Digital BW, The Print

At 12:33 AM 8/7/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>
>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
>

Tim,

Finally, someone who really understands photographs :-)  The myth of
photography is its reality. For me challenging the myth becomes a
photographic end in itself. 

AZ

Maker of Lookaround panoramic camera.
http://www.panoramacamera.us
         or
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