Photographic Reality, Realism and the Truth

The word photography comes from two Greek words meaning “light” and “drawing” and has four founding Fathers;  Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) who took the first photograph c. 1827. However, his process needed eight hours of exposure, and the picture was fuzzy. Then in 1837 Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) created a sharp but one-use image in a few minutes. In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) presented negative film and prints and finally George Eastman (1854–1932) who invented flexible film and mass produced an inexpensive camera in 1888. The initial goal of the first three  was to produce a way to copy maps, charts and drawings as the copy machine was a century + in the future. Eastman saw the future and rewrote it not based upon the past.

The realistic image produced by the early processes set the stage for photography is not art argument  because it was too easy and made by a machine and it was reality, it was real or so the opponents would argue.  In considering this age old argument surrounding photography there are three questions to ponder:

Does It matter what reality is or is not behind a Photo?

Does Sharpness matter?

Is the photograph the subject, or is the subject the photograph?

I think these questions have been at the center of the photographic zeitgeist since 1839, when Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre announced to the world that he had invented the daguerreotype process. Thus photography as a medium to capture a ''truthful likeness" was born. The historic San Francisco Group f.64 argued these questions when Ansel Adams was a young photographer.

Those very first images compared to today's high resolution standards were not very "real." And they were not very sharp, which in my mind's eye affects to an extent the reality quotient. But that brings us to the question of what is reality and how sharp is sharp? I also think somewhere along the way, like Dorothy going to Oz, we will find the answer to the subject vs. the photograph question.

Photographers, unlike other artists, work backwards. Our medium requires us to start with the real -the real still life, the real landscape, the real figure, the real portrait, etc. The very physics of our medium captures as realistic a representation of the subject as a given camera system can achieve on the first take. We know, or we should know that the image is not real; it is surreal! The court system knows this. As a crime scene photographer, the very first question the state asks before I submit photos as evidence is "Officer Young, are these the photographs you took at the scene, or of the victim, etc." Answer, "Yes." "Do these photographs represent an accurate representation of the scene at the time the images were taken?" Answer, "Yes." They do not use terms as real or reality. That is because a photograph is not real. It is surreal. It is a two dimensional representation of a captured four dimensional object. We use our eyes -the best camera system ever created. Our God-given camera allows us to see in real time, four dimensions, with a dynamic range which far exceeds anything the camera manufacturers have to offer, with a Depth of Field that far exceeds our best lenses. As photographers, we filter that image through our mind's eye using our emotions, logic and learned experiences. We then make the real into the surreal by the placement of the camera to our eye or our eye to the camera and compress the four dimensions into two via the camera. We further make the real into the surreal with in-camera cropping, selective focus, depth of focus, the play of studio lighting and post processing magic via the digital or wet dark room. The end result is a two dimensional work product, whether it is a print or shown on screen. A painter, sketch artist or water colorist starts with no-thing and ends up with something. His is an additive art process.

A relief sculptor takes the whole stone and removes the negative space, creating the final object out of the remaining positive space. That is a subtractive art process. A constructive sculptor starts with no-thing and builds until he has his object of art. His is an additive art process.

It is this, the surface difference between the "classic" art mediums and the surface "realism" of photography that has often held the art community at odds with accepting photography for decades. It is this surface realism which often prevents photographers from fully exploring the photographic imaging universe.  In the grab-the-shot "Point and Shoot" we capture the "realism" in the viewfinder, four dimensions into two. It is not real; it is still relatively real. If we selectively crop the "real" image from our grabbed Point and Shoot image so that the viewer is restricted to a small segment of the original "real" object, then a new realism is offered the viewer.

If we take multiple "real" objects and combine them into a single image via Photoshop or Jerry

Uelsmann (http://www.uelsmann.net/) or Dan Burkholder (www.danburkholder.com/) wet techniques, then our art becomes additive and subtractive but it all begins with "real" objects -"real" objects we cut, crop and manipulate into a single image.

So "Does it matter what reality is or is not behind a photo? In my opinion the answer is both yes

and no. Yes. in the beginning, "real" is where we start. We start with a real subject, then use our

God-given camera (our eyes and mind's eye to see), then move to our man-given camera. We end up rendering the subject at whatever point of "reality" the image maker wishes, i.e. as "real" as the camera can capture or as surreal as the image maker wants to go in the post processing phase.

There is freedom in the "reality" of the relative reality of our medium of photographic imaging. It

is the freedom to be a subtractive artist, an additive artist or both.

If our photographic universe is bound by this relative reality, then does sharpness really matter? The answer to this in my opinion is again both yes and no. In the photographic equipment race, we strive for the sharpest lenses, the most accurate color engines and the highest resolution sensors. We want our chosen purchase to render the tack sharp images we see in the trade magazines, right? Yet we see advertised cheap selective focus lenses which are little more than a flexible radiator hose with a plastic lens stuck to the front. The advertisers say if you are going to be a hip artsy photographer you must use one of these to make blurry out-of-focus, poorly contrasting images with your mega bucks digital camera. Maybe I am a simpleton but to me, sticking a $100 piece of plastic on my 12 mega pixel multi $1,000 camera body just seems strange. I think the reason the answer is again a yes and no answer lies in the reality of the intended purpose of the photograph. For example, if I am making a classic portrait of a woman, I do not want the photograph to be tack sharp; I do not want her portrait to look like it should be in a dermatologist textbook. I am going to want a Little softness in the image. lf the photograph is a portrait of a tough-as-nails hard rock miner and I want to convey the hardness of the job and the toughness it requires, then I want to create a sharp-as-nails image of my subject so that the photograph tells the viewer what I want it to say. If the photograph is of a subject who has seen a degree of hardness and sorrow in her life, then perhaps a balance somewhere between the tack sharpness of the mega lenses and the fuzzy-buddy lenses is called for.

Again, the answer is a relative one. The answer lies in what I as the photographer want my final two dimensional rendering of the once real (four dimensional) subject to say to the viewer. How do I want to convey the real subject? Or what do I, the photographer, feel and or see the real subject to be in the final surreal flat image we call a photograph?

If the aforementioned relativity and the level of required sharpness are based upon the desired final result or statement that the image maker wanted to achieve in his final flat two dimensional

representation of the original subject, then I would say the argument has been made and the final question answered. The answer to that question is, The image or photograph is not the subject, but a surrealist visual entity separate and apart from the real subject.

I trust the reader has come away with the under lying theme that photographic imaging is a medium of "real" freedom. Therefore, we're free to explore the variations of this reality to wherever our mind's eye would take us.

I will leave you with two quotes on the subject from two of our imaging ancestors;

"Photography's greatest gift is its ability to render three dimensional reality in a two dimensional form and that photography's greatest weakness is its ability to render three dimensional reality in two dimensional form". -Rudolf Amheim

"Because of the protean nature of photography and its many uses, critics and non critics have trouble seeing photographs for what they are rather than for what's in them." -William Eggelston

Until Next Time- Safe Imaging Photo Fans.

Namaste,

Michael L Young

www.y2photo.net

y2photo@sbcglobal.net