Can photographs tell the truth?

What attracted me to this challenge was the opportunity to investigate whether I can make photographs that can tell the truth or not. We all live in a world where we often rely on photography or pictures as a tool to be able to tell us what really happened. They are seen as a tool that can reproduce the reality or maybe even  “the truth”. After the shooting in Ferguson there was a debate in Sweden about putting cameras on police-officers to monitor them. The thought behind the idea was that the camera would give an objective view of any debatable events which involved the police. A photograph, a video or a camera don’t lie.

But I do not think it’s that simple, because I’m not sure there such a thing as a objective truth. And I don’t think that photographs can tell the truth, because they aren’t objective. The pictures is the result of a moment in time, what happens next, the picture don´t show, and it definitely don’t show the elephant outside of the frame. My conclusion is that this is an impossible task, because there is no objectivity.

“Make a short series of purely object photographs.”

Said all that you may think that I didn’t even make an attempt to do a series of pictures that are truly objective… but I did. When I look at them I think they are ultimately subjective in framing, content and perspective choice of location, lens, and so forth. I took the challenge as a possibility to try to depict a scene from different angles, to see if we see the same scene if we look at it from different perspective. And that was fun, but maybe not a solution for the task at hand.

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Kristina

Look at Aliceincleveland she took the challenge and made a series of three pictures that show another take on this challenge.