Exercise: Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism

By Kendall L Walton.



Photography and the cinema ... satisfy once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism..  The photographic image is the object itself .... Andre Bazin.

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish - Edward Steichen.


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Photography is extraordinarily realistic in a way or to an extent beyond the reach of drawings,
paintings and handmade pictures, and because of this they can be used in a court as evidence.
If you were the jury you wouldn't even consider a drawing to be true, especially in such an important
situation.  Also similarly if you were being shown two pictures of a man and a woman together, if it was a drawing you would straight away dismiss it.  By contrast if you had a photograph it would be instantly believable.  With nudity pictures I feel you would be less embarrassed when viewing a painting.

Photographs are very realistic but they too can be altered in photoshop etc .. adding, changing and adjusting colours, in this way photographs can be influenced by the photographer.  Because of this there could be questions over the realism of a photograph in a way there hasn't been any doubt before.

Paintings are striving to be photographs with all their mundane details that are caught by the camera making the scene real.  Paintings can be very real and I have seen some that I have had to study to make sure they really are paintings - they are so good.  Thats as real as it gets. I didn't question then the portrait or who it was of, whether the likeness was good. It was believable.

A blurred or out of focus picture doesn't for me make a picture unreal, its not so clear to see but you know the picture still remains true.

Bazin claims that the photographic image is identical with the object photographed.

You would never mistake that the photograph was the actual object - I cant think of anytime where you would be fooled so.

Bazin also says .. no matter how fuzzy, distorted or discoloured, with no documentary value the image may be, it shares by virtue of the very process of it becoming the being of the model of which it is the reproduction.

A photograph is always a photograph of something that actually exists - paintings needn't picture actual things.  A photographic portrait is realistic - a supremely realistic medium.  I agree with this a photographic portrait is exacting and totally believable there is no doubt in my mind.

Sometimes we learn nothing from the photographs that we view, but we can see our dearly departed relatives, our loved ones.   I have a lovely old wedding photo of my grandparents and great grand parents.  My grandmother is a child and I accept it is her and ask no questions, I ask no more from the photo than that of enjoyment.

Paintings are not transparent - when you see a painted portrait its only a representation. With regard to the photo of the Loch Ness monster its true you may be convinced if you saw a photograph that purports to be the monster.  However if you were then informed it was an error and the monster was a model you would straight away accept it.  Some photographs can be deceiving just in the way they are presented to us as with the Hitler photos, they showed or could have showed an over enthusiastic crowd giving a misleading image of how things really were. Images can be used in an manipulative way.

I didn't realise until I read this article that I do have every faith that a photograph is true, whatever it is of. I do personally not like photos that have been over photoshopped - it defeats the point I suppose.  Some pictures you do question, especially in magazines and I would think that because of photoshop there may be even problems with photos of evidence.  Paintings do not have such alterations.