André Bazin, a film critic, said that ‘the photographic image is the object itself’. I don’t think that
Bazin was actually saying that a person looking at a photograph lying on a
table or mounted in a frame would think for one moment that they were looking
at that actual object, but that you
are seeing the object itself through the photograph, not a representation or
depiction of the object. Kendall L.
Walton supports this viewpoint, and talks about photographic ‘transparency’, as
if the photographic image is a window into the past.
In my opinion, which follows the lines of Walton, is that
when you look at a photograph, what you are seeing captured on film or screen
is the same reflection of light as your eye would have been exposed to had you
personally been present at the scene. This is markedly different to even a
hyper-realistic oil painting or drawing, which is still a product of the artist’s
hand, not light. Even so, it is hard to disagree with Edward Steichen’s comment
‘Every photograph is a fake from start to
finish’. Photographic images are usually bigger or smaller than their real
life subject, they are sometimes monochrome, or with more saturated colour, elements
in the frame may be out of focus, at odds with their real-life counterpart. The
photographer has made a personal and artistic choice on what to include in the
frame, and what to exclude.
In essence, photographs don’t fall neatly into either camp,
however unlike hand-made pictures, their origin is in the basis of reality –
real light did strike the subject, then reflect back into the camera’s lens and
was recorded on the film or sensor, even though it is certainly manipulated on
the way there, and also after the fact.
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