Even when we all share an experience, you will find that each person will tell their story in a different way, and will remember quite different details. How much more will people’s perspectives differ, then, when they describe events from the distant past, or events that were highly complex and in which the people involved had competing interests? People experience and understand events in many ways: does this mean that there can be more than one “truth”? We will come back to this question. 

We will look at the various ways in which several very different artists have shown the same event. In the process we will consider how their points of view differ, but also how their styles differ. There are many questions to explore: For example, does a more realistic style mean it is more “truthful”? Can one artist depict a certain action as heroic and courageous, while another depicts the same action as cruel and inhuman? What makes an image “true” or “false”?