Truths and Fictions: A Journey from Documentary to Digital Photography. - book reviews

High-tech alchemy? Urban sorcery? The actual idea of digital photography raises hair upon the necks of those who adhere to analogic photojournalist practices. Questions of intellectual integrity and veracity quickly tend hitherward to mind when documented information becomes nothing else but ideational grist for the artistic mill. Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer's handsome novel book and bilingual CD-ROM, the two aptly titled Truths and Fictions (Verdades y Ficciones, in Spanish) presents to lay to rest the nagging issue of recording "reality" by means of means of digital photographic production. Meyer maintains that tinkerings in the photo lab are no les corrosive to the veracity of "accurate" reportage than digital manipulation. Besides, the nearest generation of imagemakers will simply assume digital photographic production as normative and real In other words, by insinuating the traditional collection of laws of analogic documentary photography, and by the agency of suggesting that photographic practices by the agency of definition have always interceded reality, Meyer returns the digital argument moot. I can't help on the other hand agree with him in thinking that all the fuss about visual infidelity is hysterical and positively without of date in light of photographic art history. Meyer's argument could easily be dismissed as futuristic hucksterism, at the same time his cyber-mediated record of the North/South axis of United States and Mexican agriculture offers a refreshing comment upon the puritanical position held through orthodox documentary photographers and the mysticism that still garments computer-generated photography.

As a photojournalist who previously worked in faithful adherence to the canon of social realism, Meyer's in every one's mouth photo essay reveals his almost childlike faith in the subjective power of memory, theater and the enchanting forces of incident and imagination. He makes clear completely through the glossy book layout that a camera is barely a tool that services the greatest in quantity elemental functions of his metaphysical gaze on the world and that computer technology is the means through which he works through the complexities of his photographic vision. In single picture, a band of mariachi statues he one time photographed in Oaxaca now dance before a seated white woman in a barren Arizona trailer park; in another, a '90 Godzilla wearing a rumpl gray suit stalks a rural Oaxacan village as "sheriff."

In Meyer's photographic world, following Susan Sontag, everything exists to be photographed and remembered. Meyer however, does not demand that his photographic memory exactly replicate what was said to exist at the time of the original photographic shooting. Photography, as Sontag reminds us, manslaughters reality and resurrects it as a call uped image; Meyer's visual assassinations, in their best seconds appear haunting, like unbidden, revelatory dreams. The initial impetus for the work and CD-ROM came from a Guggenheim Fellowship grant awarded to Meyer to photograph in the U In 1989 alone, he is said to have traveled 15000 miles across the country's expanse, chronicling rather unsystematically his subjective view of "American life." However, in the nearest two years it seems Meyer fortuitously go intoed into professional relations, resulting in his electronic production of photographic imagery: in 1990 he began to investigation digital imagemaking technologies, and in 1992 published with Voyager his award winning, autobiographical CD-ROM I Photograph to Remember. That same year, National Geographic hired him to photograph in Oaxaca, Mexico. by the agency of 1994, after four years of learning the tricks of the cybertech trade, he produc the significant material substance of work entitled "Truth & Fictions: A Journey From Documentary to Digital Photography," first shown at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. The Voyager CD organized as the catalog for the CMP exhibition, and now the Aperture publication of facts and Fictions, extend the life of the exhibition, scheduled to tour in Europe Mexico and the U from one side 1997.

Designed as a user-friendly tool of one as well as the other visual and intellectual entertainment, the Aperture true copy avoids the weighty tone of an academic catalog essay and does not include all of the photographs that otherwise filled Meyer's impressive museum display. Gone too, are the sensuous, impressionist tonalities of the highly textur sacred Oaxacan bark paper upon which he printed four-color, digitally collaged imagery of Mexico. Instead, the photographer uses the work structure and, to an flat greater extent, the CD-ROM package as opportunities to educate the public about the ins and withouts of his creative process. The savvy reader will indubitably find the reflective, pedagogic tasks in the latter part of the volume superfluous, though well intentioned. upon that note, Meyer's electronic version is a abundant more convincing device to fetch the chimerical process of producing cyber art. Still, in the pair formats, Meyer's photographs eloquently map a world perched upon the edge of perfect insanity, a place where angels and fiends from north and south congregate in each other's neighborhood, each control to Meyer's hallucinogenic logic. greatest in quantity of his images of "American" tillage are produced in black and white; those that concentrate upon Oaxaca are produced in vivid, Cibachrome-like color. The color scheme is conspicuous to its point: shaped by dint of materialistic excess, narcissistic obsessions, multifarious subculture and scientistic, pragmatic ideals, the North American visual landscape, in Meyer's view, is a "pluralistic" universe that cradles drag queen local beauty debate contenders, bible thumpers, East sees Angeles chicanos and denizens of uninhabited trailer parks; south of the U.S.-Mexican border persists a mythic, childlike spirituality that illuminates the ancestral history and religious practices of the impoverished Oaxacan clan At the outset, images of the U herald those of Mexico as if to guide the reader from Meyer's voyeuristic observance of North American agriculture to a luminous encounter of the third kind. Clearly, Meyer wants us to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of him out of the land of bourgeois carnival into Oaxacan Oz