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

Morris presents six cases about manipulating and staging photographs in a quest to find out if our faith in photographic evidence is justified.

(Penguin, $40)

“Seventy-five years ago, Arthur Rothstein didn’t know any better than to take several shots of a steer’s skull in a parched South Dakota field, repositioning it each time until he got one he liked,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Rothstein, a government photographer, was merely trying to capture Dust Bowl devastation. But it wasn’t long before opponents of the New Deal were accusing him of staging his photos to win favor for big-government programs. In his new book, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris presents six such cases, in which a photograph seems “eminently intelligible,” and then each time leads readers on a “thrilling” quest to determine if our faith in the photographic evidence is justified.

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