Last month, Kate sent me an intriguing article, Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg (Part One), by Errol Morris (New York Times, 25 September, 2007). (Morris is the documentary maker, director of The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven.) I want to reply here on the household bandwidth.
Kate wrote, about the article:
... Here is a blog about a photographic mystery... Susan Sontag accused the photographer, Roger Fenton, of manipulating the image that he took during the Crimean war in 1855. The author of the blog doesn't think he did....
The question is, can you look at the two pictures and identify which was taken first--the one with the cannonballs on the road OR the one without the cannonballs. A second question is what direction was the camera facing? The comments are using the shadows on the cannonballs.
I think you might be able to do the spatial rotation, if the light is coming from the west (the photos were taken between 3-5PM in April) the camera is facing north?
The essay is a good read. [A fascinating and recommended read, Amy interjects, but very long.]
I think it would be discernible with access to the original negatives or a high quality copy of the original. Unfortunately I was unable to find a high-quality gif to download. I did find two adequate copies (in the 200k range) and worked with that.
So, two photos, taken by the same photographer, same view, same general time in a desolate spot in a miserable war. Photograph A is labeled "Off" because the cannonballs are off the road. B is labeled "On" because there are cannonballs on the road.
Which was photographed first? Were the cannonballs moved onto the road to increase the sense of danger in the photograph, or were the cannonballs disturbed and moved off the road by military scavengers "recycling" the enemy's ammunition to lob it right back at 'em?
(And does it matter? That's at the heart of the Morris and Sontag dispute, and I'm solidly on Morris' side, which is that it doesn't.)Sontag says A then B. Morris says B then A. And I think that while Sontag is correct in the order, she is wrong about about the emphasis or conclusion. (For an overview, read the NYT article.)
You can free-view the above image (and I've tinkered with the axis to allow parallax viewing). Look at A and B above, then cross your eyes, relax the focus and make a 3rd image between these two images. You'll see glowing parts with a slightly different color/texture where there are places of difference. You'll find four rocks in the lower left side that have been moved (along with a dozen or two cannonballs across the entire photo.) And while Sontag and Morris talk cannonballs, I think it's the four rocks that show the order of photos.
Rocks roll downhill. Four rocks in A are found higher than their location in image B. For that reason, A was taken first. I can think of no logical reason the photographer or a military scavenger would be moving rocks up a hill. But cannonballs down ~ yes.Note above the rocks-to-be-moved in image A, a small yellow shadowy circle (at 10 o'clock). There, several cannonballs lurk behind a boulder -- these cannon balls are missing in image B, just as five new cannonballs appear downhill in the larger yellow circle at 4 o'clock.
So I think A was photographed first. Then the photographer (or a military scavenger) walked the hillside and rolled the cannon balls down the incline (think bowling with cannon shot) -- any stones which were in the way were knocked further down the hill in the process. After assorted cannonballs had been rolled down the hill and placed on the roadside or road, Photo B was taken.
The NYT essay is good - made me want to do a bronx cheer at Sontag (something that surprised me). But much as I agreed with Morris on meaning and interpretation of the photo, I think A then B.
Kate, thank you for the link!
5 comments:
I've been reading both FrenchKate and Cattus Dommus on these articles. I read the first part of the series when we were in Oregon, and the second two parts this morning.
I'm having the same trouble that I had when I took Philosophy courses - I'm just too literal and practical minded. The opposite of a conspiracy theorist, as EM defines it.
I really enjoyed the forensic part of the essays and I can enter into the obsession part with great enthusiasm and pleasure. I love a good obsession as much as the next guy. But I don't see anything in any of the essays that provides answers to the Greater Question of Truth.
I look at ON and I think that it's obvious the balls haven't fallen there by themselves. First, they are too randomly placed. The balls, from stationary cannons, would tend to hit in the same place and with some force - they're cannon balls meant to do damage. So they have momentum when they hit, or they couldn't do damage. So when they hit the ground (in roughly the same place), they roll or bounce in a direction dictated by gravity and geography (rocks might make ricochets, hills/gullys make them roll etc). Or, if they didn't roll/bounce - just stopped where they hit, they would make a little crater. It would be the crater that would prevent them from rolling. Otherwise, they'd roll. It's Physics.
OK. I don't have much experience of cannonballs, but I have a lot of experience with other kinds of spheres - from baseballs to hickory nuts. It's obvious to me how they behave, and the ones ON the road just don't look right. I'm like Sontag, I guess, it's obvious they have been placed there.
However, here's the difference between me and her. I just don't see what all the fuss is about. So, someone put some cannon balls on the road? So what? The photographer was there; the cannonballs were there, not imported from elsewhere; it was a real place, not a studio or an altered landscape far away from the Crimea.
I don't regard it as cheating, posing, misleading, deception of any sort. It's merely editorial, exactly the same as Sontag deciding not to have the pictures in her book. For me, cheating is about intention - having the intention to mislead and usually with the object of personal gain.
But as far as having any importance to the central question of Truth - the argument seems meaningless to me. Nothing seems to me to impinge Fenton's honor. He was there, he took pictures of what was there. Some things he left in, some things he left out, some things (that were already there) he moved around.
I blush for my simple literal-mindedness.
Wow, Andrew! Sharp, convincing analysis. When you get through part 3 of Errol Morris's analysis you'll find that he ended up drawing the same conclusion as you, OFF then ON, for the same reason--rocks roll downhill!
But you have gone one step further with the observation that five cannonballs have been dislocated as well. Very, very interesting.
For me, the question remains of how the balls got on the road and how the rocks got moved. In his letter to his wife he commented that cannonballs hit while he was there, and I have wondered if the systematic displacement of the rocks is consistent with a cannonball striking nearby (possibly dislodging the five balls you track?)
I'm not convinced that the balls on the road are inconsistent with a cannonade....Cannonballs could have struck the hill with some force and bounced back to the road. If they hit another cannonball on the road--think billiards with a 24-lb ball--they would spread out in predictable ways with a little distance between them.
It seems to me that the parsimonious assumption is that the balls got there in the normal way of cannonballs, that is, shot from Russian cannons, not that they were placed there by Fenton to achieve a more aesthetically pleasing image. It may be our lack of experience with cannonball warfare that make us think otherwise.
Here is what Fenton wrote his wife: "I I got Sir John to lend me a couple of mules to take my caravan down to a ravine known by the name of the valley of the shadow of Death from the quantity of Russian balls which have fallen in it… We were detained in setting off & so got down just about 3PM yesterday. I took the van down nearly as far as I intended it to go & then went forward to find out the chosen spot. I had scarcely started when a dash up of dust behind the battery before us showed something was on the road to us, we could not see it but another flirt of earth nearer showed that it was coming straight & in a moment we saw it bounding up towards us. It turned off when near & where it went I did not see as a shell came over about the same spot, knocked it [sic] fuse out & joined the mass of its brethren without bursting. It was plain that the line of fire was upon the very spot I had chosen, so very reluctantly I put up with another reach of the valley about 100 yds short of the best point. I brought the van down & fixed the camera & while leveling it another ball came in a more slanting direction touching the rear of the battery as the others but instead of coming up the road bounded on to the hill on our left about 50 yards from us & came down right to us stopping at our feet. I picked it up put it into the van & hope to make you a present of it. After this no more came near though plenty passed up on each side."
He says that he was forced to move 100 yards back from the best spot because cannonballs were striking there, and that plenty of cannonballs fell while he was there. So why do we start from the assumption that he must have moved them manually?
FrenchKate, I had exactly the same thought as you - the most parsimonious explanation that the cannonballs appeared while Fenton was there - he complains to his wife about being fired upon, so why not?
However, someplace in ... the third? essay, it says that the number of cannonballs on the road matches the number of cannonballs missing from off road in the other picture. So that explanation doesn't work. (Although maybe I misread it and it doesn't say that.)
BoCOG...Dennis Purcell asserts that the balls are too randomly placed to be natural, and he asserts that the number is the same in OFF and ON, but how does he know what cannonballs look like after a barricade? How was he able to count so precisely? The number of new cannonballs on the road is only about 25. That strikes me as within error.
Evidence? Where is the Evidence.
A recent Mythbusters program I think would be applicable here. They were attempting to compare the results of humidity on baseballs, and so designed a batting machine which hit all balls identically, and tried some balls which had been kept in a humidor, other balls which had been dried out, and a thrid group in which the balls had an average amount of humidity. At the end of the experiment the balls were all over the field such as is seen on the road, which is how I would expect cannon balls to react after being fired.
As far as those five cannon balls in the front of OFF, is it possible that they initially hit the ground up farther on the slope, and then rolled down to their first posisition in a previous bombardment (if the guns which had fired the cannon balls in ON had not been moved, then you might expect that during two separate bombardments, the balls that they fired would fall in the same general place), and that they had been disrupted from their initial resting place (as seen in OFF) by a more energetic cannon ball which had hit the rocks holding them up, and then which disappeared behind the camera, allowing the five cannon balls to roll further downward.
In conclusion, I agree that OFF then ON is the order, and believe that the cannon balls which are ON the road were placed there not by the hand of "Man" so to speak, but rather by the hand of "God" and the last person to touch any of those cannon balls before the second photograph (ON) was the Russian Gunners who loaded them into the cannons before firing them.
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