“Where is the Money?” © Pedro Meyer, 1985-2000
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures” -
Ralph Waldo Emerson, referenced by Pedro Meyer
Primarily a documentary photographer, Pedro Meyer is one of the earliest to experiment with digital photography, starting in the early 1990s. He created and curates Zonezero.com, one of the first photography websites on the internet. It showcases photographers from around the word as well as his own images and essays. I find him fascinating as he challenges the notion that documentary photographs are expected to record the truth or what really happened, whereas controversially, some of his digital work is in fact a collage of images used to produce a final image, and yet he still refers to this work as documentary, or truth, rather than fiction.
“Face it, all photographs are and always have been the product of manipulating reality. They are simply interpretations of the photographer who made them”. To him, photography has always been a manipulated medium, through cropping, sandwiched negatives, retouching or other techniques. He sees himself as constructing realities that are more truthful to what he remembers than to what may or may not have been there.
"Viejo con billetes” © Pedro Meyer, 1985
“Deshoyando al Borrego” © Pedro Meyer, 1985
Redefining documentary photography: http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/arts/photography/fieldskinds/document/redefining.htm
Museum of Contemporary Photography: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/meyer_pedro.php
Online debate: http://67.43.164.180/FUDforum2/index.php?t=msg&goto=81&rid=0
well done Kim! This is a good beginning.
ReplyDeleteHi Kim
ReplyDeleteInteresting stuff on "truth" in photographic images. Personally I think Meyer's use of digital manipulation is no different to other photographers taking images informed by their own world view.
John Grierson's designation of 'documentary' as 'creative interpretation of reality' is as true of Meyer's work today as it was in 1926 when Grierson made this statement.