"Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer, used to say that photographing people was appalling. That it was some sort of violation of them. It was even barbaric, he said. Because you were essentially stealing something from them. You were imposing something on them. He sensed the inherent unfairness of this transaction. All writers, all storytellers are imposing their own narrative on something. I mean, all art, in some ways, is a lie. It looks like a picture of something, but it isn't that thing. It's a representation of that thing. Your documentary is, on some level, going to be a lie. It's your construction of things. I mean, your documentary is, itself, going to be a lie. It's a construction of things. It's how you wish to represent the truth, and how you've decided to tell a particular story. By that, I don't mean that certain things don't happen. Of course they do. It's not that there's no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not necessarily because it's the most, absolutely truthful, but because it's a thing that we tell ourselves which makes sense of the world, at least at this moment."
--Michael Kimmelman (author and chief art critic and columnist for the New York Times.)
I want to discuss this quote a bit later... I'm posting it here to remind myself. It's a fascinating subject, which should be discussed more often in helping people understand how to interpret events, history, and what they absorb on a daily basis from the news media, television, films, books, friends, family etc... What is the truth? What is real?
--Carletto di SG
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