Before I come to the point, that being ‘the photograph,’ I thought a little perspective wouldn’t go amiss, and it’s this …
Is what we are looking at what is actually there? You see, our day to day lives are only lived within a sense of reality. A construct, if you like. This applies to all our senses including touch, smell and all the others but let’s leave them to one side and focus on the visual. Please excuse the pun. Entirely deliberate!
It is an irrefutable fact that everything we experience is nothing more than a figment of our imagination. That is not to say that things aren’t actually there, but it does mean that what we are seeing is a visual illusion. It is part of our sense of reality. When a dog looks at the same tree that we are looking at, he sees it in an entirely different way to the way we see it. The fact that his colour sensitivity is limited to blues and yellows does not mean that the reality of the tree is any less tangible to the dog than it is to us. The tree hasn’t changed. However, his sense of reality is different to ours.
What we see is the result of a very complex combination of sensory devices within our eyes working with significantly more complex decoding software in our brains. All this creating our sense of visual reality. Look out of your window. What you are seeing is a very small part of what is actually there. It is possible to mimic this, in a very crude way, by using films of differing sensitivities or by using filters on your camera. Take a picture of a forest of trees with infrared film and you’ll see what I mean. The infrared is always there, we just can’t see it. The same goes for ultraviolet. Again, we can’t see it, but bees can, illustrating that their sense of reality is nothing like ours, but the reality is the same.
Our sense of reality is immensely strong. Indeed, it is only our awareness of the truth which can shake it. This sense feels factual and reliable but it does not reproduce the truth of a physical entity. It does however represent it in the way most useful to us for our very survival.
A very long time before we knew about all this stuff, artists were tricking us by drawing images on flat canvasses which looked convincingly three-dimensional, and they were fooling us, with a few carefully applied strokes of a brush, that we were looking at a realistic interpretation of a bowl of fruit. And that is the key word. Interpretation.
A visual illusion is defined as a disconnection between the physical reality and our perception of it. Ergo, everything we see is an illusion.
Therefore, if all we ever see is an illusion who can say whether a photograph is an accurate representation or simply the photographer’s interpretation?