As I wrote about earlier in the year, the great filmmaker Errol Morris is wrapping up his latest effort, “Standard Operating Procedure,” a documentary set to be released sometime in 2008.

The movie is about the war in Iraq and whether or not, or how, facts can be obtained from a photograph. Morris said in a recent New York Times blog that he’s spent the last 18 months working with and interviewing U.S. military prison guards who photographed some of the inmate torture at Abu Ghraib.

What kind of information will those images - like the man standing on a box wearing a blue sheet and blue hood with an electrode attached to a finger on each of his hands - impart to people who look at those photos 100 years from now? Will any describe what actually transpired at the time?

“I’ve never liked the idea expressed by Godard that film is truth 24 times a second,” Morris said in a lecture titled “The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist” published on his Web site, www.errolmorris.com. “I have a slightly different version. Film is lies 24 times a second. Almost the same, slightly different.”

The hooded man photo is one example Morris gives in his blog of how false information and a photograph can work in tandem against the 3-dimensional reality of everyday life.

In March 2006, The New York Times and several other respected journalism outfits published articles misidentifying the man under the blue hood. A man imprisoned at Abu Ghraib named Ali Shalal Qaissi, of Amman, Jordan, came forward - with the image on his business card - to reveal he was the hooded man. Turned out he was not the man in the iconic photo. But, according to Morris, a photo of Ali Shala Qaissi holding the famous image out in front of himself, which appeared in the New York Times, somehow
“created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have.”

“Photography presents things and at the same time hides things from our view,” Morris wrote in his blog. “It allows us to not-see at the same time that it allows us to see. But language plus photography provides an express train to error. The photograph should be a constant reminder of how we can make false inferences from pictures. And of how pictures and language can interact to produce falsehood.”

A companion book to the documentary, also called “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris is to be published by Penguin Press on March 13, 2008.