Book Review: Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, by Errol Morris

Abstract

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. Errol Morris. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 310 pp. $40 hbk. $25 ppk.Anyone who makes a living teaching others to write well eventually confronts the great imponderable: Can curiosity-the foundation of all good thinking and writing- be taught? Like all hard questions, this one comes wrapped in related unknowns: if authentic inquisitiveness really can be taught, what are the best ways to do it? Has the Digital Age blunted or enhanced curiosity? And if curiosity is a fixed trait-no different, say, than a genetic predisposition to heart disease-then what are mass media courses teaching anyway?Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning film director, delivers a hopeful answer. In a series of opinion essays first published on the New York Times website, Morris analyzes (and re-analyzes and analyzes again) a set of photographs from the Crimean War, the Civil War, two Mideast wars, and the war on Depression Era poverty. Many readers will recognize these images. Consider Illustration 62. shows former Army reservist Sabrina Harman, smiling and giving a thumbs-up as she poses beside a corpse at Abu prison in Iraq.You know this picture; maybe it feels too familiar to wring much new information from. And you would be wrong, as Morris thoroughly, thoughtfully, and very engagingly shows.Torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in 2003 and the meaning of photographs they made are the subject of Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Believing Is Seeing reconsiders the Abu images in a section called Will the real hooded man please stand up? Writing instructors seeking to use Morris as a field guide to curiosity may wish to start with the hooded man and his eternally outstretched bare hands. Because Abu and the prison scandal are a recent mass media experience, students may find this section more potent compared with Morris's investigations of older history.Especially helpful to students wondering how curiosity starts, Morris documents the chronology of his thinking and follows it, breadcrumb like, until logical resolution emerges. Each case study reminds us that a dedication to truth seeking, especially the type demanded of journalists in a meme-saturated world, depends on an unwillingness to accept things as they seem. Here is how his interest in the hooded man was rekindled: It was arguably one of the least newsworthy pictures in the world, if only because it had already been seen by everybody. Published March 11, 2006, on the front page of the New York Times, the hooded man image this time was a photo within a photo: was held by a gray-haired man identified as Ali Shalal Qaissi, the symbol of Abu Ghraib who, the Times said, was speaking out to spare others his nightmare. …