The Deceptive Camera
About Angela
Born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Angela Barker moved to Miami, Florida in 2005 to attend film school at the University of Miami. In two short years, she
Cameras are liars. By artfully composing my frame, I can make you believe that a man is in a room that he has actually never set foot in. I can make you believe that a woman is speaking to her lover when she is actually addressing the director behind the camera. We take photographs to preserve memories, but are they true? What is your girlfriend really thinking behind that smile in that Polaroid? Did the fact that she left you two weeks later make that photo now seem less true? Cameras are powerful things. They show people things that words could never say and things that most people don’t even bother to notice. We can use them to forge truth from lies, or make lies of truth. I respect this power, am in awe of it, and seek innovative ways of exploring it. It’s the reason I came to be a cinematographer.
For as long as I can remember the people around me have always fascinated me. Over the years I have made a hobby of meeting new people and figuring them out. I also loved taking and collecting photographs of the people in my life. This human fascination led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in psychology. Psychologists are, in essence, people who are
trained to show the patients their problems in a particular light that guides them through self-discovery and thus (hopefully), self-improvement. So, the psychologist, like the cinematographer, uses lies to reveal truth. I even spent some time counseling domestic abusers…talk about people who are lying to themselves and to everyone else! However, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in an office. So I decided to continue pursuing my passion for the truth, but this time I would do so in a world with no limitations.
“The Prestige” has recently become one of my favorite Hollywood films because of its thorough explanation of the difference between what we know and what we think we know. At one point in the film, the magician, Alfred Borden, says of performing magic: “The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way
through. But if you can fool them even for a second then you can make them wonder. Then you got to say something very special.” I feel that this is the perfect description of what we do as filmmakers. Perhaps it is quite a somber view of the world but my interest lies more in the magic of fooling the audience. They want to be fooled. That is why they come. The writer and the director may have thought of the trick and the engineers may have built it but the cinematographer is the one actually doing the deceiving. But it is for a good cause. The cinematographer uses lies to show us the truth that the world is a beautiful place…and the audience is convinced they are being lied to but they believe it anyway. And so hopes and dreams are spread through the lies of a camera. That is why being a cinematographer is the greatest job in the world.
angeLA barker
