Digital BW, The Print

One of the things about photography that often catches people off-guard and
in fact frequently will give a photograph its power to evoke an emotion or
reaction is that a photograph is much more distanced from reality than the
common view would have it. It is more often somewhat a tenuous thread that
stretches from the photograph to reality.

Never mind the more abstract issues of the language (or lack of) and form of
photography, just think of the some of the basics:

It's two dimensional

It's often in black and white

Even if it's in colour - the colours usually aren't "real"

They are usually smaller than the "reality they attempt represent" - by a
huge degree in most cases.

They impose a frame around what it is trying to represent - how real is
that?

The lenses used either compress or expand the plane of the image, thus
distorting the reality compared to how we perceive it outside of
photography.

They capture perhaps 1/500th or 1/25th or at most a minute or two of time.
That's not, generally how we perceive something or how something really
exists.

The photograph always looks backwards - that is, it's a piece of history, of
the past - it looks to something that we can never see again and is in that
sense not real at all.

So, just a few for starters  :-)

So, how accurate a representation of reality is a photograph? - not very
accurate at all. As accurate as, say, one of Picasso's paintings of women.
(which of course may be a more true representation... but that's another
issue)

tim