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

(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.

Morris begins “at the beginning,” with an image considered to be “the first iconic photograph of war,” said Saul Austerlitz in The Boston Globe. In Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death, from 1855, cannonballs litter a dirt road in a forlorn patch of Crimea. But a second photograph that Fenton took from precisely the same spot shows the cannonballs gathered instead in a ditch. Which is the undoctored image? To answer that question, Morris brings readers along as he sets off to Ukraine to examine shadows cast on the road. But the search leads to more questions: Is it immoral to stage a photo to “telegraph the horrors of war?” And if so, why do we often speak about such staging as if it’s more immoral than the violence it aims to dramatize?

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Morris, who’s a former private investigator, “is a curious guy,” said William Meyers in The Wall Street Journal. But he’s an able storyteller, too, and there’s real pleasure to be had in tagging along on his hunts, even when the settings are grim. His “preoccupation with photography and war” leads this book to some dark places, including Abu Ghraib prison. Believing Is Seeing is “an important book.” At a time when it is “remarkably easy to manipulate images and we are daily inundated with more and more of them,” it reminds us to ask, “What, after all, are we looking at?”