Think You Know This Photograph? Take Another Look

"At a time when digital photographic manipulation is a fact of life, these images remind us that a photograph is not an objective representation of the events it depicts" The artists here are doing the opposite; providing an un-manipulated (we presume) photograph of a real diorama they have cleverly constructed. So the photograph itself is an objective representation, even more so in that we are allowed to see the artifice. Fascinating.

Background, from Whole Earth Review, July 1985 Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything by Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Jay Kinney http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/040324/f98095dd2c6a93a397662cfd97a246e5/WER-INFO-69.pdf

Cortis and Sonderegger’s techniques are a reminder that, to really study something, it's better to draw than to photograph. The devil is always hidden in the details.

Of course the point — that photographs are not necessarily complete depictions of reality — is an important one (but fairly well known to anyone who has taken even a basic Comm. course or paid a little attention in a museum). That the artists chose these particular photographs to make their point is spectacularly irresponsible. These will certainly inflame the lunatics and generate controversy among curmudgeons like me, granting the artists the (likely fleeting) fame that they so crave. This is a sad meta-commentary on cheap, shallow thought, “truthiness” and the clickbait media who publish it. Sigh.

While I understand, to some degree, the concerns of commenters who think this further deprecates the idea that photographs represent objective reality, I must say that ship sailed long ago. Today we have "deep fake" online videos, photoshopped pics of sharks in waves, and every other manner of photo fakery, but lying in the form of photography is as old as the medium. Framing, cropping, perspective, dodging/burning, double-exposure, and a myriad of other techniques have always been a part of forming a narrative around an image -- a narrative that the photographer, the photo-editor, or some repurposer of the photograph is wishing to put forward. Framing a lovely landscape to avoid the telephone poles or the pile of garbage is a photo-fake of the same kind -- if not the same degree -- as cropping or photoshopping your ex out of a holiday shot. The point of this artwork is that in order to understand a photo, you have to understand the context, what's *outside* the frame. You need to understand who made the photo, when, and how, and what their narrative may be. Photojournalism, a (smallish) subset of the world of photography, rightfully has some self-imposed rules that govern what gets presented as a "news photo". It is both art and useful to the general public to point out that in order to understand a photo, one needs to do more than just look at an image

I am certainly not a conspiracy theorist. Even so, this work underscores the power of media to create rather than document history. One possibility: some photographs are “fake news”.

OK, not a single positive comment, here goes: Remember that feeling you had when you first saw these images? In the case of 9/11 the sheer horror; moon landing, sheer exhilaration; etc., this is what the artist is after. He's asking you, "where did those feelings go?" What is it about memory that separates our recollection of images and our recollection of feeling? Clearly, from the comments, he's struck "a" nerve, but not "the" nerve these events once struck. That's not the sheer horror of 9/11, it's "hey, have some respect!" Why do we turn tragedy or exhilarating success into neat little packages that we can tuck away for later viewing? This artist forces you to live in that original moment again, or tries to. Of course it's outrageous, it's art! Art is sometimes outrageous! It has to be to get you to start thinking about things other than surface appearances and how much money is left in your retirement portfolio! Once your outrage dies down, consider this work again. Think about human memory and emotional memory. Think about the passage of time and how without memory there would be no sense of the passage of time. Think about how a camera fits in there: it captures images better than our minds yet has no emotional memory whatsoever. Are we merely cameras? Think about the world as a stage and a transcendent creator moving us around like chess pieces. Are we just pawns? Most of all, and at long last, THINK! We could use more of it nowadays.

I doubt that the twisted mindlets of conspiracy theorists will be affected one way or another by the assertion that photographs can be faked. That has been pretty well known almost since the birth of photography. The proof of what you see in a photograph comes from a second source outside the work itself. Just as journalists don't file a story on the basis of what they are told by a single source, what photographers capture is only an invitation to dig further.

Great art but there are plenty enough deniers out there.

Interesting project but I dont the back story. Photos can be faked or doctored but the ones they copy were not so whats the point?

Artists with too much time on their hands and not enough creativity in their minds.

So we have to be reminded that memory fades and is not perfect? Wow. Tthat's really brilliant.

Why on earth is any legitimate news organization promoting this? My thoughts exactly with the other comments. This serves no purpose but to draw into question, conspiracy and downplay or even dismiss significant real world events. It isn't as if you are artistically portraying obvious fake propaganda like Nixon giving his address with a bunch of blank files on his desk How can you possibly attribute or equate something as certain and impacting as 9/11 attacks to being staged? Even for the sake of 'art' this crosses an unethical line that speaks to the public at large and facilitates a narrative I would expect from r/The_Donald or Alex Jones.

It's incredibly irresponsible and disappointing that the Times would feature these (albeit well-made) artworks without referencing the clear conspiracy theory component of it. Whether or not the artists decided to pick 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the moon landing because of how they're touted as fake by a certain type of people, it's clearly a dialogue that needs to be had with the artwork. By photographing the dioramas in a way that highlights the fiction, the artists are sort of insinuating the real events were also fiction. If their sole motivation was to highlight the artistry of the dioramas, the images wouldn't need to be framed that way. As it is, the work is crass and exploitative.

I accept these creations are significant art not because they indicate that what is accepted as true might be fake but because they mock the fakes such as those we now know as fake as the propaganda that started wars or besmirched individuals who were innocent makes all truth susceptible to doubt. Modern craft to deceive has reached a state that no one anymore can have absolute confidence in what is assumed to be reality. Picasso is claimed to have said that an artist is one who lies to tell the truth.

Hmmm..we have a host of great "set up" photographers decades ahead of these two. James Casebere and Thomas Demand come to mind. Framing the "set up" so that you can see the devices used to create the image is a bit novel. Not sure it is any more than that.

I honestly don't see the point of this, other than to give fuel to the conspiracy theorists.

Extraordinary miniatures that may be of value to some Visual Effects Filmmaker. Great craftsmanship but not great art.

Call it artistic expression if you like. The issue I have with this work is not that "Each of these images had a momentous effect on the international audiences that saw them.", but that they always still do. The original images are haunting and riveting moments in human tragedy that we relive every time we see them. We don't need any help getting to the core of the pain captured in the historic resin of those images To re-present them in any other form, skilled in miniature craft or not is on some level blasphemy and completely irreverent. Go ahead and intellectualize the process, it's nothing more than sadistic rubbernecking akin to grade school boys putting a goldfish in chlorine bleach to watch what happens.

I realize that art needs to be a free expression and art is in the eyes of the beholder, but when there is human tragedy involved there needs to be some responsibility in art. Would these Swiss artists do an art piece depicting the deaths of the Holocaust. I would hope not. I put this in the same category.

Huh. Is the artists’ intent to make us doubt the authenticity of the original photos? Regardless of their intent, is that what some conspiracy theorists will take away? And if so, the Times believes that this article serves the common good?

Once again, modern artists who cannot come up with a completely original idea. Another remix of something that was original and is already famous, and these "creators" are using that pre-existing fame to boost their own profile. Clever? Sure. Good display of craft? Sure. But a copy can never be great.

I guess the reality isn’t enough for them.

As someone who was in 2 WTC on 9/11 the burning tower photo rattled me. I’m disappointed in the artists. By creating obvious fakes of events that conspiracy theorists like to tout as faked, the artists are presenting a wry endorsement of these theories. Is that their intent? They might claim it is a sarcastic takedown of such theories but I don’t see it that way and neither will the nutjobs who spread them.