[Part 4] Curtis is revealing a basic truism about all documentary photography, perhaps all photography. Does it document what it claims to document? Dorothea Lange took multiple images of the “migrant mother.” She may have asked her to stand in a particular way. She may have asked her two children to hide their faces. [Lange’s account follows] //// The real complaint with the cow skull is not that it was moved. Who cares? It was that it was photographed, printed and published in such a way that encouraged the viewer to make unwarranted inferences. And they felt manipulated, tricked, deceived. [Part 5] People don’t disapprove of lying, they disapprove of ineffective lying. They disapprove of people caught lying.//// Photographs may be taken — but we are also taken in by them. [Part 7]

http://shipoffools.com/features/2009/chapter_and_worse_results.html

6th-century Babylonian Talmud instructed the Jews how to regard their sacred books: “What is Torah? It is the interpretation of Torah.” The fixing of texts first came about with the advent of printing, which elevated what was on the page above the spoken, physically felt and thus more mutable word, and then with the search for certainty associated with both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Scientific rationalism made religion even more earthbound when the churches welcomed it

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/ ///// http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2009/09/polanski-some-cognitive-biases.html