[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello?

ERROL MORRIS: Hello.

JAD: Hi. Is this Errol Morris?

ERROL MORRIS: I think it's me.

JAD: [laughs] Hello, this is Jad from—from Radiolab.

ERROL MORRIS: Hi. Thank you for your very, very nice but somewhat disturbing email.

JAD: [laughs] What disturbed you in the email?

ERROL MORRIS: The term "truth fascist."

ROBERT KRULWICH: You called Errol Morris a truth fascist? What were you thinking?

JAD: I was—I was trying to—I wrote him an email to try and get him to come talk to us. And I don't know why I used that ...

ERROL MORRIS: What is a truth fascist?

JAD: That was meant lovingly, I should say.

ERROL MORRIS: Ah!

JAD: It wasn't exactly the right choice of words. Fundamentalist?

ERROL MORRIS: Oh, I like it!

JAD: But really what I meant is that, like, this is a guy who's always trying to get to the bottom of things. So he made all these documentaries Thin Blue Line. Got a guy off death row, actually, in The Thin Blue Line. He made The Fog of War.

ROBERT: He made Vernon, Florida.

JAD: Yeah. But I contacted him because, you know, I'd recently seen him give this talk about this one investigation of his that for me is like the purest example of the thing that drives him, the thing that's in all of his films, this desire, a relentless desire to figure things out, to get to ...

ERROL MORRIS: Truth! [laughs]

JAD: And it all starts with a photograph.

ERROL MORRIS: One of the very, very first photographs of war, 1855.

JAD: Which war?

ERROL MORRIS: This is the Crimean War. It involved Great Britain, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and, believe it or not, Sardinia.

JAD: The fighting took place in what is now basically the Ukraine. The Russians were on one side, everybody else was on the other. Half a million people died. It was incredibly brutal.

ERROL MORRIS: And there's this photograph titled, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." It's black and white. It shows a dirt road cutting through this landscape.

JAD: Just one dirt road between two hills.

ERROL MORRIS: There's nobody in the photograph.

JAD: No birds, no trees, no people.

ERROL MORRIS: There's really nothing living in the photograph.

JAD: Not even grass.

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing.

JAD: But as you stare at this road a little more closely, you realize why nothing is living in this photograph. Because this road is ...

ERROL MORRIS: Littered with cannonballs. Cannonballs everywhere.

JAD: As soon as you notice it, the photograph springs to life.

ERROL MORRIS: You imagine this fuselage of artillery fire raining down on this landscape. This is one really fascinating thing about photography. It's a time machine. There's a physical connection between that photograph and that world.

JAD: Because you're holding this piece of film that was literally ripped right out of that world.

ERROL MORRIS: But the context is gone.

JAD: And more importantly, in this case, you don't even know if that picture is true.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

ERROL MORRIS: It turns out that this photograph is one of a pair. There is a second photograph exactly the same as the first photograph.

JAD: Exact same camera position.

ERROL MORRIS: But in this other photograph, the cannonballs that were on the road are gone.

JAD: So one has cannonballs on the road and one has cannonballs not on the road, but otherwise, they're completely identical.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: He thought, "That's weird. Let me look into that."

ERROL MORRIS: And there was a passage in ...

JAD: And he ends up reading this essay by Susan Sontag ...

ERROL MORRIS: ... where she talks about these photographs as though it's just obvious what was going on.

JAD: He was like, "Ugh, that word."

ERROL MORRIS: Well, I don't like the word "obvious."

JAD: Susan Sontag was basically arguing that the guy who took the picture, Roger Fenton, came to an empty road, put the cannonballs on the road—he staged it.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: It's obvious.

ERROL MORRIS: But ...

JAD: That word ...

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing's so obvious that it's obvious. And so I started investigating.

JAD: And so began a ludicrous, obsessive, dogged—but kind of sublime—pursuit of the slippery little fact that actually inspired this whole hour.

ROBERT: So today on Radiolab we are going to wrestle with a series of seemingly simple facts that turn out to raise complicated questions.

JAD: Like what is truth? Is is just a pile of facts?
ROBERT: And how much does the fact of the matter matter?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Back to Errol Morris.

ERROL MORRIS: I tracked down Fenton's letters from the Crimea journals, written records of soldiers who were in that area at that given time.

JAD: Didn't find much.

ERROL MORRIS: I interviewed five historians. Two ordered the photographs in one way.

JAD: Saying yes, it's obvious he posed the pictures.

ERROL MORRIS: Two ...

JAD: And this is a bit of a surprise.

ERROL MORRIS: ... ordered the photographs in the opposite way.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: They told him it is actually very possible that Fenton saw the cannonballs, took the picture, and then soldiers came along, took the cannonballs off the road to recycle them so they could fire them back at the Russians.

ERROL MORRIS: Exactly.

JAD: Was that kind of recycling a common practice?

ERROL MORRIS: Yes, indeed, it was, actually.

JAD: So he had a tie. Two historians saying he faked it, two saying he didn't.

ERROL MORRIS: And the fifth ...

JAD: Tie-breaker.

ERROL MORRIS: ... jumped back and forth. [laughs]

ROBERT: I like that you called it—tried to call him the tie-breaker, but he didn't break the tie.

ERROL MORRIS: Well of course none of these things is subject to a vote. Truth isn't something that you vote on.

JAD: At this point he says he says he was feeling a very familiar ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: He thought, you know what, forget historical interpretations.

ERROL MORRIS: What if I could, from the photograph itself, the very photograph itself, determine which photograph came first?

JAD: From just the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: So I started AB-ing the photographs.

JAD: Just sort of superimposing them on each other and flipping back and forth.

ERROL MORRIS: AB, BA, AB, BA. Et cetera, et cetera.

JAD: Nothing. And then he thinks ...

ERROL MORRIS: I know what I can do. I can start studying the shadows.

JAD: Which meant ...

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, let's go to the Crimea. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Are you serious?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah.

JAD: His reasoning was, I can't study the shadows unless I know the exact direction the camera was pointing on that day in 1855, which means I need to find the exact spot where Fenton stood.

ERROL MORRIS: And I had terrible trouble finding this place.

JAD: Is it marked?

ERROL MORRIS: No! All the guides kept taking me to the charge of the light brigade, that site where Tennyson wrote about the Valley of Death. No no no no no, not the Valley of Death! The Valley of the Shadow of Death! But finally ...

JAD: A guide named Olga ...

ERROL MORRIS: She was fabulous.

JAD: ... helps him locate the spot.

ERROL MORRIS: It's completely desolate, undeveloped.

JAD: Still, after 150 years. With some trial and error, he's able to figure out that Fenton was facing north when he took those photos. And then he goes off to the Crimean War Museum and asks them ...

ERROL MORRIS: Could I borrow some cannonballs?

ROBERT: Oh, man.

ERROL MORRIS: I take the cannonball, take it out to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I photograph it ...

JAD: ... at different times of the day, hoping that he'd be able to see subtle differences in the shadows cast by those cannonballs that could help him order the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: But, nothing.

ROBERT: Nothing?

ERROL MORRIS: There was endless questions about cloud cover, whether you could even measure the shadows on these photographs.

JAD: In fact, he now suspects that the shadows in those old pictures may not have been shadows at all ...

ERROL MORRIS: But just artifacts of how the prints were made. And on and on.

JAD: So was the trip useful at all?

ERROL MORRIS: Not so much. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Oh, man. That's a vacation moment right there.

ROBERT: How many days—how many days did you spend photographing and examining the photographs of cannonballs on the road?

ERROL MORRIS: I was there for about a week.

JAD: And then he went home with no answer to his question, only that continuing ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: But he was like, no.

ERROL MORRIS: No!

JAD: Not done yet!

ERROL MORRIS: Look, when you investigate anything, I don't care what it is, whether it's a Fenton photograph or Abu Ghraib or the murder of a Dallas police officer, yes, complications result. Thinking causes complications, I'm sorry. But it's part of that process that we go through of trying to figure out what's out there in the world, what really happened. This is about truth. Absolute truth. And the pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity. [laughs] So yes, the Fenton photographs worried me, that I might not be able to resolve it to my satisfaction.

JAD: But then he's at a party, and he bumps into a friend of his, a guy by the name of Dennis Purcell.

ERROL MORRIS: Who is very, very good with Photoshop.

JAD: We called him up.

DENNIS PURCELL: Hello.

JAD: Turns out ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Well, I'm an optical engineer.

JAD: So he's not just good at Photoshop. He actually builds high-tech cameras. In any case, they were talking at this party ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And the Fenton picture came up.

JAD: Errol told him ...

DENNIS PURCELL: He had this problem of wondering which came first and said, "Could you take a look at these?"

JAD: Dennis takes the pictures home, puts them in his computer ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And I immediately started to compare them.

JAD: Right away, he starts noticing differences between the two.

DENNIS PURCELL: The light changed. The weather was different. Shadows.

JAD: But he comes to pretty much the same conclusion as Errol, that those things ultimately don't help. So he just starts flipping between the photos.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flipping them back and forth.

ROBERT: Back and forth between the two photographs.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He's doing this for hours. Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And then he sees it.

DENNIS PURCELL: The rocks on the left-hand side.

JAD: This little group of pebbles up on the left bank. Every time he flipped back and forth ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip, flip.

JAD: Those little rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Popped out.

JAD: They moved. Just a little bit. And when he zoomed in, he could see that there were five of them.

DENNIS PURCELL: Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke.

ERROL MORRIS: We named them, yes.

JAD: These five guys shifted from one photo to the next. And here's the key. In the picture where the road was empty, they were a little bit higher on the hill. When the road was full of cannonballs, those little rocks shift down.

DENNIS PURCELL: Maybe eight inches or nine inches.

ERROL MORRIS: And from the direction of that movement, you could order the photographs.

JAD: It's basically like this. You could say, some rocks fell down the hill. They went from up on the hill to down. Up goes before down. And if the up photo is the empty road and the down photo is the road full of cannonballs, well, then ...

DENNIS PURCELL: The one with the cannonballs on the road was the second picture.

ERROL MORRIS: Imagine the scene.

JAD: Fenton comes upon an empty road, but he sees cannonballs on the hill. So he and ...

ERROL MORRIS: Whoever was helping him would have walked along the sides of the road and lifted up cannonballs, moved them onto the road. In that process, they would have invariably knocked into rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And rocks don't fall uphill.

JAD: They only fall downhill.

ERROL MORRIS: It's gravity.

JAD: So case closed? This has—this has been resolved?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. [laughs] I think it has.

JAD: So Susan Sontag was right.

ERROL MORRIS: For the wrong reasons.

JAD: She was right. Fenton staged the photograph. So in addition to being one of the first photographs of war, this is one of the first photographic lies.

ERROL MORRIS: I guess he just figured it was a better photo.

JAD: Yeah. Or, you could say ...

ERROL MORRIS: Fenton was a coward.

JAD: Maybe he didn't want to get too close to the actual fighting, so he ...

ERROL MORRIS: Put the cannonballs on the road to make it look a lot more dangerous than it would have otherwise.

JAD: Or maybe he was after some kind of ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Emotional truth.

JAD: And that's what Dennis Purcell thinks.

DENNIS PURCELL: It's obvious why he did it.

JAD: There's that word again.

DENNIS PURCELL: To make it look the way it felt. To put those cannonballs on the road is how you felt when you were there.

JAD: In which case he would argue that the second photo, the one he posed, is more authentic than the first.

ERROL MORRIS: But forget all of that. Who in hell knows what Fenton was thinking? I really don't know what his motivation was.

JAD: But isn't that kind of the question at the end of the day?

ERROL MORRIS: Do I really care whether he put the cannonballs on the road or not?

ROBERT: I hope so.

JAD: Well, I hope you do. Don't you?

ERROL MORRIS: I do and I don't.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Why would you go through all this then?

ERROL MORRIS: I guess this is what I take from it. In flipping back and forth between those two photographs ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He says you see the rocks move.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you see the rocks move ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... you imagine feet kicking those rocks.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you imagine feet ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... kicking those rocks ...

ERROL MORRIS: You feel the soldiers walking, like really feel it. You feel them hitting into the rocks. You feel, on some deep sense, for me, the reality of that scene in a way that I would not have felt otherwise. It's almost as if you've walked through a pinhole camera into the past. That world in which the photograph, that strange, temporal, evanescent world in which we live is gone.

ROBERT: But if you can step between these photographs, you are permitted a brief trespass into something that you thought was lost.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. My father died when I was two years old, and perhaps the deepest—one of the deepest—mysteries of my life: who was he? There were all these photographs around the house. I was very, very young. I have no memories of him. There's a mystery about this man who is central to my life in so many ways but who I don't know. And who I never will know.

JAD: Errol Morris' latest book is called A Wilderness of Error. This story was taken from his book, Believing is Seeing. I also want to thank Ira Glass for helping us to connect with him.

[DENNIS PURCELL: Hello, this is Dennis Purcell.]

[WOMAN: Hi, this is Errol Morris, and he is about to read the credits for you. Here you go.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Here we go. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation ...]

[DENNIS PURCELL: ... and ... ]

[ERROL MORRIS: And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[DENNIS PURCELL: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Modern world.]

[DENNIS PURCELL: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Radiolab is produced by WNYC ...]

[DENNIS PURCELL: And distributed by NPR. That finishes the credits. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE: End of message.]

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