A Quote by Errol Morris

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.
I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child. That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
The question at hand is the danger posed to truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.
It's a political and manipulative industry. Actors vie for the same roles, movies are snatched away. Have I ever been manipulated? Yes. But I haven't manipulated anyone because if you think from the heart, you cannot be calculative. I have spent nights crying.
There's a lot of anger on our side. We've been lied about, we have been lied to, we've been mischaracterized, Hillary calling people deplorables and this kind of thing.
I walk in the park every day, and when people come and ask for a photograph, I say, "Oh, my God!" It means they recognize that I have been doing something right and they want to have a photograph taken with me.
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I hear that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead.
This country's response to the coronavirus has been disastrous because of poor, incompetent leadership at the national and state levels. More than 4.6 million Americans have become infected with the coronavirus. Basic safety precautions have been manipulated into a political issue.
Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
Press information is serious information, but press information is also manipulated by people who want you to think that this and that happened. So it's the old thing that you still cannot trust photography at all or you have to know who is distributing the photograph. In terms of cell phone photography, I think nobody cares about a photograph anymore because they're taking so many pictures just for fun.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.
A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.
I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent - not forced consent, manipulated consent - and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.
Even though reality TV is very manipulated, it's all manipulated so that something real happens. And so, our job in this era is to make that real thing happen, because nobody wants to see any more manipulated, pre-planned performances. That era is over.
After I have photographed the way I like to, I feel as I might if I had been making love all day, marvelous and exhausted and wanting to collapse on the floor in a heap. That's why I can't photograph just anybody, and why it's so hard to photograph people on assignment; it's like going to bed with someone not of my choosing.
I have been in love with somebody in my past who lied to me, who cheated on me, and I tried to make it work. But I'm not that girl anymore, and that's been something I've been so proud of.
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