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Transparent Pictures. Kendall Walton
The veracity of a photograph over a painting held good until the advent of Photoshop and its kind. Now one cannot necessarily believe what one sees in an image. The development of CGI in the cinema has further blurred the believable. Who has not marvelled at the impossible sight of David Attenborough Walking With Dinosaurs, or the gigantic beasts in Jurassic Park? But that is the point; they are unbelievable, the proof of seeing is not proof of existence any more than absence of proof is proof of absence.
Before computer image manipulation it was painters who had the freedom to move rivers, invent imaginary cities and produce images of improbably stormy seas, but now photographers have the same freedom. If they have the skill and imagination they too can invent the fantastic, with the added benefit of making it look real.
All pictures are a simulacrum, a false 2D representation of a 3D actuality; a frozen moment in a moving tableau, an image of something that is no longer the same and may never have existed.
Yes, photographs are more believable than paintings but how much trust should we put in them?
In his introduction to his book, The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski writes that “..he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than reality itself.”
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