This was published 8 years ago
Call a taxi for Serena Williams haters, because the camera told half the story
By Andrew Hornery
Those old adages that "a picture is worth a thousand words" and "the camera never lies" remain largely true to this day, but sometimes it's the viewer who needs to have their eyes checked, especially those who chimed in on the Serena Williams chorus of discontent in recent days.
The tut-tutting and eye-rolling filled the airwaves from breakfast television to talkback radio after Williams was "caught" taking a taxi to complete her own five-kilometre charity run in Florida, having stopped at the two-kilometre mark to climb into a cab and be driven to the finish line.
Serena Williams should be praised for turning up to her fun run even though she is injured.
Not such a good look for the world's No.1 tennis star, especially when she was photographed climbing into the taxi in her running gear and coinciding with her being named Sports Illustrated's Sportsperson of the Year.
After a day or so of general condemnation, the nay-sayers suddenly fell silent as word started to spread that the reason Williams took the taxi was due to tennis injuries she sustained to her knee and elbow that resulted in her withdrawing from the playing circuit in October.
Indeed Williams should probably be commended for remaining so committed to her charity run that she actually turned and had a go at running the event, acutely aware that her presence would help generate the interest required to help raise money for the charitable causes it supports.
Clearly, it would appear that while the photos of Williams seem damning, not all was as it seemed. In this case, while the camera may not have lied, it wasn't telling the whole truth either.
Not that Williams is alone on that score, with the advent of social media sites such as Instagram giving everyone a platform to share their lives – one perfect frame at a time. But what are we to make of the results? Indeed some social media feeds are nothing more than exercises in narcissism, their perfection bordering on the ridiculous with everything from what one had for breakfast in the form of styled fruit salads to selfies so artfully orchestrated the subject is barely recognisable.
But just as Instagram feeds can bend the truth, there have been celebrities guilty of manipulating images to deliberately create an impression that does not represent reality.
And it's been happening long before such technical wizardry as Photoshopping and smartphones, with far less technology required to create a shot that can have a defining and lasting impact in popular culture.
This was the case in the mid 1970s when Bob Dylan came face to face with Rubin Carter, a prolific boxer imprisoned for an alleged triple-homicide who had inspired Dylan's protest song Hurricane.
Dylan went to visit Carter in prison with a photographer to help drum up public support for the boxer. However, when he got there the musician was disappointed that there were no bars to separate Carter and himself, ruining his plans for a dramatic photo. Dylan and Carter later posed in a staged shot, standing either side of a security grille they pulled down from above in the middle of a hallway – not that any of THAT was disclosed in the caption, lest it detract from the drama the photo conveyed.
Carter spent 19 years in jail but was released when a judge ruled he had not received a fair trial, a decision many Americans believe was due to the groundswell of support he had received, kicked along from the celebrity backing he had received from the likes of Dylan.
But there was no misconstruing the deeply disturbing images published in 2013 of the "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson sitting outside a London restaurant as her former husband Charles Saatchi wrapped his hand around her neck midway through what appeared to be a very public throttling.
Saatchi would later claim in court that he was "cleaning" his former wife's nose of cocaine, claims which Lawson vehemently denied in the witness stand.
While the consequences of the Lawson photos can in no way compare to those of Williams jumping into a taxi, both attest to the potency of a photograph, the trick is understanding the actual context the photo was taken in, which was clearly different for both Nigella and Serena.