When Eadweard Muybridge succeeded in "freezing" rapid motion-to settle a bet as to how horses galloped -his results were met with dismay by artists, photographers, and the general public alike as being "unnatural" and "untrue." This was not an expression of doubt in the veracity of Muybridge's results but, instead, a perception that the results lay outside of common visual experience, and outside of the conventions of representation that obtained at the time. (Snyder and Allen, Pg 165)
I have encountered on numerous occasions similar to the one above recounted to us by Snyder and Allen, people asking why I decided to “photoshop” a picture to have a blurred background and how did I do it. This is a result of my choice of aperture not my editing (all though I could do it in post if I wished), but people are so aware of the manipulation of photographs that they are beginning to believe that anything shown in a photograph that does not match what their eyes naturally see must in fact be a manipulation, this goes someway to showing how distrustful the general public have become of modern photography. In my own opinion, it also shows that they have lost ability to really know what they are seeing. Presuming a blur to be unreal because your eyes do not see it makes no sense, hold a thumb within inches of your pupil and you will observe as the thumb comes into focus the world behind goes out of focus just like in a photograph, wave your hand in front of your face and you will be faced with the same motion blur as a photograph of a moving object with a slow shutter speed. This matters not, their experience of background blur is using an app on their phone to add it to existing photographs, and so they believe this is how I have created the effect as well. There is an automatic distrust of anything they see that was not created by themselves.
The questioning of photography is not an inherently bad thing, on the contrary, I think in an era of "Fake News" thinking critically about everything we see is a good habit. A photograph is not inherently a representation of what is real, it is not automatically authentic due to its own existence. The work of photographers such as Gregory Crewdson is enough to prove that, his highly constructed tableau's of bizarre suburbia are produced from the ground up on sound stages with actors and lighting. This isn't a new concept either, as far back as near the conception of modern photography itself, images were being manipulated, such as this of Abraham Lincoln (Circa 1865), which is in fact a composite using the figure and background of an image from ten years before (http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/lincoln/). But both of these examples could be perceived as "real" due to quality and detail of the image.
Allen and Snyder ask "Is there anything particularly Photographic about photography?" and my answer to this is that the very nature of a photograph being perceived as plausible I.e. It is not initially obviously unreal, and this would be down quality and the level of detail. Take for example computer graphics. As they advance further and further they are more often described as "photorealistic" (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/star-wars-battlefront-photo-real-toddyhancer-mod), and this refers to the shear amount of detail, and replication of real life phenomena such as the behaviors of light and shadow.
The ideas of Truth, Representation, and Realism play an interesting part in my own photographic practice. My work is inspired by video games, sources that are almost categorically unreal, the events and visuals do not exist outside of the virtual realm of my computer and games consoles. Yet the appear as real, and the emotions and narrative communicated to me through these games could be real, the visual are beginning to look as though they could be real. My camera, can be used as a tool to recreate this unreality out of the very real environments around me. When i find a subject that calls out to me, I may not be able to see it in its final form, but I know I can use my camera and lens to create something similar to what I have seen in the video game world. Allen and Snyder discuss a photograph of James Dean and his brother at the grave of Cal Dean (pg 158) and mention the possibility of an actor in the place of James Dean. Does the authenticity of the photograph have any real bearing on the representation of the photograph? If the photographer is trying to say something about James Dean, does it really matter if its actually him or an actor? If it was a James Dean look alike I believe the narrative would still be clear. Or does the fact that it is James Dean lend authenticity to the photographers representation of James Dean. Does my inspiration, video games, mean that my images are somehow less valid?
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