The Academy-Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris once served as an investigator for the federal government. He refuses to be more specific, except to say that he can’t say anything more about it. Since turning 30 in 1978, his focus has been much more devoted to making documentaries, where he is still obsessed with recovering Truth from a muddy world.
Early notoriety came in 1988 with “The Thin Blue Line,” in which Mr. Morris brooded over the murder of a Texas cop.
“Stop. Be careful,” the hypnotic film commands. “Don’t overlook this so quickly. Imagine what you think you know from a whole new point of view.” Through his probing, insistent method, Mr. Morris helped free the man who had been wrongfully convicted of the cop’s murder 13 years earlier; and to do so, he persuaded the real murderer to confess on camera and offer up the proof.
The former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara also gave Mr. Morris a long, drawn-out confession, and that became a documentary meditation in 2003 called “The Fog of War.”
“Nonfiction: Photographs by Nubar Alexanian from the Film Sets of Errol Morris” is about what Mr. Morris has been up to since. But it simultaneously reveals much about its author, the photojournalist Nubar Alexanian. The two men met 15 years ago and immediately recognized a workable harmony in the way they both see the world.
Mr. Morris invited Mr. Alexanian to join his crew and document each of his new major projects. The seasoned magazine photographer at first refused, sensing that it would only be frustrating to provide production stills of the movie-making process. Mr. Morris insisted, promising him total access, complete freedom of movement and full editorial control after the fact. “You stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours,” Mr. Alexanian announced quietly on his first day, only half-kiddingly.
Bits of six of their partnerships fill “Nonfiction,”including “I Dismember Mama,” “The Story of Willie Edwards, Jr.,” “The Parrot,” “Standard Operating Procedures,”“Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” and “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.”
Mr. Alexanian enjoys a kind of creative alliance nearly unheard of on the set of a film. When Mr. Morris’ movie camera dives under water, Mr. Alexanian’s lens hovers only inches away, just out of the line of sight, but just as hungry for emotional truth. Mr. Morris even slips the still photographs into his final movie footage.
What Mr. Alexanian could not predict at the time was how strange their collaboration would turn. Instead of the work being only about the apparent subject at hand, it became a hall of overlapping mirrors. According to Mr. Alexanian, Mr. Morris is interested in irony, whereas a still photographer “must be interested in ambiguity, the well that feeds still images.”
They both loved the idea of how any photograph can become an artifact; but the very nature of a Morris film requires a return to the past, a pre-occupation that is at cross purposes to what photojournalists need: Real people doing real things in the present tense.
When the scandal broke surrounding amateur photos taken at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, both Mr. Morris and Mr. Alexanian knew that the perfect raw material was at hand. The film “Standard Operating Procedures” is the result, still currently in theaters, and pictures from that film make up more than half of Mr. Alexanian’s portfolio in this book.
“I’m trying to advance the story of the pictures that the guards took,” offers Mr. Alexanian. “The film is about what you can and cannot know from photos.”
When first we meet that iconic hooded man standing atop a box, Mr. Alexanian resists the template to give viewers what is expected. Instead, the camera moves in close enough to better understand the hood itself. Mr. Morris went to great pains to make sure it was the same kind of bag that the prison guards used, and viewers of the new photo can readily fill in details. So that’s what it must have smelled like and felt against the ears.
Mr. Morris invented a monstrous confessional box that allows filmmaker and subject to stare each other straight in the eye while cameras are rolling. He named it the Interrotron, fusing the words terror and interview. It’s rigged up with monitors, somewhat like a speechmaker’s teleprompter, so that each person can stare directly into the lens, but give the interviewer and audience direct eye contact.
Mr. Morris never writes down questions in advance. It’s an open-ended conversation, an exploration. His questioning of former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinsky lasted for two days. Lynndie England arrived for her interview revealing a side that the mass media had never shown up to that point.
“People approach the still photograph with truth someplace in their heads. That’s not so for paintings, though,” wonders Mr. Alexanian. “People see this work as political art; but that’s not my intention. I just don’t understand. I used to want to believe that it was important for me to make a difference, but I never really believed it. It’s just not measurable.”
The explanatory text in “Nonfiction” abounds with the abbreviation “RE,” which indicates that Mr. Morris and Mr. Alexanian have staged a reenactment, something that the photojournalist had never before used.
“I’m still learning how to talk about the photographs in this book, and how we managed to put together a truthful understanding of what lead up to the making of those historic pictures. It’s torture, after all. My pictures take you there for a moment in a safe and aesthetically beautiful way. That beauty creates a strong tension. People tell me that they love looking at them until they realize what it’s about.”
To see more photographs from this book by Nubar Alexanian, visit www.walkercreekpress.com
J. Ross Baughman is director of photography at The Washington Times.
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