In platos cave

Trevor Gustafson’s response to
In Plato’s Cave by Susan Sontag

I agree yet disagree with Susan Sontag. Photos can be an accurate or an inaccurate depictions of truth. However I do not believe that photos in themselves are a truth of there own. When I say that a photograph is not a truth of its own, I mean that it is not a truth of the item being photographed. It is a truth of itself. That photograph is lying on my table is a truth, but IT is not the table that was being photographed.
With photographs we can have an accurate view of things. Policemen have used them for years to convict criminals. They are accepted as evidence in the court of law. Sometimes a photo can catch a thief in the act of robbery. Sometimes it can prove that the suspect had contact with the victim. Investigators take hundreds of photos at the scene of a murder investigation. They take pictures from every angle and of everything. Photos taken rightly by the hand of a professional can be a very accurate depiction of truth, even the courts agree on this.
Sometimes photographs can inaccurately depict reality. A photographer can choice to make the object he is shooting appear brighter than it is by making the shutter speed slower thus allowing more light in. In this way he can make a scene that would almost disappear into the night’s shadows, visible. A photographer can also choose to make things appear larger than they really are.
Photographs cannot fill in other parts of our memory. For a while a picture of grandma may bring back memories of the deceased grandmother. The picture may remind a person of conversations with grandma, the way grandma spoke, and the even the way Grandma smelt. But after a while, as the person’s memory gets filled with other information, looking at the picture will not bring back the same memories. Had the picture changed? Not at all. You see it was not the picture that was creating these memories, it was the brain.
Sometimes we can look at photographs so much that our brain imagines we were there. We see that picture of ourselves at the family get-together when we were two and we think we can remember the situation. We think we can hear what people are saying, the smells in the room, and even the things that went on before and after the situation. Quit often these “memories” are wrong. Yes we were there, but our brain can’t recall information from that far back. So our brain pretends it knows [don’t laugh at poor Mr. Brain. We all pretend we know stuff we don’t to try and impress others.] The brain makes up information, and we accept it as the truth, even though that may not be an accurate depiction of what really happened.
So we know that photographs are sometimes accurate sometimes not. Sometimes they bring back memories, other times our brain creates inaccurate memories from them. Does an inaccurate photo or an inaccurate memory make the photo a new reality? A new truth? Absolutely not. Though men used to think that the earth was flat, that didn’t mean that it was. Though people in Plato’s cave thought there world consisted of shapes dancing around on the wall, truth is that those shapes were formed by people and a fire behind them.
The author says that photography can’t explain anything. She said that photographs are just like fiction. That is a major exaggeration. Photos can explain a lot. They can explain why dad was never able to get a date during high school. They can explain who robbed the bank. Some of them can be misleading, but that doesn’t mean that all of them should be discarded. Some people can be misleading. They can lie to us and steer us in the wrong directions. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t trust anyone. Likewise we shouldn’t discard photographs as useless.
Many times we are given false ideas or beliefs. This doesn’t mean that all our ideas are false. I’m convinced that there is something that I am convinced of that is false. Does that mean I shouldn’t believe in anything? Should I say we can’t know anything? If one person says that he saw the suspect with the victim on the night of the murder yet another witness says he say the witness 200 miles away on same night, can they both be right? No they can’t. You see there is only one truth. It can’t be made up. There can’t be two of them. The only way truth can be changed is with action. If I cut three inches off of the table legs, the truth is that that table will be three inches shorter. However, there is never more than one truth.