Philosophy of photography

Excellent quote from a documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

The irony here is that we tend to think of photographs as revealing rather than concealing, but the opposite turns out to be the case. Because they make invisible only fragments, contingent on a frame, a moment in time, a point of view, and between each photograph in a series of snapshots there is a blindspot, just as there is between shots in a film. We make sense of these gaps. We make up stories to fill these gaps, these blindspots, and these stories are shaped by our storytelling traditions, conventions, our habits of viewing, our inclination to identify good guys and bad guys, simplistic and generic ways of imagining. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, top administration personnel concocted and promulgated the "bad apple narrative" to help us fill in the gaps between and around each photo, and thereby transforming photographic evidence of what in fact was a vast, premeditated and institutionally sanctioned crime (a criminal standard operating procedure) into a tool in the cover up of that same crime. The irony is that photographic evidence of a crime became tools in a cover-up, allegories for the visible become mechanisms of blindness.

Killer Images, p. 314