In 1988 Errol Morris released The Thin Blue Line, a documentary in which he examined the case of the convicted murderer Randall Adams. Morris was so tenacious for the truth that he proved what the courts had missed, Adams’s innocence. A year after the movie came out, Adams was freed and so avoided a life sentence, thirteen years of which he had already served.
Morris’s doggedness for what really happened has inspired two other films, The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, both of which uncover the lies that powerful statesmen—Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively—deployed to justify wars. Not surprisingly, Morris worked as a private investigator before becoming a documentarian.
Morris’s passion for the facts was aired recently on an episode of the NPR show Radiolab. The piece focused on Morris’s quest to discover the sequence of two pictures taken by Roger Fenton, one of the first photographers to document war, the Crimean War in this case. In 1855 Fenton took a picture of a desolate valley in the war zone, through which runs, into the gray horizon, a lonely dirt road. It is strewn with cannonballs. Fenton called it The Valley of the Shadow of Death. But another version of the same scene, apparently taken the same day, is also extant. Everything is apparently the same, save one detail: the cannonballs lie to the left of the road, in a ditch.
These two versions have led several experts to conclude that one of the earliest war photographs was also one of the first staged photographs, the assumption being that Fenton found his first composition, the “real” one, cannonballs off road, to be lacking and so rearranged the details to his liking: balls on road.
Morris didn’t so much question the fake-photo hypothesis as the assumption that the off-road occurred before the on-road. He admitted that one could certainly reasonably assume that the on-road was second, since it is more “aesthetic,” ostensibly illustrating that “the way is blocked with the horrors of war.” But Morris also claimed that one could with just as much validity assume that the off-road was second, because it suggests its own stagedness. In the midst of war’s hell, hope remains: a way cleared of obstacles.
Hungry to know which came first, Morris interviewed art historians. He also visited the actual site where the photos were shot. He found nothing. Then he ran into a friend, Dennis Purcell, at a party. He thought Purcell, an optical engineer, might be of help. After much study, Purcell revealed that three pebbles were lower down the bank in the on-road image. He concluded that Fenton and his helpers inadvertently kicked the stones down the bank when transporting the balls from ditch to road. Off-road indeed came first: what really happened minus the artist’s intervention. Then Fenton meddled, transmogrified the spheres into a parable.
For Morris, problem solved: the first photo is authentic. But Purcell, the forensic catalyst of Errol’s satisfaction, feels otherwise. He believes that the second, on-road, is more valid, because it expresses the “emotional truth” of the scene. A true artist, Fenton altered the cannonballs “to make [the landscape] look the way it felt.”
To which Morris says, “Forget all that.” What he ultimately took from his search for the Crimean sequence, he confessed on Radiolab, was not which image was more authentic but the way the relationship between the photographs made him feel the motion of the stones and inspired intense empathy with the soldiers, with their “feet hitting the rocks,” their “walking” through that desolation, the complex physical “reality of the scene.” In slipping through the gap between these photos, as if “through a pinhole camera,” Morris recalled his father, who had died when Morris was two. He only knew his dad through black-and-white photographs. Now, scrutinizing the shadowy images of his parent as he had earlier studied Fenton’s cannonballs, he asked with renewed force, “Who was this man? What is the mystery of this man?” He couldn’t answer. He could only march once more through his own desolate valley, where all that we most love is lost.
But in bearing witness to the shadows of what has passed—the memorial pictures, the eulogizing words—we can find a kind of grace, the resurrection, within our hearts, of the one gone, more alive to us now than when we could actually touch his hand, because we understand how abundant he was, how able to fill the emptiness now within us, and we imagine that fecundity and are nourished. The thirsty man learns the water, Emily Dickinson writes, so much more acutely than the quenched, just as Plato’s men, cave shackled and blinded, understand most resplendently the glaring air.
This book has been about how we fake it to compensate for what we lack, to make up for the ruining of love in the books of our days. Build your own artifice out of the rubble, maybe a sphere expansive as the universe, or perhaps a single ball, apple size. How well it fits into your hand. You throw it across the field easily, and your daughter catches it every time.