ERROL

MORRIS

Errol Morris (b. 1948) is best known as a documentary filmmaker, having directed motion pictures like The Thin Blue Line (1988), The Fog of War (2003), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). He became interested in film during his time as a philosophy student at U. C. Berkeley and launched his career with Gates of Heaven (1978), a documentary that became a particular favorite of critic Roger Ebert. In the years that followed, Morris’s works would garner top honors like the Academy Award and the Emmy; the director himself earned five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a seat in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. More recently Morris has turned to writing, producing numerous essays and three books over the past decade.

The second of these books, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (2011), is composed of essays that originally appeared in the Opinionator blog of the New York Times. It is concerned with the knowledge that viewers draw from images and the question of whether objective truth can be captured in a picture — a notion that Morris himself seems to doubt. “There may be no such thing as a true photograph or a false photograph. They may have nothing whatsoever to do with truth or falsity,” Morris said in an interview with NPR. “But what we can ask of our documentary filmmakers, our photographers, our journalists is that somehow they’re engaged in the pursuit of truth. That, to me, is the important thing.” Believing Is Seeing was well-received in literary circles, with the Los Angeles Review of Books stating that the book could “make its readers think — a crucial response, given that we live in an era where the photographic image is often still too habitually and too trustingly taken as fact.”

As you read the following chapter from Believing Is Seeing, you will see Morris working out his argument in relation to one of the iconic images to emerge from the Iraq War, the image of the “Hooded Man” at Abu Ghraib.

Click here to watch Morris discuss the oft-forgotten relationship of photographs from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and to the physical world and to access questions and assignments for the video.

For more of Morris on photography, you might also consult his personal Web site.