August 23, 2004
What's the fuss?
This report says that Frank Hurley, is much ado about nothing.
It says that Hurley, the pioneering Australian cameraman and adventurer, "fabricated scenes and doctored image" that he took on Ernest Shackleton's near-fatal Antarctic expedition of 1914. (That expedition has been recreated.)
Hurley had been on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914 led by Sir Douglas Mawson:
Frank Hurley, Sedimentary Rock Formation, between 1911 and 1914]
Hurley was primarily a straight documentary photographer:
F. Hurley, Castaways adrift on the sea ice,1915
An exhibition of that expedition.
We already knew that Hurley worked in a montage way during WW1. What is the problem?
The Guardian article says:
"The poignant photographs recording Shackleton's departure from Elephant Island and the return of his rescue party in 1916 are both misrepresentations of what actually happened. Hurley's frequent use of 'artistic licence' was confirmed this weekend by the last remaining survivor of an Antarctic mission that was officially photographed and filmed by Hurley."
Photographic images cannot be altered seems to be the assumption here. So the manipulation of the images (ie. superimposing images or restaging events) is deemed to be fakery.
This assumes that photography has implicit connotations of authenticity, presupposing that the image is an unmediated transcription of reality. But Hurley rebelled against that view of photography as he used the camera ato interpret the world around him.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 23, 2004 02:14 PM | TrackBack