I often think that what is most interesting about a picture, a book, an essay, a movie, a song—often more interesting than the thing itself—is the story behind its making. Consider this exhibition. Don’t you wonder what drove this or that photographer to the subject he or she treats? And don’t you wonder how his or her pictures got chosen?
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I think I know what is driving me to the subject I am going to write about here. I am writing this in the Dallas – Fort Worth Airport on my way to Poland, where I will talk about American culture with university students of English. I am acutely aware that what I say to them, and how I behave, may color their view of our country, which they know through the gaudy violence of our movies and news, and the gaudy nonsense of our celebrities. I would like to help them understand a bit of our true complexity. At the same time I’d like them to like us.
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I trust it doesn’t violate an important confidence to say that the other members of Rick Williams’ advisory committee and I saw the pictures in this exhibit before Rick made his final choice. Rick and Roy Flukinger had done a rough cut, and they wanted our opinion of what they had. The exhibit then was different from the exhibit you see now: a few photos have been added and a slightly larger number have been dropped.
As the committee discussed the pictures, we found ourselves talking about what I’m sure the pictures will make you talk about: truth and beauty. We love the beauty (by which we sometimes meant ugliness, strength, and artistic and visual interest, as well as handsomeness), but we talked much more about truth. It was easier to talk about, of course. More important, because this exhibit will be seen by people beyond the U.S. border, it seemed to use more important.
“Is this picture true?” we kept asking, though in words less bald. Was it a true image of what Texas life, American life, was like? Why were there—for instance—so many strong-looking men and so few strong-looking women? We actually counted the strong- and weak-looking members of each sex. The totals dismayed us, being ourselves women or having daughters.
“What will people who don’t know us think?” This was the crucial question, which we asked in oblique ways. Would this picture, for example, in the context of the others—especially of that picture, say—mislead a foreign audience?
We wanted to protect strangers from a small truth (half truth?) in the interest of what we felt to be larger (i.e., more statistically and morally significant) truths.
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“But this is cheating!” one of us should have said, but didn’t. “We’re using general, numerical Truth, with a capital T, to hide a particular, unpleasant truth. We’re like parents who come upon somebody crippled or drunk or demented on the street when we’re walking with little Jimmy or Jennifer. What do we do? We try to turn the child’s attention from the afflicted person because we don’t want Jennifer or Jimmy to think life is like that.”
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Though none of the committee pointed out how close we were to cheating, we all must have felt it, because we finally did something about it. We explicitly adopted a standard for inclusion that I’m sure is used in many cases where truth and beauty conflict but that I’ve never seen spelled out. If a picture was beautiful enough, we paid no attention to how true it was. On the other hand, if a picture showed a truth we felt we had to have for whatever reason (statistical, ethnic, sexual, vocational, religious, etc.), then we used it even though it wasn’t beautiful enough. “The photographer wanted to make a better picture,” we told ourselves. “Unfortunately, reality didn’t cooperate.” Thus, to the best of our ability, art and sociology were both allowed to make their strongest claims.
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