I’ll throw my 2 cents in, even though I haven’t dissected everything on the blog. But looking between Trunk’s larger images, I think that the one with the cannon balls OFF the road came before the ones ON. I think so because in the OFF image, if you look on the left hand side you see two trails with the furthest left (further up the hill) having a cannon ball in a divot. In the ON picture, the divot is empty and there’s a large rock laying on the trail. Looking further at the side of the hill you see several other cannon balls in the ON picture that aren’t in the OFF picture.
So obviously some cannon balls have been moved, the question is which came first. If the ON picture came first, then somebody moved the cannon balls from the road, UP the hill and placed them precisely in the divots already on the hill. If the OFF picture came first then somebody just rolled the balls down the hill and threw them in the road.
If the bit about harvesting the balls is true, then I think the photographer didn’t stage anything, instead the sequence of events was 1) picture of cannon balls OFF the road. 2) Soldiers come through throwing cannon balls ON the road for a cart to pick up. 3) Picture of cannon balls ON the road. If there would have been another picture, then I think you would have seen a clear road again after the cannon ball pickup cart came along.
Anyway, like I said, just my 2 cents. I’ve bookmarked this thread, so I’ll see if my conclusions pan out.
On was first, there is even a cannonball in motion in the image. (On the road towards the right, almost the last cannonball on the road at the right see the blurry cannonball? It has to have just landed, I would say.) Off was second, it’s darker/later in that image series. Of course, I don’t know where the sun was when they pictures were taken, either. Still, the slant of the light in the second says to me that it is later in the day.
Jim Lewis has a good article in Slate about Morris’ series. (He loves it, even though he thinks it’s obsessive.)
One thing he notes: “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.”
I think the motion of the rocks in part three clinches it. I also agree that the spacing of the balls on the road is too even for a random process.
Furthermore, virtually all of the balls in the OFF image occupy locations where you’d expect a ball with random momentum to come to rest. They’re in natural declivities or against rocks. But the balls on the road don’t have any reason to be in their particular positions – they’re just scattered on a flat surface. Now certainly its possible that they all arrived in those positions just by chance, but if that were the case you’d expect to see a similiar scattering across the entire landscape. But you don’t. You only see them on that one patch of road.
It seems to me that he’s simply expanding on all of the things summed up by the originating article that “it is obvious” which came first. Spending hundreds of pages for what the human mind can determine in a half minute, while showing how impressive our brains are, is rather pointless. Arguing minutiae to win an argument more often aids consipracy theorists than the people who have logic on their side.
But the point is that it isn’t obvious which came first. It could just as well have gone the other way. The main reason people were arguing “it is obvious the balls were moved onto the road” is to create a “better picture” and so on. It could just as well have been obvious that the ON picture came first and he created a “better picture” by moving those damned unlikely looking cannonballs off the road and cleaned up the composition.
The point is that it is obvious. 30 seconds of looking at it tells you that the distribution looks unnatural, that pits exist with balls in one and without in the other, and knowledge of human motive gives reason to lend motive to the scattering while explaining the odd distribution and the pits. Certainly you could go on to look at shadows, individually counting balls, tracing elements, trying to find footprints, and introducing speculative third parties who move balls from roads to put into the pits of previously fallen but since removed shots, but ultimately you’ve solved things to 90% certainty within the first 30 seconds.
Unless his point is that “In everything, somewhere there’s a smoking gun”, which I doubt, then I haven’t missed the point. Certainly assumptions aren’t to be relied on, but everything at some point is an assumption (even with a smoking gun) that boils down to probabilities and logic. Being more thorough doesn’t remove assumptions, it just gives you more backing for it.
Ultimately, thoroughness for the sake of thoroughness is, unless you are in training, spending your energy on something worthless rather than on something worthwhile. There’s any number of historically or criminologically significant pictures that he could have examined, I’m sure, and where the result of the answer would be interesting to know with greater certainty. Whether some guy spiced up one photo that didn’t show much beyond “people were shooting cannons here” and still showed that in either version, just doesn’t change history in any way.
I applaud the scientific method, but if you’re going to use it solely as a party trick, you might as well blow stuff up, like the Mythbusters, so at least something more entertaining than watching a guy publicly masturbate in self-appreciation for his own tenacity and thoroughness is occuring.
With hundreds of comments on each blog entry and thousands of words of discussion by people who say they’ve enjoyed the series and the speculation, it seems that this series was indeed “entertaining” to a great number of people. You’re not one of them? Okay then. Nevertheless, Morris uncovered or instigated a historical forensic photographic mystery that fascinated many of us for a few weeks. For that he should be lambasted?
And I believe the point that Cervaise (I’m not e-stalking you, I promise!) was referring to is that Morris objected to Sontag’s assumption of the photographer’s reason for taking two pictures. She claimed – using someone else’s theory – that the version with more cannonballs on the road was “obviously” faked because the photog wanted to seem like a big ol’ hero, and that was the only possible explanation (to her and the earlier cite she used).
Considering the variety of views from even the experts whom Morris consulted, the “obviousness” of the correct chron order and the rationale for taking two pictures in the first place were not nearly as apparent as Sontag, the earlier author, or you, are making it out to be.