Documentary filmmaker and all-around dope human being Errol Morris has a semi-regular column for the New York Times, in which he discusses “the influences and use of photography.” One of the uses of photography is to provide subject matter for essays I don’t read, for possibly the same reason that I am not interested in sculptures about songs. Yesterday, though, he got me. Morris describes a man who came under the impression that rubbing lemon juice on your face makes it invisible to cameras. Armed with this knowledge, he robbed two banks in Pittsburgh, his eyes and skin burning, only to be identified from security footage and apprehended. The man, Morris opines, was the victim of a kind of anosognosia—in this case the failure, caused by stupidity, to recognize one’s own stupidity.
A blog by Dan Brooks