After reading Errol Morris’ article, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, I was very intrigued by the fact that Morris seemed to be utterly convinced that Fenton had not staged the second photograph even though that was the conclusion several modern authors had come to.  He seemed to have thought that these authors had come to that conclusion by coming up with conjectures about Fenton’s behavior rather than analyzing the photographs themselves.  It was quite interesting how those authors, (Keller, Harwood-Booth, and Sontag) were convinced the photograph with the cannonballs in the road was the second (and staged) photograph when they had not analyzed the photo particularly closely.

In the end, Morris conceeded that they were right albeit for the wrong reasons.  They were convinced Fenton moved the cannonballs onto the road to make a more dramatic photo but did no forensic examinations of the photographs to back up their argument.  They seemed to prove Morris’ claim that people tend to jump to the conspiricy answer when there is little evidence for or against it.  I thought the important point of the article was that you need to do research and collect evidence supporting your conlcusion before you declare something to be a conspiricy based solely on the conjectured behavior of the people involved.