What should “reality” look like?
In selecting participants for click! photography changes everything, one of the issues I wanted to explore was, “Just how photographic do the images of ‘reality’ need to be?” Many people assume that the quantity and level of detail captured in a photographic image—what some describe as “indexicality,” the point-for-point correspondence between what’s in front of a camera’s lens and what can be seen in an image—is a guarantee of truthfulness. But, are there instances where that’s not the case? Maybe there is too much information in some photographs, and not enough in others. To figure that out, I contacted Jos Stam, a multiple Academy Award winner who’s been instrumental in creating software programs that make special effects in the movies exciting and convincing. In the piece Stam has just written for click!, he explains that while we want and expect photography to be accurate in the ways it renders the world, sometimes—given how our eyes, brains, and cameras work—the most powerfully convincing images turn out not to be non-photographic ones. Jos Stam’s comments are provocative, and raise some interesting, and even bigger questions: What kinds of data, emotions, or sensory experiences can’t be captured or represented in photographic image? And, is that ever a problem?
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This is a really tough question. I am not a photographer or philosopher but i always think about the meaning of reality. In everyday usage, reality means "the state of things as they actually exist". But on a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences and personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual. If so, reality may look like in different ways. In this case, Photography is not only changing what we think “reality” looks like, it also helps us to understand what reality is.
I think that the photograph of the waves really sums it up. When you take an image of a person, they appear just as you would expect, if you get something that feeds the immagination then the image becomes a classic. Nature images are more sensory based because they show us that our perceptions and reality are sometimes different. As Plato implies, the only thing certain in life, is death, our senses are open to confusion!
For me what we see in a picture is often very different to the story our eyes tell us, is it an effect of residual vision or our eyes wider dynamic range ? Certainly provides food for thought Tim
These are just the kinds of questions and issues that we're hoping to raise and explore with click! photography changes everything. The more I've worked on the project, the more I've tried to understand the difference between what we see optically and what happens with, and to, all that incoming visual information. The power of photogaphy doesn't just rest in the images we look at. Photography's impact, and our ongoing fascination with and use of the medium, is the net result of what can be seen in images and what our brains do with that information, how that information gets decoded, used and stored. In the next couple of months, we'll be posting some intersting new stories on click, writtten by leading neurological researchers (including Jeremy Wolfe and Aude Oliva) that will begin to explore some of these issues. So stay tuned...
I agree with Essex and Sussex above - the image is just the start. Its our preceptions of it that make the difference.
i think that a photograph can be a "starting block" for the mind to build upon. An example being a Black and white image, for me, is a wonderfull moment in time captured but presented in a way that you as a viewer then have to build in your own colours (as we don't see in black and white) and also try to imagine what happened before/after the event or indeed what caused the event captured in the image in the first place.
I do agree with the above comments and in these days of digital and photo manipulation the skies the limit way beyond the click. That said there is still lots to be said about the art of the the photographer and getting things right in the camera in the first place sows the seeds for a memorable photograph.
I think if it tells the story in it's organic form (unedited and unchanged) it is considered REAL!
Think about the World Press Photo Awards. Those images have REAL stories behind them.
It's not about how much of information the image story has, it's about "The simplicity of understanding the story"
When I studied photography we were asked to interpret several WPPA photos and caption them. We then compared those captions to the actual photographers' stories...
Needless to say, the photographer had a different idea as to what he/she was trying to convey.
As far as problems go. I think the more controversial the reality is, the more offensive or emotionally persuasive (manipulative) the interpretation will be.
I think the obvious 'fabricated' reality is the fact that most images are manipulated in software.
Sometimes, it does more harm than good. Sometimes a good, real, story... becomes nothing more than a picture - with no interpretive reference!
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