Of all the visual media, none seem to have more elements of realism than photography, film, and video. Because such lens-based media make a seemingly objective record of the world, they also have countless uses beyond art or entertainment.

Today, photo and camera-based communication is becoming an increasingly dominant mode of communication, telling people where you are, what you are doing, who you are with, and about your likes and interests.

The function of photography has undergone many technical shifts since its invention. Smartphones and inexpensive digital cameras have placed the pictorial moment in the hands of the masses. In this way, photography and video can be said to be democratic - open and accessible to many.

Think about the importance of photography and video in your life. What types of photographs/video do you take? How often? What kinds of cameras, apps, or devices do you use?

It is said that photographs are indexical - that is, they are directly connected to their subject - because of how they are made. A typical photograph is the result of light bouncing off of a subject in the real world, through a lens, and captured on a light sensitive material such as a negative or now more commonly stored in pixels in a digital camera.

Because of this indexical nature, photos are regularly viewed as unmediated copies of the world around us, associated with concepts of representation, truthfulness, and “reality.”

However, we can ask the following questions:

· Are all photographs indexical?

· Do photographs grant us a unique and privileged access to reality that other media (writing, painting, sculpture, etc.) do not?

· Are photographs more real than other representations? Are they more realistic?

A tenet of realism is that the realist image depicts something as it would be seen by the eye. There is a term for this: mimesis.

This image (an oil painting on canvas) for example, is called realistic because of how the artist has depicted the scene, using shadows, textures, space, color, etc. in a way that mimics the real world.

The function of visual art, however, has not always been to reproduce objects, people, and events in the real world as the eye of an observer would see them.

Take for example spatial representation in Egyptian art. The composition does not suggest the illusion of depth. Text and image are instead organized sequentially, like a contemporary comic book. This does not mean that these kinds of representations are primitive or that spatial logic is undeveloped. Rather, it is just that other systems of logic or conventions are at work here.

"What is a Graphic Novel page 1" by Jessica Abel - http://dw-wp.com/resources/what-is-a-graphic-novel/. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_is_a_Graphic_Novel_page_1.jpg#/media/File:What_is_a_Graphic_Novel_page_1.jpg

One artistic convention that we are familiar with but maybe don’t even realize it, is linear perspective.

The term perspective comes from the Latin “perspicere” meaning “to see clearly” or “to look through.”

Linear perspective refers to a set of mathematical systems used to produce representations of objects in space as if seen by an observer looking through a window or a frame. In perspective, the size and detail of objects depicted corresponds to their relative distance from the imagined position of the observer.

"1ptPerspective" by Guillaume Godet-Bar, from Wolfram Gothe - Original creation made under InkScape. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1ptPerspective.svg#/media/File:1ptPerspective.svg

Keep in mind that linear perspective relies on the conceptual anchor of a single, fixed spectator position. In order to create the desired effect, the spectator/observer would remain absolutely still and look at the subject with one eye closed.

Of course, human sight is based on binocular, not monocular vision. We don’t normally go around viewing the world in a frontal, stationary position, with one eye covered. When we look, our eyes are in constant motion and any sight we see is actually composed of many different angles, views, and glances.

Despite how we actually see, the trope of the window as the rectangular frame through which seeing is organized has a long history in practices of mimetic representation. Perspective has become the dominant way of organizing two dimensional visual space since the time of the Renaissance to the digital era today, which is filled with framed optical screens of computers and digital technologies.

Although it displaces the human eye with a mechanical instrument, the camera mimics perspectival depictions of space, capturing the world through a rectangular frame and monocular point of view, editing out what is on the “outside” the frame.

In order to obtain an “optical realism”, artists have been using optical devices and equipment for centuries, well before the modern “photographic” era. By the 15th century, an enclosed box or room, called a camera obscura was routinely used by artists to copy nature accurately. On one wall of the camera obscura, a small hole called the ‘aperture’ allows light to enter. On the opposite wall, the outside scene is projected. The projected image would, however, differ from reality in that the scene was flipped upside down and backwards. Through a tedious process, a person could trace over the image projected on the wall to capture it. This optical device offered the lens technology that photography began with, a precursor to early cameras.

As we’ve earlier mentioned, realism through the use of optical devices was achieved centuries ago. However, photography itself is relatively new. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the necessary chemistry made it possible to retain an image on a light-sensitive surface

Many early inventors were able to capture an image temporarily, but it wasn’t until 1826 that French inventor Joseph Niepce created the first image on a light sensitive surface-a photograph. His View from His Window at Gras took eight hours to expose.

Early photographs like this were made through a tedious chemical process. Because of those long exposure times, it was difficult to photograph a living person.

Another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, perfected Niepce’s process, significantly reducing the exposure time from hours to minutes.

Daguerre announced his photographic process to the world in 1839. His one-of-a-kind photographs made it possible for anyone to have the likeness of themselves and their family preserved.

Indeed, photographic portraits became extremely popular in Europe and beyond. A genre of portrait photography, called Carte de Visites were popular beginning at about the time of the Civil War. Photos were collected and traded amongst loved ones and friends and displayed in personal albums. These photos were a way of collecting friends and displaying them in personal albums. Sound familiar?

Photography has always been linked to developments in technology. The invention of photography involved optics (the use of lenses), chemistry, and some type of material surface to create the image. As soon as still photography was introduced, people wanted to extend its abilities to capture motion and time.

Eadweard Muybridge’s early experiments helped fuel possibilities of capturing motion on film when he finally succeeded in photographing a horse in motion using a trip wire set up of 12 cameras, resulting in 12 individual photographs.

Today, film, animation, video, and even animated GIF’s are ubiquitous.

But the basic theory behind these can be understood when we see an early 19th century child’s toy, the zoetrope. The zoetrope helps us understand that film, even today, relies on the theory known as “persistence of vision”. Visual images recorded from the eye persist in our brain for a fraction of a second after the object is no longer there, so it is the brain that makes the connection by carrying over the visual image to make a continuous sequence, and thus the illusion of a moving image, the illusion of continuous “reality” outside the camera.

As we mentioned before, photographs are regularly viewed as unmediated copies of the world, showing us evidence of reality. In recent times, ideologies surrounding “truth” and photography have been critiqued or overturned.

The French semiotic theorist Roland Barthes put forward his notion of myths - hidden cultural values and conventions through which meanings are made to seem natural and universal, even though in reality they are specific to certain groups of people. Take for instance our culture’s myth regarding beauty and thinness.

He referred to photographic truth to be a myth, not because photographs inherently lie, but because they are always influenced by cultural and contextual factors.

Even an unedited photograph involves some degree of subjective choice. Decisions on how an image is selected, framed, and lighted represent the intentions and values of the person behind the lens.

Barthes also referred to images and photographs as having both denotative and connotative meanings.

The denotative meaning of an image is the literal, descriptive meaning.

This Marlboro advertisement might denote a cowboy with a lasso.

Connotative meaning relies on the cultural or historical context, including that of the viewer. It is how we interpret the meaning of an image, influenced by what we know about when/where/why the image was taken, the context in which we see the image, and the ideological assumptions we hold about the world.

When we look at the Marlboro ad for connotative meaning, we observe what the man looks like, what he is wearing, and the context or situation of the rider and horse (Is this a circus, a rodeo, a ranch, the open West). The image may connote the rugged, masculine American independence of being a cowboy on the open range.

If you think about it, rather than experiencing “photography” as a whole, in an abstract sense, we instead experience “photographs”. This is because there are so many various types of photographs, called genres. And each genre is framed by its different uses and contexts, whether social and material.

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In addition to specific genres, there are codes, or interpretive frames that are learned culturally, through which we view photographs.

Staging and manipulation in photography is as old as the medium itself. Some early photographers would combine multiple negatives to construct images similar to how painters might orchestrate a composition. There have been other well-known examples of early documentary photographers staging or editing photographs for effect, thus producing unreliable evidence and raising ethical concerns.

Since the introduction of digital photography and photo-editing software such as Photoshop, we have seen a shift in thinking about photographic images. The world of photography has been completely transformed into a highly manipulatable medium.

Now, many images are made to look photographic, whether or not a lens or several lenses were used in the making of the image. Digital collages, tableau photography, montages, constructed and composite shots….our confidence in an image as an objective representation of reality is eroded.

From its very beginning, photography has been a hybrid - produced from combinations of technologies (from optics to digital) and by its very nature, crossing over between mechanical and documentary functions to entertainment and art.

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In addition to being produced from continually developing and hybrid technologies, a key concept to note about photography is that it is made to be reproduced.

Today especially, digital images are created in order to be copied, distributed and shared, with no fixed physical medium.

The technical reproducibly of images in photography introduced a new set of questions in global culture - questions about truth and realism, authenticity, and uniqueness.

No longer was an image made for just one, like a painting or sculpture where you would have to travel to go see an original artwork. Instead, because of this integral feature of photography - its connection to mechanical and digital reproduction techniques - the very nature of representation and art itself was transformed.

What is the status of the photographic image today, with the advent of digital cameras, camera phones, and the ease and widespread use of editing and manipulation?

Some theorists speak about our current era as being "post-photographic" - technology has shifted from film to pixels and the social and cultural functions of the medium have changed.

Despite the fact that many of the photos we encounter are altered in a variety of ways, the aura of machine objectivity still clings to these electronic images. What are the implications of living in a "post-photographic" world? Does photographic "realism" still exist?

Here are some ways to look at photography today and how its role has shifted in contemporary times, both technically and socially.

"David LaChapelle Tak pravil LaChapelle, Galerie Rudolfinum, Praha, 2011 12 01" by svajcr - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_LaChapelle_Tak_pravil_LaChapelle,_Galerie_Rudolfinum,_Praha,_2011_12_01.JPG#/media/File:David_LaChapelle_Tak_pravil_LaChapelle,_Galerie_Rudolfinum,_Praha,_2011_12_01.JPG

Since its earliest invention, the photographic image has been invested with truth and reality. We have discussed reasons why that indexical nature has been questioned - from early manipulations to the overall subjective quality of all photographs.

Today, we experience images of all kinds, from those that we accept as examples of photographic “realism” to those we recognize as complete fiction.

However, it is important to keep in mind that all images, including the most seemingly straightforward photographs, use humanly constructed conventions to communicate. They are depended on codes and contexts, of both the maker and the viewer. Although we have been socialized into reading photographs as quotations from reality, we have to learn how to look at photographs through those social and cultural contexts in order to see how they work, and how we see and think "photographically".