Errol Morris's Reading List

"I was hard-pressed to come up with what kind of a list to give you guys. But it did occur to me that an attempt to reconnect with what we are looking at when we look at photographs is at the heart of the book that I’ve just written. So I thought I’d give you books that have attempted to do something along the same lines – books that come from kindred spirits. Frassanito was obsessed with Gettysburg and with reconnecting photographs of the Civil War to the circumstances under which they were taken. Through this obsessive quest, he reconnects the photographs to actual geographic places and reorders them to reflect the real sequence of events. It’s a deeply fascinating enterprise and I was inspired by his work. So many things. Yes, those photographs certainly altered the course of history. I also learned that they’re among the most widely-distributed, widely-viewed photographs in history, on a par with the Zapruder film [the amateur footage of John F Kennedy’s assassination]. Another book I would like to mention is Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas [about the Kennedy footage]. It’s an early example of an attempt to do just what we’re talking about – piecing together reality through photography, or in this case film. Thompson was a Kierkegaard scholar at Yale who went on to become an expert on what might be the most widely-seen piece of film in history. Not a still but a movie. Thompson attempted to analyse that film and reconnect it with reality. You would think that six seconds should be easy to interpret, but it turns out to be nothing of the sort. It evolves into a rabbit hole about the relationship between photography and reality."

"These images answer certain people’s hopes and dreams – that they can reconnect with those that are lost, that the deceased are always with us. One example is William H Mumler, the famous spirit photographer who created a picture of Mary Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband hovering in the background. At the time, people invested these images with truth. You might imagine they would know better. But photographs are intimately connected with our desire to believe, whether that a person who is gone is still with us or in a particular version of history. I’ve been asked: Haven’t we become skilled at identifying falsified photographs? Aren’t we now less credulous about what we see with our eyes, more suspicious, more sceptical? I think: Yes and no. The falsification of photography didn’t start with Photoshop, it started with photography. At the very beginning, people used photographs to convey false beliefs. They noted from the beginning that you could look at a photograph and form your own interpretation of it – one that might be at complete variance with what the photograph was documenting. Early in the history of photography, people learned that there was slack between the real world and our images of it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Are we that much smarter now? Within the last decade, Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations as Secretary of State and showed photographs of plants [in Iraq ] that he claimed produced chemical or biological weaponry. On that basis we went to war . Have we really learned anything? When we’re shown an image we tend to let our guard down. People learn how to read critically and think critically, but I don’t believe we learn how to see critically."

"This is definitely a book by a kindred spirit. I first heard about it from the writer Lydia Davis, who is a friend of mine. We knew very little about these photographs – the circumstances, how many there were, who took them, you name it – until Billy Klüver set for himself this project of trying to figure it all out. He did a forensic investigation of the photographs and discovered that they were taken by Jean Cocteau of his friends Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani et cetera. It’s a true detective story about photography. It’s an obvious precursor to what I’ve been trying to do. It’s also a great book in its own right. Unfortunately, Klüver died just a couple of years before I started working on my own book. I would have loved to talk to him."

"In a way it’s an unfinished project for me. Ben Curtis, a photographer who had worked during the [2006] Israel-Lebanon war, went through a day’s worth of photographs with me in my book. We very rarely do this, but I wanted to do it with Lee Miller as well, because she took this series of over 100 photographs on one of the most critical days in 20th century history. There’s this wonderful photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub , taken by her boyfriend at the time – a Life photographer she had teamed up with, David Scherman. They were there at the liberation of Dachau, and the series of amazing photographs that she took that day culminated with these photos from Hitler’s Munich apartment, No 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The announcement of Hitler’s suicide came on the radio just around the time she was taking her bath in Hitler’s tub. In fact, there was a pair of photographs – one taken by Lee Miller of David Scherman in the bathtub, and one taken by David Scherman of Lee Miller in the bathtub. The combination of photos from one of the most notorious concentration camps and the oddity of these scenes in Hitler’s apartment gives you a window into history that we otherwise wouldn’t have. The back-story is often more interesting than the photographs. In many ways they enhance each other. Photographs are in part about dreams – the dreams that we have about them, the ideas that we associate with them. But they’re also about connecting with reality, about being brought back into the world. They’re a window into the past, and to me this is powerfully evoked in that day or two of photographs created by Scherman and Miller. She was a great writer too."

"Maybe this list is a frustration of articles I haven’t written and movies I haven’t made. I had thought about doing it. I was going to interview Lilly Jacob, and then she died. Lilly Jacob’s family was killed at Auschwitz, but she survived and ended up at Dora, a concentration camp inside Germany. She found a book of photos there, in an SS barracks where she was recovering from typhus after the liberation of the camp. In it were people that she knew. Yes. She found pictures of herself, her relatives and others from the village where they had lived, who were all dead. In 1944 they were liquidating – it’s a horrific word – they were murdering the Hungarian Jews, and here you have an album of close to 200 photographs that were taken by SS men who were on the platform that day in Birkenau [an Auschwitz sub-camp], documenting the selection of Jews for the gas chamber. She took the album with her to America where she emigrated. She ended up as a waitress in Miami and people heard about this album, and went to her looking for family. Eventually, [ Holocaust scholar] Raul Hilberg persuaded her to donate the album to Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims] where it is today. Again, it fascinates me because it’s a group of photographs centred around one historical moment. We’re really thrown into that moment. It’s the attempt to understand something that maybe can never be understood. We look at the SS officers on the platform and the many, many Jews, most of whom have only hours to live if that. We know that we’re connected to history here, but what is it that we’re looking at? On the one hand we know, and on the other hand we don’t know. We’re looking at something deeply disturbing and mysterious. It is one of the more extraordinary series of photographs. I sometimes talk about the trunk in the attic. You go up to the attic, you find a trunk, you open it and there’s some photographs inside. Maybe you know the people, maybe you don’t. You look at the photographs and you want to know more. You want to know something about the people in them. Who they are, who they were. Again, what are we really looking at? It’s a mystery. An attempt to contextualise – I hate the word but I use it anyway – the photograph is the beginning of the investigation. I feel the pull of The Auschwitz Album very powerfully. We’re looking at something that is indecent, it’s cruel beyond imagination and yet it’s real. It concerns real people and real historical events. I want to know more, to reconnect myself to that history. They’re both of a piece, investigating with a camera. I’ve learned as a documentary filmmaker how you can investigate. I’ve been lucky to solve – in part using a camera – at least one mystery, involving a terrible miscarriage of justice in Texas . [Morris’s 1988 film The Thin Blue Line presented evidence that a man was on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. The inmate was released within a year of the film’s release.] I don’t look at documentary filmmaking as anything more than an obsession with the world and what’s real. That impulse is in my filmmaking, and it’s certainly in this book I’ve just written. There’s a passage in Believing is Seeing where I talk about posing – how all images are posed. There is no veridical image. There is no ur-image. There is no image that is more truthful than another. It’s a misconception about truth and it’s a misconception about the pursuit of truth. One of the deep misconceptions about documentary is that it’s more truthful if you hand-hold your camera or use available light. Truth isn’t about style. That’s what makes it so absurd that the Academy didn’t even consider The Thin Blue Line for an award. The Thin Blue Line did what a documentary movie should do – it pursued the truth. It got an innocent man out of prison, not by virtue of the fact that I shot it in one style or another but by virtue of the fact that I investigated with a camera and uncovered the truth. I don’t think that documentary has to be vérité or agitprop or narrated slideshows or whatever. But I do think that it has to try to uncover something about reality, investigating something to find things out. I think it’s a noble and worthy enterprise. What else would I do with myself?"