It’s not even a true statement. “A real picture of a pipe” has never once in history been interpreted as “my golly - there’s an actual goddamn pipe trapped inside this piece of paper”. We know it’s a freaking representation.
The “real” part refers to how it’s a product of mechanically capturing the light that was reflected off an actual pipe at some moment in time. You could have a real picture with adjusted colours, at which point it’s real but manipulated. Of course with digital photography it’s more complicated as the camera will try to figure out what the colours should be, but it doesn’t mean the notion of a real picture is suddenly ready for the scrapyard. Monet’s painting is still a painting.
Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say a real picture. Imposing a 3D model over the moon to make it more detailed, for example, constitutes “not a real picture”. Pretending this is some impossible philosophical dilemma is just a corporate exercise in doublespeak.
To play devil’s advocate, even traditional photography involves a lot of subjective/artistic decisions before you get a photo. The type of film used can massively affect the image reproduced, and then once the photos are being developed, there’s a load of choices made there which determine what the photo looks like.
There’s obviously a line where a photo definitely becomes “edited”, but people often believe that an objective photo is something that exists, and I don’t think that’s ever been the case.
Of course - there’s a huge difference between a “real photo” and “objective reality”, and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.
It’s not even a true statement. “A real picture of a pipe” has never once in history been interpreted as “my golly - there’s an actual goddamn pipe trapped inside this piece of paper”. We know it’s a freaking representation.
The “real” part refers to how it’s a product of mechanically capturing the light that was reflected off an actual pipe at some moment in time. You could have a real picture with adjusted colours, at which point it’s real but manipulated. Of course with digital photography it’s more complicated as the camera will try to figure out what the colours should be, but it doesn’t mean the notion of a real picture is suddenly ready for the scrapyard. Monet’s painting is still a painting.
Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say a real picture. Imposing a 3D model over the moon to make it more detailed, for example, constitutes “not a real picture”. Pretending this is some impossible philosophical dilemma is just a corporate exercise in doublespeak.
This is fuckin’ brilliant. A picture worth a thousand mutilated words.
To play devil’s advocate, even traditional photography involves a lot of subjective/artistic decisions before you get a photo. The type of film used can massively affect the image reproduced, and then once the photos are being developed, there’s a load of choices made there which determine what the photo looks like.
There’s obviously a line where a photo definitely becomes “edited”, but people often believe that an objective photo is something that exists, and I don’t think that’s ever been the case.
Of course - there’s a huge difference between a “real photo” and “objective reality”, and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.