The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia has a six-month investigation into the question What is Truth? Exhibitions re-evaluate the most iconic images of the past 100 years.
The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project looks at the influence of photography on shaping, and very often distorting, the stories behind seminal global events. A dramatic installation features more than 100 canonical (and shocking, attention grabbing) works by documentary photographers, including Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Don McCullin, Marc Riboud and Nick Ut. This provides a context for work by 15 modern practitioners, such as Laia Abril, Matt Black and Simon Norfolk. Collectively the exhibition ‘charts a global century of iconic documentation and manipulation’ and the way in which we consume the inhumanity of humankind.
The exhibition also explores how, through repeated use, single images have come to represent and define events. The contemporary work shows how modern practitioners are using research to inform their imagery, arguably giving them more control over how it is used than their predecessors, who were often subject to the whims and prejudices of picture editors.
It raised for me issues around the objective v the subjective, the literal v the metaphorical; and if the question is ‘What is Truth?’, it begs the further question, ‘Whose truth?’
Two images summed up some of the dilemmas for me. The famous (infamous) Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5 1936 by Robert Capa; and an image by Max Pinwickers and Sam Weerdmeester claiming to show that the site of the supposed death was some miles behind the front line. Does the truth, or not of the Capa picture matter? Perhaps in an absolute sense, yes, but it still stands as an enduring, powerful metaphor for the tragedy of war in general and the Spanish Civil War in particular. I’m reminded of the closing lines to the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.