Reconstructing reality
The models were fun to create, but a lot of hard work
Making of ‘Five Soldiers Silhouetted at the Battle of Broodseinde' (by Ernest Brooks, 1917), 2013
‘What happens when we can clearly see that we are being lied to?’
Photography is one of the closest things we have to time travel. Through the dissemination of still images, we can travel back and bear testament to events that occurred long before our conception. That’s perhaps the medium’s greatest power, and we so often believe that it is far more reliable than human memory. Memories, as neuroscientists are fond of telling us, are not records – they are reconstructions. They are patchy, fallible and open to interpretation and manipulation. But are photographs really any better? This is, of course, an age-old debate. The veracity of documentary photography has been debated from the moment of its inception. More recent years have seen the
