PREFACE The essays in this book should be seen as a collection of mystery stories. Imagine finding a trunk in an attic filled with photographs. With each photograph we are thrown into an investigation. Who are these people? Why was their photograph taken? What were they thinking? What can they tell us about ourselves? What can we learn about the photographer and his motivations? Each of these questions can lead us on a winding, circuitous path. An excursion into the labyrinth of the past and into the fabric of reality.

ILLUSTRATION #1 MORRIS FAMILY PHOTO

Errol Morris_RESUBMIT 0623.indd 22 6/24/11 1:03 PM

Preface xxiii

My own endless questions about the relationship between images and reality, and in particular, photographic images and reality, began with photographs of my father. My father died on December 10, 1950. I was almost three years old. He was at a party with my mother, complained of chest pains, and collapsed. He died within minutes of a massive heart attack, leaving my mother a widow at the age of thirty-two with two children (myself and my brother, Noel, who was almost six years older than me) and an adored housekeeper, Mary Jane Hardman, whom we called “Hardy.” This picture of my mother, my father, and my older brother was probably taken in 1943, while my father, who was a doctor, was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was a captain in the army.

I have absolutely no memory of my father. Other than a few photographs, all I have is an elaborate lithograph of a skull drawn with the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It was a prize for excel-lence from his anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh. (In the 1930s it was extremely di!cult for a Jew to gain admission to one of the top American medical schools since there were quotas in place. Hence, my father ended up in Edinburgh.)

ILLUSTRATION #2 SKULL DRAWING

There were also the limited recollections of my father from my mother, my brother, and other family members. My brother, who I believe was horribly traumatized by my father’s death, never spoke about him.1 No stories, no anecdotes. Nothing. (Maybe I was reluctant to ask him, but he never volunteered information.) My mother also said very little. It was as though there was a secret about my father and I had to fig-ure out what it was. Although my mother often suggested that I should become a physician—“like your father,” she would say—I told her that I wanted to become an artist like her. After all, I knew my mother; I didn’t know him.

Errol Morris_RESUBMIT 0623.indd 23 6/24/11 1:03 PM

Preface xxiv

ILLUSTRATION #3 DETAIL OF SKULL DRAWING

For years after my father died, his doctor’s o!ce was still part of the house— downstairs, in what later became the living room. There were hundreds of medical books with grotesque pictures of various diseases and deformities. There was his chair, his pipe, his tobacco jar. But he himself was absent. My mother, on the other hand, was very much present. She was an exceptional musician, a graduate of Juil-liard, and an extraordinary sight-reader. I was in my twenties before I realized that not every mother plays Schumann’s Carnaval or Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy.2

Hardy would often use my father as a warning when I misbehaved. “Your father would never have tolerated this behavior,” she would tell me. But my father was dead, so the issue of whether he would or would not have tolerated my behavior seemed remote, at best academic. At some point, I learned from Hardy that my father often fought with my brother and that my father called me “the little professor.”

And then there were the photographs of my father. Who was this man in the pho-tographs? On one hand, the photographs were familiar to me. I grew up with them around the house. They showed my father and mother together while he was in the service; my father and mother with Hardy; my brother and my father. I’m not exactly sure what I thought about them growing up, but I was surprised when, years later, someone observed that my father had a rather severe, forbidding expression.

In a sense, the photographs both gave me my father and took him away. Pho-tographs put his image in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his absence. He existed for me primarily in photographs accompanied by sketchy family stories. There was ample evidence that he had once been in the house with us, but

Errol Morris_RESUBMIT 0623.indd 24 6/24/11 1:03 PM

Preface xxv

nevertheless, he was inherently unknowable to me. Who was he? I have no idea. I have the photographs, but I can only imagine who he actually was.

There is a further complication. Just after my father’s death, my eyes were operated on. I had strabismus, a condition in which one of the eyes is misaligned. I was wall-eyed, like Jean-Paul Sartre. With strabismus there is nothing functionally wrong with the eye, just with its alignment. Once the eye has been put back into the correct posi-tion, the brain can then integrate the output of the two eyes into a single stereoscopic image; that is, it can produce normal vision. In order to promote the development of the “lazy eye,” a patch is placed over the good eye. This treatment doesn’t always work, and I reduced whatever chances I had for normal vision, by repeatedly tearing the patch o". My mother bought me a Philco television as a reward for wearing the eye patch. I dutifully watched Winky-Dink and You, The Howdy Doody Show, and Captain Video, but I still refused to wear the patch. It was my fault, and it left me without nor-mal stereoscopic vision (stereopsis) and limited vision in my left eye.

ILLUSTRATION #4 WINKY!DINK AND YOU

Ironically, the eye surgeon was Ben Esterman, the family ophthalmologist, who became my stepfather twenty years later. When I was older, my mother told me how she had come to visit me in the hospital shortly after my operation. Both my eyes were wrapped in gauze like something out of a film noir story, except I was a small child. My future stepfather said to my mother, “Don’t say anything. Don’t let him know you’re here, because if he can’t see you it will be too upsetting.” My wife Julia calls it a new version of the Oedipus story: my future stepfather blinds me and then marries my mother. But it all ended happily. My mother married Ben when I was in my early twenties. They were married close to thirty years, and without both of them, I could never have become a writer and filmmaker.

If I share anything with Oedipus, it is asking one too many questions. Why do I see things the way I do? I suppose it must have something to do with my skepticism about vision. Did this influence the way I look at still photographs or my skeptical approach to documentary filmmaking? I wish I could pin it down more precisely. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here.

Errol Morris_RESUBMIT 0623.indd 25 6/24/11 1:03 PM