Can photographs tell the truth? We asked four photojournalists
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The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through the Incite Project (part of the What Is Truth? season at the Sainsbury Centre), explores whether an image captured by an individual photographer, choosing one angle, with a singular crop, can show the whole truth of an event.
Challenging Truth Through Photography
We spoke to four of the contemporary photographers in the show: Guy Martin, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Edmund Clark and Simon Norfolk.
Guy Martin’s The Parallel State began life as an examination of the Turkish soap opera and film industry but evolved over the course of five years into a semi-fictional study of truth, reality and lies in contemporary Turkey.
Following economic and political turmoil in Turkey from 2012 onwards, Martin photographed growing civil unrest on the streets of Istanbul. Simultaneously, he had free rein behind the scenes on Turkish film sets where once traditional story lines were shifting to reflect real life events.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind has collaborated with journalist and anthropologist Alisa Sopova, from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, for the past decade on a project documenting life in war-torn Ukraine in a project titles 5K from the Frontline.
“Everything is ok, except our neighbours are a bit noisy.” This is how Olga and Nikolay Grinik refer to their life 50 metres away from a Ukrainian frontline military position on the edge of Avdiivka. This young couple takes life as it comes – both their children were born during the war.
Edmund Clark has been exploring politics of control and incarceration for decades. Showing a single contraption, Camps IV – Camp 6, Mobile force-feeding chair, Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (2009) is an eerie image of an object that has been used in the controversial processes of Guantanamo Bay.
Photographs from Clark’s Negative Publicity series document the sites and bureaucratic mechanisms that powered the counter-terrorism rendition operations throughout the early 21st century. Clark’s work documents the spaces where brutal events took place, meaning the truth of the event would not be known without context.
Landscapes by British photographer Simon Norfolk shows the central highlands in Afghanistan throughout different seasons of war, drawing attention to the impact of humans and mechanised warfare has on altering landscape in his project Time Taken.
Image: Guy Martin, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Edmund Clark, Simon Norfolk. Photo- Kate Wolstenholme
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