What do you see in the picture?

“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire”: such an odd title for this kind of article, and I still do not understand what he means by that (at least for me). Well, anyways, I really enjoyed reading this article because this type of articles makes me reread and think about what I just have read. Yes, I totally agree with Morris that pictures contain thousands of words and meanings in them, and I also believe that people never know what they are telling us, who are the third persons to the picture forever. It can be anything, or just nothing. Maybe a little caption under the picture does not really tell anything about itself. When I first read this article, I thought of these words, “I (only) believe what I see”, which are probably spoken by anyone in this world. I want to add more onto that quote that people only believe what they believe. What I mean by this is that, like everyone thinks differently, she/he would interpret a picture in various ways. Morris in this article tells us that he believes many things in a picture, in his own way of beliefs, and raises some question for his audiences and himself if a picture tells the truth or not. But here, I rather want to ask if there is really truth in our world? Who defines truth or falsity? Or, does truth of a picture really matter for us? I think the relationship between images and beliefs is really about how people interpret the picture; in other words, there is no one proven answer for that. At the end of his article, Morris repeats himself from the introduction but at this time with “answer” that “pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false,”” which I believe it is the “truth”. Morris's article mainly talks about the truth of photograph’s story, but I think it contains more than that. Maybe he is trying to tell us that there is always more meaning or story in anything we face, like I believe he says more than photograph in this article.

Interpreting one picture from different points of views, if I understand this right, I think Kevin Carter’s photo can be a good example for this idea. Carter’s “Vulture stalking a child” is world widely famous photo not only because it won Pulitzer Prize, but also due to what it contains in the picture. This is a pretty simple picture: there is a child lying on the ground and a vulture staring at her. Many people were shocked by this picture when it first appeared, and he came under criticism for not helping the girl. He was described as that ”the man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” but ironically the photo was introduced as “metaphor for Africa’s despair” on the New York Times, and won the prize for it. This one picture contains lots of things even though there are only two figures in it, and it is truly shown differently from people to people. But seriously, there is nothing can be defined as truth or falsity by us. I mean, do any of us have the right to judge?

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/vulture-stalking-a-child/