Reality and Imagination

[Comments have been added. I also sincerely apologize: I thought I had added the Featured Comments to Monday's three posts, but I messed up somehow. They're posted now.]

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When I was a schoolteacher, years ago, a young girl was telling me a story once in the art faculty office (students were allowed to come and go as they wished). She introduced the story as something that had happened to her. Halfway through the story, she reached a detail that made it clear that everything she was relating couldn't have happened to her; but rather than get flustered, she just said, "Wait, this happened to my mom, not me," and went on telling the story. Why not? All that the inconvenient shift of perspective did was put the witness at one more remove. No biggie.

One of the most interesting articles I've read recently (I read a lot of articles—too many for sanity, probably) is "You Are Not Who You Think You Are" by David Brooks, in The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2021. Since you may not have access, a few key takeaways:

"'It turns out, reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brain,' Nadine Dijkstra writes in Nautilus, 'which means that the separation between our inner world and the outside world is not as clear as we might like to think.'"

"We grew up believing that 'imagining' and 'seeing' describe different mental faculties. But as we learn more about what’s going on in the mind, these concepts get really blurry really fast."

"Observation feels like a transparent process. You open your eyes and take stuff in. In fact, much or most of seeing is making mental predictions about what you expect to see, based on experience, and then using sensory input to check and adjust your predictions. Thus, your memory profoundly influences what you see."

It was interesting to me to notice, during the digital transition, how blithely most people dismissed the ease with which we could fake visual elements of digital pictures. Their standard argument was to point out that photographs had always been manipulated and that therefore nothing had changed. A specious argument; it whitewashed the fact that images had become orders of magnitude easier to manipulate, and that the manipulations had become greatly more difficult to detect. Even done with great skill and great care, darkroom manipulations still in most cases left telltale signs, if you knew what to look for. That's not to claim that optical/chemical photography functioned perfectly as evidence. Far from it. And it doesn't make a value judgement as to which of the two is "better" or "best," which is what people defending digital seemed most anxious about back then (for a short period during the transition, optical/chemical photography retained greater prestige). There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to divergent techniques.

But they are quite different, and we downplayed that, almost willfully. We didn't want to believe there was any difference except that things had gotten easier/better. If it were up to me, though—as I said many times back in the early days of digital, to deaf ears—I would never have transferred the word "photography" to digital imaging. They're enough different that they each deserve their own name. Calling digital imaging "photography" reminds me of George Foreman, who named each of his five sons "George"! But then, that's the way language works too—movies are still "films" and the act of making them is still "filming." Another example you kinda have to love is that we still say we "dial" the phone, but young people presented with a dial phone, cold, sometimes can't figure out how it operates!

My father invited me out to lunch once and asked me to settle a dispute. He claimed that a photofinisher had scratched a negative of his, and he wanted compensation. I was expected to support his case. At issue was what appeared to be telephone lines in the corner of a negative of a landscape. He claimed they had to be scratches because there had been no lines (or wires, or cables, or whatever they were) there in the scene—he had been there, and therefore, he knew—he was a primary witness and therefore had the last word on the subject. I was, at the time, already a bonafide expert in darkroom technique, enough that I knew what I knew and knew what I didn't know. I examined the negative and confirmed that the lines were imaged in the film, and weren't scratches. They had been there in the scene.

Not good enough. He still insisted that he was there, and he knew there were no telephone lines there, "as surely as I know you are sitting here at this table." By testifying otherwise, I joined the ranks of the enemy, so I had to come under assault too, which quickly shifted, as usual, to ad hominem—so for the second half of that lunch I had to withstand a continuous stream of withering fire about my defective education, the deficiency of my supposed expertise, the idiocy of anyone who would take my word for anything, and the rest of the catalogue of my manifold faults, which he kept at the ready for all situations in which I expressed any opinion independent of his own. (The underlying problem was that for him, it was axiomatic that he was always right, no matter what. It never made the slightest bit of difference how wrong he might be.) Nowadays, of course, it would be less than trivial to remove the telephone lines in post and bring the picture into concordance with my father's report of reality—no compensation from the poor put-upon photofinisher required. (No photofinisher required period, come to that.)

My point is just that optical/chemical photography tended to shade more towards giving impartial evidence of the visual world, although it did so imperfectly, and digital imaging more readily allows us to show the way we and our brains wish reality to be, although that doesn't mean it can't render an accurate report of the lens image. From the first, photography insisted, rebelliously, that we should see the visual world with traces of the same chaos and confusion as our eyes see it before our brains get a hold of it. Most humans, apparently, always resented that about it. We like digital+Photoshop better.

Anyway, go check out that article, if you have access to the World's Best Photography Magazine. I've always been fascinated by how our brains see, and the degrees of separation between the witness and me.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Photography, The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang. This is a book that can't exist—it's too much work to put it together, like several others I know of (I'm looking at you, Q.T. Luong). Amazingly, it exists anyway. A brightly-lit shop window for the attractions of photography—a whirlwind tour of people, cameras, and pictures. The author still has time to be an accomplished travel photographer, although I don't know how.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a referral link; you help TOP when you use it as a gateway to B&H Photo.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

s.wolters: "'One eye sees, the other feels' —Paul Klee

"After reading this article yesterday I watched a documentary about Koos Breukel, a Dutch photographer well known for his beautiful portraits. Het oog dat voelt (the eye that feels) is its title, with thanks to Klee’s quote above. In 1992 Breukel was involved in a terrible car accident that nearly cost him his life. His right eye was damaged severely, fortunately it could be operated. But this made him aware that when photographing he used both eyes in a different way. Left looking through the viewfinder for the technical part, right for overviewing the total situation. Breukel: 'It’s all about concentration and at the same time knowing very well what you’re doing. That’s the main disadvantage with digital. You tend to keep on clicking while there is no concentration at all. In the past you saw the same with 35mm cameras equipped with motordrives. With five frames per second many photographers thought that at least one of them should be okay. And then they found out that none of the frames was usable, because they had not looked well enough, but just had pushed the button.'

"Here is Koos Breukel’s work."

John Camp: "If you'll allow me a comment that is a bit longer.

"Years go, I was playing golf with two friends I'll call Bob and Sue, not their real names. One slight downhill fairway ran along a street that was on the other side of a chain-link fence. Sue, not a great golfer, sliced her tee-shot over the fence into the street. At about that moment, a car came around a corner and the driver, for some reason, stopped the car, got out, and (it appeared to me) looked at his front tire, then got back in his car and drove away. But Bob said, 'That guy picked up your golf ball and drove away!' And Sue turned to me and said, 'Did you see that? That guy picked up my ball and drove away.' I said, 'No he didn't. Your ball is rolling down the street.' I pointed at the ball rolling down the street. Neither one looked. They just repeated to themselves, as though they witnessed a miracle, that the guy had picked up her ball and had driven away. But you could actually see the ball in the gutter of the street, slowly rolling downhill. As we walked down the fairway pulling our golf carts, they kept talking about the incident. I had watched the ball from the time she hit it, to the time it landed, to the point where it stopped rolling down the little hill. When we were directly across from the ball, I pointed it out again, but they said that couldn't be her ball, because the guy...etc. I gave up, and started adding details to the incident—that the guy had given us the finger before getting in the car. That the ball may have hit the car and we were lucky to have gotten away with it without a confrontation, and so on. Those details have now become part of the story, which I revive every time I see them. 'You remember the time we were playing golf and the guy gave us the finger...' and so on. They remember it all, including the added details.

"On another occasion, I was having a casual newsroom conversation with a group of other reporters, and I said I kind of wished my family could afford to live on a lake, because I thought kids who lived on lakes early learned all kinds of interesting responsibilities about taking care of themselves—being careful around water, learning to swim, maybe messing with outboards, etc. A friend of mine who hadn't been part of the conversation later told me that one of the participants had told him that I said I wished my kids had grown up on a lake so they could be around rich people.

"Reality is a construct. That's why global warming is either real or not, for you, depending on your political views."

Mike replies: The reason you observed more closely is perhaps that you were (or had been) a reporter, and the objective of reporters is to resist the allure of the fanciful story and be more open to the likely truth. Like observational skills as photographers, that is a skill that can be practiced and nurtured. Something similar is true of editors, who must hone the skill of "evaluating competing claims"—a skill some ordinary Americans of today grievously lack.

David Dyer-Bennet: "The mutability of memory is a hard thing to come to terms with, because once that's suspect everything about my history is suspect."

Peter Croft: "Yes, I've been thinking recently about the ads for software that can 'replace the skies' at the click of a button, or amp up the contrast and colour, or smooth the skin and remove blemishes and so on. The examples they show are distortions of reality. This is not photography. If the sky has been replaced in your picture, then it's not a real photo. If the skin is smoother than real life, then it's not a true photo. I don't mind using a tone curve to lighten shadows or restrain highlights, and I sometimes increase saturation, but that's generally as far as I want to go. Except I'll smooth the skin for my female friend."

John Shriver: "One of my great aunts married Harry Grogin, originator of the faked news photograph."

Mike replies: Excellent example of "darkroom manipulations still in most cases left telltale signs." One glance at that top photo and I know something's off. But sometimes I find myself getting taken in at first glance by what I later figure out is probably pretty extreme digital manipulation.

Ken Owen: "Re pesky telephone lines: did no one revisit that troublesome location to settle the argument?"

Mike replies: The photo was taken on one of my father's (many) trips to his beloved France—from the top of a ski hill off-season, if my visual memory is serving me well here—and at the time of our lunch he was back in D.C. where he lived at the time.

As a writer, this sort of thing is bothersome: a fact which could be checked, except that the cost in both time and money would be completely unreasonable. For another project, I recently wrote about a series of Colonial headstones I discovered on a Maine hilltop many years ago, which together told a story. I'm pretty sure I could find that place again, and I'm pretty sure revisiting the headstones would revise my memory significantly, certainly in the exactitude of names and dates. But there's just no way I can undertake the project of fact-checking it—far too time-consuming and expensive for what I'd get in return. Getting it right, though, would be the difference between reporting and storytelling.

Anyway, what's to say the scene would be the same when one got back to check? A former girlfriend was a photographer for The Washington Post. She also did graphics for local television news. She was assigned to photograph the last one-penny parking meters in D.C.—there were five of them, in a specific known location. But she procrastinated, and when we got there, the parking meters were gone! Cut off at pavement level, as if with a Sawzall. So we had to research the yard where old traffic lights and signs were taken as junk, and search the yard to find the meters. This we did. Then we drove one of them back to the site where it had lately been. What her picture didn't show was me, lying supine on the sidewalk, holding the parking meter vertical on my stomach so she could take her pictures of it! She did not tell her editors; I've always wondered if a scrupulous editor would have allowed or disallowed that photo as news, if he or she had known the circumstances. As it was it was probably okay, because it was going to be one of those illustrations you see over the shoulder of the anchorperson while he or she is presenting the story on TV.

Dillan: "Today's most significant event: I learned that George Foreman named all five of his sons 'George.' This is something that I will never forget."

Joseph Kashi: "Hi, Mike. I have to agree with you. Not everything has to be 'art'; sometimes we need real evidence that we can trust and verify, as happened with you and your father. Photography is important as potentially more detailed and accurate evidence, if we can show that the original image file has not been manipulated inappropriately. There are serious forensic efforts underway for some years now to provide that level of analysis, but the ease of changing metadata(!) complicates that. I and other trial attorneys have run into situations where an evidentially important digital image has been altered, luckily so far by ham-handed amateurs, but there's always tomorrow. It's been a big enough problem that I've presented over the past several years at several continuing education legal sessions to other attorneys and judges about how to spot some of the more obvious faking (metadata erasure, inconsistent lighting, weird perspectives, etc.). Wet-process photos were, as you note, hard to fake, but it's been done, occasionally well. Digital photography does have the potential to be similarly hard to fake with fakes detectable, but I'm not sure that the technology's quite there. Ultimately, we need live witnesses to testify that the photo accurately depicts the scene. In the case of you and your father, you could have gone to the scene and simply taken a look and a later photo."

Kenneth Tanaka: "So, in brief, chemical photography = ink, digital photography = pencil? Hmm. Well, yes, I see the concept."

Iwert: "In reply to Kenneth Tanaka, more like watercolour (unforgiving) and oil paint (one adds layers and can alter a lot). Pencil isn't to be used with an eraser, that is a common misconception. Only when doing technical drawings, but even there the art is to not use the eraser (it is time loss, and I'm a lazy person). Once you use an eraser you allow for mistakes. leave it out and one makes fewer mistakes. Being a teacher in hand drawing at an architecture school I constantly see this simple reality confirmed. This goes for photography as well, and once it is in your mind it works as good for digital as for analog. It is more in the mind ('I can alter/adjust later'), than in the technique."

Frank Hamsher: "Just saw a documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time (Jigsaw Productions). It was a two-part documentary. The first episode talks about the photo that became the cover of Crosby, Stills and Nash's first album. It was the photo that showed the three gentlemen sitting on the porch of this abandoned house. When the photographer developed the negative they all noticed that the picture showed the three sitting in the wrong order (Nash, Stills, Crosby). They went back the next day to shoot another picture with them all sitting in the right order. When they got there the house had been bulldozed. The original picture was used."

Comments

[KeithB]

"Halfway through the story, she reached a detail that made it clear that everything she was relating couldn't have happened to her; but rather than get flustered, she just said, "Wait, this happened to my mom, not me," and went on telling the story. "

And an urban legend is born.

[Omer]

I swear the McDonald's around the corner was better 5yrs. ago. Huh.

[Jim Fulwider]

It's no wonder you prefer to see things the old fashioned way. Your father put you on the defensive from the beginning.

[Jamie Pillers]

I'd argue that black and white photography is a dramatic departure from reality, or at least the 'reality' recorded by our eye/brain systems. I've always thought that b&w photography is a serious manipulation of what was actually in the scene, often adding drama that wouldn't appear otherwise.

[Ray Hudson]

Well, the whole 'perception is not (necessarily) reality' has been around in my awareness since the 60s and LSD, Vendantic thought, etc. al. Way many books, articles, etc. - tho not so much actual research and research papers. That's a bit new. But the real reason I wrote, digital not photography? Light thru lens, captured on light sensitive coated paper, metal, glass, film, whatever, and then light sensitive pixel?? Why not? Pls refer me to whatever you wrote at the time and I'll start there. Or, add current thinking.
Just asking....

[Thomas Rink]

In this analog vs. digital debate and concerns about image manipulation, I think the elephant in the room is missed: The decision of the photographer what to include in the frame, and when to click the shutter release. This decision depends on what the photographer finds worthy of a picture, and is therefore thoroughly subjective. Of course, he could try to give an objective account on his surroundings by photographing everything he can see. - But most likely, the resulting pictures will not be very interesting to viewers, much like reciting a telephone book. Obviously, the notion of what's of interesting in a picture has to be shared between photographer and viewer for the picture to work.

I could imagine a photographic project which explores all the "uninteresting" subject matter and why most viewers can't make sense of it. Much like an inventory of the "dark spaces" in between the words of our language, where the things for which we don't have words live.

Best, Thomas

[darlene]

Yes, cameras can be copy machines, but where is the art in that? I guess that is expected if your aim is to render reality, but whose reality?

--

"The underlying problem was that for him, it was axiomatic that he was always right, no matter what. It never made the slightest bit of difference how wrong he might be."

I am sorry to hear your relationship with your father went like that at times. Now you know what it is like dating a lot of the men I dated during my life, and they were my age or a few years older. Ever wonder why a lot of independent women never remarry after a divorce? I know not all guys are like that, but from my experience, more are than not, at least in my age group. But hey, you get used to it until you tire of it. Best to you, Mike.

[Albert Smith]

Quoting the great Steven Wright: "Four years ago... No, it was yesterday. Today I... No, that wasn't me..."

[Grant]

At my advanced age, I have decades of experiences that I am able to recall in minute detail. I just have a bit of trouble getting the facts straight.

[Stan B.]

Studies have shown that mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for about half of all wrongful convictions:

https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses

FWIW: I was an analog holdout till 2016, and have no problem accepting that "digital imaging" is just the technological medium in which photography exists today; yes, it's a marked evolutionary, almost revolutionary (where the difference of opinion may lie) process from the century old chemical process, but "a rose by any other name," nonetheless.

I think the challenge of presenting digital B&W in a manner that rivals analog remains. A (very) scant few have been able to present digital B&W in a manner that emulates the subtlety and nuance of B&W analog, but for the majority, it may make more sense to just find a manner that successfully treats it as a markedly different animal that operates within its own grammar. I think someone like Matt Black has found such a lexicon, and it can be viewed in his current book and ongoing essay, American Geography:

https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/politics/american-geography/

[Stan B.]

Meant to add that Black's approach seems to embrace digital's tendency to compress midtones, lending at least a superficial similarity to Roy DeCarava's approach...

[Richard Parkin]

Jamie Pillars wrote …b&w photography is a serious manipulation of what was actually in the scene… I’ve always thought we easily accept b&w because that’s what we see in low light levels. Colour photography is in some ways more problematic since it tends to show what is there (to the camera) rather than what our brains have modified what our eyes have registered.

I’m not sure that either is more “natural”.

[Graeme Scott]

Ahh, the nurturing environment of the family.

'From the first, photography insisted, rebelliously, that we should see the visual world with traces of the same chaos and confusion as our eyes see it before our brains get a hold of it. Most humans, apparently, always resented that about it.'

Brilliant - that's got me thinking.

[Zack S]

Now you got me started.
"New Physics Experiment Indicates There's No Objective Reality
Turns out, reality is at odds with itself." https://interestingengineering.com/new-physics-experiment-indicates-no-objective-reality

[Mike Mundy]

George Foreman. Still not as bad as Mrs. McCave:

https://immortalmuse.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/tuesday-poem-too-many-daves-by-dr-seuss/

[Dave]

Mike,

As Graeme commented, "Ahh, the nurturing environment of the family."

Maybe a response like this would have been handy; "Oh, now I remember. You've never made a mistake in your entire life."

(Or perhaps not. I guess I'm often blunt when I hear someone utter obvious nonsense.)

Of my parents, my mom is the one who is as stubborn as a mule.

Regarding what we see and what we think we see; I'd rather not ever have to witness a crime and testify in court. I would be too unreliable regarding details.

I'm better when looking through the viewfinder, but not by much.

I would have felt guilty about taking the photo of the parking meter being held in place and would probably have told the editor. If she had said, "The meters had already been taken down when I got there.", it would have been at least halfway true.

[Patrick Dodds]

Your dad sounds a bit of a tricky character. Good on you for turning out into the fine man you did.

[Moose]

It has long bothered me that some folks believe that "what the camera saw" is objective, more accurate than, and thus invalidates what I saw.

I am well aware that "what I saw" is not any sort of objective recording, of what may or may not be an objective reality.

But, what I am interested in sharing with others, on paper or screen, is "what I saw".

I see whatever changes I make to "what the camera saw", to make it more similar to "what I saw" to be entirely legitimate.

[Steve C]

The first thing that came to mind was my first class in high school psychology: sensation and perception are very different things. Nothing about perception (which is everything) can be trusted to be "true" in any sense except the personal.

Malcom Gladwell did two or three episodes on this and the fallibility of memory / imagination in his Revisionist History podcast.

One of the techniques that shows how highly personal our construction of memory and meaning is, is the study of "flashbulb" events that leave an impression on everybody — the JFK assassination and 9/11 are classic examples. In the show, he compares his memory of the morning of 9/11 with the recollection of a neighbour he interacted with as it all unfolded. There's almost nothing they agree on.

Maybe more interesting for you as someone interested in documentary, is the case of Brian Williams, who covered a military incursion gone wrong, describing the night the helicopter he was on was shot down. Only he wasn't on the chopper that was shot down, he attended the crash from another bird in the formation. But his recollection of being shot down it was so strong that even after being contradicted by the pilot and not appearing in any flight documentation, he said that while he could accept that he could not have been on the downed chopper, he could not say otherwise and feel as though he was speaking truthfully. When he recalled what he knew from memory: he. was. on. that. aircraft.

It ended his career as a reporter. It's a fascinating must-listen.

https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/free-brian-williams/
https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/a-polite-word-for-liar/

[Daniel M]

Reality face perception that translate into interpretation that is conducted through imagination. Senses are giving the meaning of our thinking.

[Sean]

John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing opened with

“The relations between what we see and what we know is never settled”

According to Anil Seth in Being You it’s all a controlled and controlling illusion. “We live within a controlled hallucination which evolution has designed not for accuracy but for utility.”

[Alan Whiting]

On transferring terms to new technology: we still say a ship "sails" from Shanghai to San Francisco, even if it's under power the whole way. For a while one could say, accurately, that the ship "steamed" that distance. But there are very few steam-powered ships left, and the term has fallen into disuse. Almost all nowadays use diesel engines. But we can't use "diesel" to replace "sail," since "dieseling" is a malfunction of a gasoline engine (continuing to run when power to the spark plugs is cut off).

[Bob G.]

This could be the “Backfire Effect” ?
-via Michael Inman on the “Oatmeal”….
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

[Jim Arthur]

I think the average consumer with a point and shoot resented the time, effort, and expense required to get two or three decent shots out of a roll of 36 from the local drug store. At the end of the process they had a closet full of failure that they couldn’t bring themselves to throw away and the pleasure they got from their few successes was fleeting. I’m not sure the average Joe or Jane was that focused on the unfiltered chaos of their few keepers.

I bought my parents an entry level digital camera (Olympus D-580) in 2004 and suddenly everything changed for my Mom. Photography was easier. Mom’s keeper rate went way up thanks to scene modes and a built in flash and the pictures had the saturated look she preferred. When she had collected a few photos that she liked on the xD card she printed just those photos at the drug store at 4x6 or 5x7 and was thrilled with the process. Photography was suddenly easy and convenient and so the tiny camera was always in her purse.

D-580: 4MP, 3X zoom (35-105 f/3.1-f/5.2), USB auto connect, sliding lens cover/power switch

Your use of the word specious made me think of this old scene from the Simpsons. :-)

[Robert Pillow]

I thought the faint, curved, power lines in the upper left of this image were scratches, too, until I looked at some other transparencies made that day.

https://www.photo.net/photo/18663781

[Ben]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/rittenhouse-trial-judge-disallows-ipad-pinch-to-zoom-read-the-bizarre-transcript/

Here’s something along similar lines from just this week…

[Doug Edwards]

I kept waiting for someone to mention it, but could both you and your father be right? You remember how optical view finders didn’t show the whole frame (except for a few, like the Nikon F3, if I remember correctly). What he saw through through the view finder didn’t show the overhead wires but the print did. I used to be surprised all the time by the difference between what I remembered and what showed up on the print until I figured it out.

[Mike Plews]

Google "Madness" by W Eugene Smith. Back in the day this was called "hand of God" printing.
At one point there was a pretty heated debate about the ethics of burning and dodging in a news photograph among NPPA folk. I'm not sure it ever got resolved.
Not related to image manipulation, my middle grandchild Gus loves turtles. His room is full of stuffed and toy ones. They are all named Frank. Love that kid.

[robert e]

To follow on from Richard Parkins' reply to Jamie Pillers, neither color nor B&W photographs are making things up. Rather, they record different characteristics of "reality" (more accurately: light). And there is light information that both methods record and that both omit. If B&W can "add drama" that wasn't there, it can also reveal drama (or straight up data) that was there but would have been diminished or hidden by color information. The fact that one or the other process happened to record the part we don't value or need doesn't make it inaccurate so much as unhelpful.

This is interesting to think about following a post about flare and glare. Are those things part of "reality" or not?

[David]

Just here to quote Tolstoy:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

[Jeff]

Regarding Frank Hamsher’s comment on the Crosby, Stills and Nash album cover, I believe that the photo was taken before they decided on the name of the group. A few days later, with name decided, they attempted to re-shoot the photo, but were unable as Frank described.

[Chronicpix]

Photography: reality and imagination.

Without any pictures to get in the way…

I think I finally may understand it.

What many people are doing today in terms of photographic images is actually fiction—as in fiction versus nonfiction—as in literature.

I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me before. I understand now and can finally articulate why those kinds of images are not particularly interesting to me.

You’ve all seen these…

Otherworldly skies over otherworldly landscapes over impossible colors and improbable reflections and the inconceivable hallucinatory fragments and, of course, the seemingly requisite coincidences of celestial occurrences—ad infinitum.

I believe that images like that take me to the creator’s computer, and not to the place they visited or the scene they observed.

But that still wasn’t a concise statement of description.

Certainly, photographs are processed for clarity, highlights and balance, etc.— to help bring the viewer to the moment and to the scene itself.

What is happening more and more goes far beyond processing…

Fiction fits those fantasy images best— not that there’s anything wrong with that. Art is art, right? Making things makes us artificers and everything we make is artificial—so, enough said?

For me, life is too short for too much fiction. And very little fiction out there really stands out as exceptional storytelling… such as “Dune”, as one recent example of (science) fiction, along with many other classics in multiple genres.

For the most part I crave nonfiction where I can learn about a place, a person, a People, a process, a history… and I generally find that most fiction can be rather a waste of time.

And time is running out.

For me, what a work of fiction must do is overtake its own mechanism of contrivance and feel absolutely real… A great movie will do that, as will a great book.

I still have never seen a heavily processed/blended/denatured photographic image that can actually achieve this, no matter how beautiful it may be.

Images such as those are examples of digital painting to me—one pixel at a time—and no longer actual photography:

Writing and recording what light has revealed.

In today’s photography, the pixel has become digital paint. That is neither good nor bad— it’s just not photography to me when the light is no longer being graphed.

The computer is here and now pixels of images are being manipulated and mapped instead.

Cartopixography, a word I have just coined for the manipulating and mapping of image pixels, would be a more accurate word for what people are doing on Photoshop and many other post-process image tools of the day.

A single image, irrespective of how it was generated, cannot effectively overcome its own contrivance—in my mind—no matter how “good” or how well it may be executed— if it is fictionally denatured and no longer truthful—when it is no longer a faithful storyteller.

I do believe that a great written work of fiction can be a faithful storyteller—a great movie can be one as well.

I believe that this is why the greatest single images in art are those which are faithful to the truth though they may vary greatly in their method of expression…

A slow walk through the Getty museum can demonstrate this. Or perhaps a walk through a fine art museum near you…

Impressionism versus realism, abstracts, etc.—any of which may bring the viewer to a special place and transport the mind without filling in every blank—such that the viewer may ultimately behold the image and make it their own as reality and imagination work tirelessly together.

In these extensively processed and blended photographic images found in much of today’s “photography“, every single detail is provided by the creator and not a single dot is left for the viewer to connect which makes the image remote and inaccessible to me such that it can never be an image that I could carry in my heart as my own or at least as a shared experience with the author.

An image of art should never cause the viewer’s imagination to rest, stumble or shut down by declaring that it is no longer needed.

An image must humbly feed the viewer’s imagination without telling them what to imagine in order for the image to be at its most powerful state of expression and availability for adoption by the viewer.

In this jaded and modern world, we must gently get back to: “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me”!

With an image crafted as such—blended and manipulated into a near-plastic-banana otherworldly fantasy, in many cases—I am, as a viewer, always on the outside looking in at a projected hallucination—and instead of being taken and transported instantly to a place which I could hope to go to, see, and experience for myself, I’ve been taken—instead and by the hand—to the image-makers digital workstation.

Over the years I’ve started tolerating this less and less wether it be hyper-processed photographs, the commercially available works of fiction in print/download/audio or “movies“ due to their ever-weakening screenplays, plots, and artificial characters.

What’s even worse is that fiction photographs, or “cartopixographs”, even those which are better and more competently executed, no longer look particularly unique or fascinating as they may have, once upon a time, as they are taking on the cookie-cutter sheen of “run-of-the-mill” hallucinatory post-process-based image alteration. The stand-outs are harder to find.

Twitter has been very informative in that I have been seeing loads of these kinds of hallucinatory fantasy “shots” and they are all starting to look the same. At the end of the day, people will pay for an illusion so there will continue to be people that will continue to provide them—and that’s fine.

I can’t.

Ansel Adams was able to do amazing post-processing—but in not a single one of his images is the viewer ever dragged back into his darkroom to smell the bitter chemical baths which reflect the dim red worklight overhead.

Similarly, I believe the post-processing done in digital photography should never drag the viewer back to the photographer’s computer, any more than you would want an exquisite work of cabinetry or furniture to take the beholder back to the master joiner’s shop.

So, that is my story on today’s cartopixography: Image pixel mapping and manipulation.

I had to make up a word just to understand it.

I’m finally getting my head fully wrapped around the nature of some of today’s fiction photography.

For so long, the false flag has been extolling the virtues of either analog or digital when, all this time, it has been, truly, fiction versus nonfiction.

And fiction has a real leg-up with the present available technology.

Conclusion: can there even be one?

Fiction succeeds in literature and in movie screenplays in ways that a single photographic image cannot fully support.

It’s time to distinguish digital painting (cartopixography) from photography.

They are different vehicles.

If we can deal with the difference between sedans, vans, cars, trucks and SUVs, we can deal with this right?

We already deal with photojournalism and not-photojournalism, etc.

But now comes the inevitable question:

Where do we draw the line?!

Or do we just leave this mess alone?

Is it a mess? Isn’t all art, generally speaking, a mess, anyway?

Do we all try to make cartopixography (fiction photography) better?

Is cartopixography merely far from maturity as an art form? Can it become interesting to me someday? Perhaps, just with some moderation?

In-camera “Hallucinogenic” pre-sets might be interesting. No more waiting to run it through Photoshop…

There could be an in-camera (even on your phone!) that puts the core of the Milky Way over every subject you take, or even between the jumping legs of your friends at the beach in colors of your choice!

No pictures provided here in deference and respect to your own imagination, kind reader!

Remember, a picture is worth 1000 words.

We should make every word count.

And the picture must be interesting!

And that’s not always easy—in all the chaos and confusion—to render the full and pleasing (to whom?) union of reality and imagination in a robust 1000-word two-dimensional image.

The new word I made up here today, cartopixography, is non-inflationary—and, if ever adopted, will not increase the price of any dictionary or thesaurus.

Ed, via Twitter.

[David Graham]

When we have traveled to a place, and see the landscape before us, we are within the very three dimensional scene, and we have our natural in-built tools to process what is before us.
Our visual subsystem builds a wide sharp detailed view in our imagination, based on rapidly scanning eye movements. We can easily look past, filter out, and forget the telephone lines, and fully appreciate the beauty of the mountain beyond.
But when presented with a photo taken from that very spot, now we are evaluating the beauty of the photo, and we lack the thee dimensional tools ( including stereo vision and small parallax viewpoint movements ), so the various imperfections intrude much more harshly.
So to show the beauty of the mountain, the photographer must take conscious care to choose a viewpoint that omits the reality of all the other stuff.