Lying Response

Over fall break we read a little about lying through photography and began thinking about our own lying project for the coming weeks. At that point I wasn't really that into the project. I was thinking about it too much and it wasn't until we discussed lying in class that I became more comfortable with the idea of the coming project. When designing my project I kept thinking about the words tricking, lying, fiction, and a few others and then trying to establish a distinct difference between them. However, there is really a gray area around each of them. Is tricking your audience the same as lying to them. Is a staged or posed image/series a fictional story or is it a blatant lie? What actually makes a photograph a lie? After freaking myself out thinking about all of those questions, which don't seem to have concrete answers, I just tried to dive into the project and kind of run with an idea. The one I ran with was banned books. I wanted to photograph images of destroyed books and the destruction process and trick the viewers into thinking that the images were actually taken in the 1960s and 70s when two specific books, Lolita and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, had been banned. This would require cutting, tearing, erasing, and burning books, photographing the process, converting the images to black and white and sticking a false date on the bottom right. Although my project progressed in a little bit of a different direction, I was quite satisfied with the final product and enjoyed the project as a whole. I was happy to get three weeks from the introduction of photographic lying to brainstorm a topic and narrow down what began as a very broad and almost vague project.