Digital illusions in frames of reality.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell
• Position: Pedro Meyer, photographer of social truths

USING COMPUTER MANIPULATION, MEXICAN PHOTOGRAPHER PEDRO MEYER CREATES STARTLING IMAGES THAT REVEAL POIGNANT SOCIAL TRUTHS

Pictures, says one of society's newest adages, don't lie. Pedro Meyer, Mexico's enthusiastic exponent of digital photography, would agree - if he trusted the photographer. The truths in Meyer's photographs are not always facts in the traditional sense of the word. He produces his revealing illustrations of social realities through computer manipulation. The images are fictions, but they do not lie. Meyer's solo exhibition, Truths & Fictions: A Journey from Documentary to Digital Photography, first mounted in October 1993 at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, has become a focal point for vigorous debate about the role of photography in contemporary society. Meyer has impressed audiences in France, England, Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States with his visual virtuosity. He has also unsettled them by the ease with which he develops new realities.

Meyer produced nearly every image in the exhibition by combining his strengths as a documentary photographer with his abilities as a computer expert. By mixing bits and pieces of several images in specialized computer programs, his pictures show more about the Americas than many more traditional photographs are capable of capturing.

Because Meyer's photographs look, at first glance, like those used to illustrate newspapers and magazines, it is not always easy for a viewer to tell where reality ends and artistic expression begins. To complicate the situation further, even what appear to be obvious illusions were not always created in Meyer's computer. The subject of Monumental Chair is so large that viewers immediately assume Meyer has altered it. Ironically, it is one of the few images in his recent production that he has not substantially changed. The huge chair is a real monument in Washington, D.C.

Artists throughout the ages have selected and reassembled elements of the world around them to produce images, and people don't expect a painting always to reflect reality. Many observers, however, assume that photographs are direct reflections of daily events. Meyer wants to change that perception. "Art is about manipulation of matter and ideas, isn't it?" he asks. "It's only now we are making so much fuss about pictures, because for the first time, words and images can be altered in quite the same way."

Meyer likes to use analogies between journalism and photography to emphasize this point. The credibility of a photograph, he maintains, does not lie in the image itself, but in its context. "People have learned not to believe words just because they are printed or spoken," Meyer says. "They depend on who is carrying the message and how it is carried." He believes the same caution will eventually be applied to photographic images.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1935, Meyer decided to become a photographer when he was eleven. "I was seduced by the magic of the image coming up on those little white sheets of paper as they lay in the developer," he explains. That same interest in technological magic would eventually lead him to digital photography.

He cites colorful Japanese decals that his father brought home from business trips, cartoons from the New Yorker Magazine, and major U.S. and European photographers from the 1930s and 1940s as major formative...