Review: Believing Is Seeing by Errol Morris

Trade paperback, 310 pages
Published 2014 (originally 2011)

Borrowed from the library

Read June 2018

Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography)

by Errol Morris

Morris's book is pretty easily explained by the title: we see things because we want to believe them. He explores this concept through a few different case studies: Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" photographs from the Crimean War, Sabrina Harman's photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, Dust Bowl photojournalism from the 1930s, combat zone photography from Palestine, and the case of Amos Humiston's Civil War photographs. The book is okay, but it is not 300-pages okay. Morris has some insights, but they are often buried in minutiae; his processes of uncovering the truth behind Fenton, for example, goes through more tedious detail than is needed to arrive at his point that every photograph is posed.

This is, of course, a point John Berger made on (I believe) the third page of Ways of Seeing back in the 1970s. Morris writes like someone who believes himself charting new territory, even though he must know better, as he cites people like Susan Sontag and talks to a lot of experts in photography. (It's these conversation that pad out the book.) The story of Fenton, an injustly-maligned man, is the book's best part, but it didn't need to be seventy pages to make its point. The chapter on Sabrina Harman, on the other hand, is pithy and focused and interesting. This book could have been a couple focused essays (and I think it was at some point? I believe these all started as New York Times columns), but instead they're stretched out in order to yield mostly banal insights. It feels mean to say it, but I suspect the book is best used as a source of anecdotes, rather than something you should actually read yourself. I'll happily tell you the Roger Fenton story in about five minutes myself.