Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » When Cameras Lie

When Cameras Lie – (….even Nat Geo can get it wrong!)

Now it sounds like i’m complaining but when it comes to art, I reckon photography is one of the least understood areas there is. Technology is such that just about everyone has access to a camera of one sort or another be that a fully fledged DSlr or a more humble camera phone. Anyone can now go out and save their memories, record their images for posterity, and what’s really great about it is that the camera never lies. Wrong! A camera can make a politician seem honest if you want it to! Ok, now for that, you probably want to start using programs like Photoshop or The Gimp but away from those and a camera can still give a completely wrong impression of something, purely because of the pictures we choose to take. A camera is a tool, nothing more, and it allows us to say what we want to say.

National Geographic recently published an article under the title ‘Serbs Face the Past Future‘ and in my opinion what came out of that was a completely one-sided and inaccurate account of the situation there. Now I could respond to that article by citing examples of everything that was shown and talked about in that article, happening in my own country. I could even show you examples in my own home town of things like football violence where recent memories include over 200 000 fans rampaging through the city caused incredible damage and left many injured, including one fan stabbed. Anyone with common sense though should be well aware that these things happen all around the world and as a reply, Mima Stanojlovic writes a much better response than anything I could come up with.

As a photographer myself, what I want to talk about is naturally the photography side of things. As I mentioned before, Technology is such that just about everyone has access to a camera of one sort or another and that’s led to a situation where just about everyone can take a photograph but not everyone understands the art behind it. You wouldn’t pick up a drumstick, hit something hard, and just because a noise comes out, call yourself a drummer. In the same way, just because a picture comes out when you press a button, it doesn’t make you a photographer. The photographer who took the photos in the National Geographic article is clearly an accomplished and skilled photographer. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever. He’d need to be, a) to get such good pictures, and b) to put it together so well.

It raises a question though and it’s a question that professional photographers ask themselves over and over again “How do I take a photo?”. There are technical sides to that question such as do we choose an aperture that blurs the background so that the image focuses on the subject more? Do we choose a shutter speed that suggests movement? And many more, but there is also a more fundamental part to the question which asks, ‘do we tell our story, the story we want to show the world, or do we put our own considerations to one side and tell the story that is before us, or the story that is asking to be shown? It’s a difficult question to answer and thankfully my style of photography means that I don’t have to ask myself the question quite so much or with quite so much riding on it as perhaps a journalistic photographer reporting the news around the world would, but it’s still relevant to everything I and every other photographer does when he/she picks up his/her camera.

It would be easy to stand here and criticise the photographer in the NG article for only showing negatives and giving an unbalanced impression of Serbia, but as a photographic principle, is that any different to me going out and shooting only the things I love or find beautiful in Serbia? Both are stories with a bias, both could equally therefore be considered wrong.

I think the answer lies in a single, simple, yet overused word “respect”. I think there is a duty upon every photographer who sets foot in another land, the same as there is for every traveller, to treat people and places with respect. It should be a part of what business people love to call “Our Core Values”. You can’t be a photographer without wanting to show what you see, but that should never stop you from having respect for your subject and their or it’s story. Half a story is worse than no story at all when that half of a story creates a lie in the eyes of the viewer. Is it right to show a man punching someone in the face and accuse him of violence when you deliberately missed taking the first shot of him being attacked with a bat? Would it be right to show the young boy throwing a stone and accuse him of violence without showing the tank that has just destroyed his home? To me, the answers are a resounding “No!” and for the same reason I finish this as I began, with words from Mima Stanojlovic

“Belgrade is not, as the photographs indicate, a miserable city inhabited by miserable people. The citizens of Belgrade are not barbarians as we have been presented in the Western media for more than a decade. On the contrary, the city is vibrant, open-minded, and hospitable with a positive attitude”

Now go out, “take photos, leave nothing but footprints” but above all, have respect!