Colorful Leaves and Musings on Photographic Realism

The Fall project I have been working on has made me think about the question of honesty in photography.

Is editing dishonest? I would say no. Rather, not necessarily. A camera is not the same as human vision. For one, our vision is not some objective, mechanical thing—what we notice, how it makes us feel, is as much determined by our state of mind as by what is in front of us. Our vision also combines an extremely wide field of view with a sharp focus on a small area in a way that a two-dimensional image cannot replicate. A photo will never be a “perfect” representation of what we see.

With that said, should a photo attempt to represent what we see as accurately as possible? That is obviously a different question for photojournalism than for art, although the limitations of “true” representation apply as well to journalistic photography. For art, however, I think it depends.

What draws me to photography is the desire to express the things I find beautiful or somehow moving. In my editing, I try to work the image so that it feels closest to how I experienced the scene. When the camera records the data present in an image, it already makes a number of decisions about how to render the brightness, contrast, color, etc. I do believe in trying to get as close to the desired image as possible in camera, mainly because the editing process is easier if the initial image is fairly close to what I visualized when taking the photo. But there is no inherent value in the way the camera has been programmed to process and output the image. A large part of the art is in editing the image to express what I felt when taking it. In my photography, this means trying to strike a careful balance between being faithful to what I actually saw—because the beauty was in the real scene—while also bringing out the feeling that captivated me. For a more abstract artist, perhaps that balance matters even less.

I’ll end with a quote from the cinematographer Roger Deakins:

“It's also not necessarily about creating total realism. I think there's a difference in a way between naturalism and realism. You're not always trying to completely represent reality, often far from it. But for me anyway, I want to create a reality, I want to put the audience in a world that they believe, that appears like it behaves the way the real world does to their eyes...”