St Paul's Cathedral, London, March 2009There's some to and fro between The Landscapist and Paul Maxim on the nature of truth, and that awful adjective "absolute". Just like physics, it's all a matter of scale, like the Newton-Einstein-Heisenberg thing. Get close enough, and nothing is certain - we can't know everything properly, truth is nominal. Just like the physics: Heisenberg says we can't know the position & speed of a particle but throw a baseball at my head and it's very empirically (and pretty shortly tactilely) Newtonian.
And photography can be like that. We can get in close and make it seem like anything we want. The truth is wider: either by physically stepping back, using a wider angle or presenting a larger story. This is why Frank's "The Americans" is truth - for all the symbolism and themes, truth will out from the quantity of evidence.
Ad of course, while I was preparing this post, Paul came back with another using similar thoughts, although with a slightly different conclusion to mine.
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I have been enjoying the exchange of opinions, partly agreeing and partly disagreeing with both proponents. I think this "ventilation" of opinions is great, it makes you try to find your own standing on the matter.
ReplyDeleteYes, I have learnt from this a lot, both in terms of philosophical knowledge and also in terms of expressing ones ideas in sometimes hyperbolical, even aggressive and at least provocative stanzas. So it's a bit a embittered joy following this discussion
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