Photographer Pedro Meyer produces CD-ROMS that are works of art, but he says multimedia is being made shallow and irrelevant by huge, Hollywood-style projects. His answer is simplicity itself.
Wired:
If we can't trust photographs anymore, what should we trust?
Meyer:
I'm not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn't trustworthy simply because it's a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it. You're interviewing me right now, you're taking notes and taping the conversation, and at the end you will sit down and edit. You won't be able to put in everything we talked about: you'll highlight some things over others. Somebody reading your piece in a critical sense will understand that your value judgments shape it. That's perfectly legitimate. Turn it around: let me take a portrait of you, and suddenly people say, That's the way he was.
We don't trust words because they're words, but we trust pictures because they're pictures. That's crazy. It's our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution. People need to realize that an image is not a representation of reality. And they are, more and more. Take Forrest Gump. People viewing that film might not know immediately that a certain image is a montage, but they sure know that Forrest Gump did not meet President Kennedy.
Nobody's very careful about objective reality. The O. J. Simpson trial was a vast demonstration of how any fact can be stretched in any direction.
In Truths & Fictions, you take an image from the Rodney King videotape and keep zooming in on it until it becomes an unintelligible blur.
By going deeper and deeper into detail, the lawyers turned King's beating into a nonissue. A dot. Abstract pixels. The question, Did you hit the guy or not? got diluted to nothing. In the DNA portion of the Simpson trial, again we analyzed the dots. There's this constant struggle to look at dots rather than deal with the issue of the murders.
What happens to images, then, when we stop trusting them?
Newspapers and magazines, instead of shying away from altered images, will use them more freely. The public will understand that photographers are more than button-pushers, that they make judgments, and that photographs are created. People approach my work differently now that they're conscious I can change the image.
Many traditional photographers seem afraid of how digital technology changes their role.
Talking about how the digital revolution affects photography assumes that photography could be some separate entity. That's misleading. These changes will occur throughout the fabric of society, in every medium of art and communication, and they have their own momentum. Chemically based photography is not going to disappear in the near future. I wouldn't announce the demise of the book either. But how these books and silver prints will circulate is going to be different. Photographers and artists can either look upon these changes as bystanders, or become active participants.
Say you're a new photographer trying to chart a course through all this. What do you do?
Photographers have always complained about the difficulties of publishing their work. Well, CD-ROMs and the Net provide an opportunity to publish freely with a low budget - in a fantastic way. Yet the opposite is being encouraged - huge budgets, Hollywood-style projects. In the multimedia world, simplicity has a negative connotation, and that leads to a lot of mistakes. We should eliminate the patronizing attitude toward simplicity and frugality and value them instead. I encourage young people to use digital tools because they can do some fantastic work for a pittance. Take the issue of sound, something that no photographer grew up learning about. Rather than fiddling around with all kinds of new gadgets, we should be thinking about and exploring the contributions of sound with something as modest as a little tape recorder. I Photograph to Remember was recorded in my living room.
It sounds as if you don't like a lot of the CDs that are out there.
A lot of the digital artwork that's being made is shallow and completely irrelevant. If the audience doesn't know about the tools, then for a short time you can keep everybody astounded. But if all you contribute to an image is to put it through a Photoshop filter, then as soon as everybody else on the block has the program they will say, So what? It's the same thing that happens when an artist from Idaho goes to New York City, sees the latest avant-garde painting, and goes back to Idaho to show off. When other people in his community go to the city, they will quickly catch on. The important question is, Why do it? A lot of this work is like the demonstration records people bought when stereo equipment first came out. I remember having my friends over, opening beers, and sitting there like an idiot listening to a ping-pong ball bouncing from speaker to speaker. We thought, Isn't this great? But it had a very short shelf life.
A lot of junk gets made in the name of interactivity.
For the most part, nothing's interactive - it's all preprogrammed and controlled. Interactivity isn't a choice between turning right or turning left. Interactivity is when people write me letters.
A traditional photographer and digital-age dialectician, Pedro Meyer is as comfortable working in Photoshop as he is in a darkroom. His classic I Photograph to Remember CD-ROM, published in 1991, told the story of his parents' deaths in a spare voice-and-image style, demonstrating that digital media can make us feel as well as twitch. Born in Spain, raised in Mexico, living in Los Angeles, Meyer is a short man with a graying beard and vaguely mischievous look. His impishness carries over into the images of his latest exhibit-cum-book-cum-CD-ROM Truths & Fictions, which embraces the power of digital imaging and calls into question the photographic image as documentary truth. He has two messages: photographers are storytellers and high-tech Renaissance artists, and you can't trust your eyes.
