The Camera Lies

The act of observation is never neutral. Reality TV does not show reality because the presence of the camera injects an outside element into an otherwise closed system. Perhaps the closest we could come to filming reality would be to watch through hidden cameras or one-way glass. It’s no secret that we act differently when we know we are being watched. The presence of the the media

The Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square

can turn a peaceful protest into a violent melee, as people “perform” for the camera or attempt to deliver the sort of excitement that wins coverage on the nightly news. Even if the journalists or photographers go unnoticed, their work inevitably frames and shades the public memory of the event. The cliche holds that “the camera never lies,” but it lies by its very nature, by the fact that it cannot capture everything around it. By definition, a photograph picks a square of space and squashes it between four walls; it includes some things and excludes others. A front-page picture of a demonstrating crowd may show people packed tightly together, but it may not reveal that, had the photographer pivoted 90 degrees to the right, he would have seen an empty street.

How much does the media influence world events? How much of the narrative we accept as history is a fabrication concocted by human beings trying to make sense out of chaos? Two recent stories explore what happens when reality becomes surreal, when the hand holding the camera is the same as the hand guiding the revolution.

In “The Toppling” (The New Yorker, 1/10/11), Peter Maass reveals that a symbolic, TV-friendly turning point in the invasion of Iraq — the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square — was perhaps more a product of the American military and media than any swell of anti-Saddam Iraqi spirit.

“The slap that sparked a revolution” (The Guardian, 5/15/11) is Elizabeth Day’s investigation of the life and death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. The particulars of the straw that broke the camel’s back, an argument with a government official that may (or may not) have ended in a slap to Bouazizi’s face, are hardly straightforward. Day writes that “there is also a growing murmur of dissent among those who believe that Mohamed was not a political hero but a media creation . . . .” Everything, from the slap itself to a visit by Tunisia’s dictator to Bouazizi’s deathbed, is in question.