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Who's Zooming Who?Errol Morris' obsessive investigation of a Roger Fenton photograph.

By Jim Lewis
Posted Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007, at 5:23 PM ET
Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855. Click image to expand.

There is a phenomenon often at play in the worlds of art, literature, criticism, and journalism, which I have come to think of as the JM Effect, in honor of its most striking manifestation, a series of moves by New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm. Malcolm, you may recall, was sued for libel by a man named Jeffrey Masson and then went on to write a book called The Journalist and the Murderer, which attacked a writer named Joe McGinniss for betraying his subject, a convict named Jeffrey MacDonald. Quite a few people believed that Malcolm was trying to expiate her own sins, or perhaps to exonerate herself by comparison. Me, I always figured she was just obsessed with the initials.

The JM Effect, then, prevents anyone from knowing why any artist or writer does anything, and I had cause to consider it again just recently, as I was reading Errol Morris' very long, sometimes brilliant, and overall very strange series of essays in a blog on the New York Times Web site. Morris begins, and ends, by considering a picture by Roger Fenton called "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death," a famous photograph from the Crimean War that, according to Susan Sontag, was at least partially staged.

When I wrote about Fenton myself, here on Slate, I repeated Sontag's claim, somewhat unthinkingly, I have to admit, at least in light of Morris' vetting. He was more skeptical, and in fact he writes about 25,000 words, over three posts, about his efforts to determine the truth of the accusation. That is about three times the length of a very long magazine article, and Morris digresses a lot; he pulls in maps and charts, he delves into Ruskin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, some notes on the history of fashion; he notes the difference between the Valley of Death and the Valley of the Shadow of Death (they were apparently two distinct places); he travels to the Crimea to see the scene for himself; and he quotes, at considerable length, a series of interviews he conducted with various photography experts, curators, computer scientists, and historians. At one point he reproduces a picture of his Crimean tour guide's shoes, and I would tell you why, but I'm not quite sure myself.

Morris posted two pictures by Fenton, taken on the same day and from the same position, one showing cannonballs on a road, and the other showing them only on the side of it; he invited readers to weigh in on the evidence for one or the other being staged, and hundreds took him up on it. He seems to have struck a nerve, or perhaps forensics is a more popular pastime than I would have guessed. The whole affair snowballed to browser-crashing size: If you add the readers' comments to Morris' own writing, you get a word count of about 223,000, which—just to put it in perspective—is slightly longer than Moby-Dick. Not since the Zapruder film has so much been said about a few frames of photography, and it ends with Morris siding with Sontag, after all (though her evidence was scanty and her motivations suspect). It seems very likely, if not absolutely certain, that Fenton threw a few cannonballs onto the road in order to make a better picture. In other words, we finish, after a very long journey, pretty much right where we started.

But it's a very charming and enjoyable journey, with all sorts of hypotheses entertained, and computer analyses, and a great deal of slightly neurotic second-guessing and self-doubt. It's a shaggy-dog story, a monumental procedural in which it's revealed, at the very end, that the butler did it after all.

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Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead.
Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855. Collection: The J. Paul Getty Museum.
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