Transparent Pictures
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Photography and the cinema ... satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. The photographic image is the object itself." -André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" "Every photograph is a fake from start to finish." --Edward Steichen, "Ye Fakers" Camera Work, no. 1 (January 1903): 48 |
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"Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism " (1984) is an essay by Kendall Walton.
Excerpt:
- Photographic pornography is more potent than the painted variety. Published photographs of disaster victims or the private lives of public figures understandably provoke charges of invasion of privacy; similar complaints against the publication of drawings or paintings have less credibility. I expect that most of us will acknowledge that, in general, photographs and paintings (and comparable non photographic pictures) affect us very differently. Compare Francisco Goya's etchings The Disasters of War with the Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady and his associates (see, for example, figs. 1 and 2). It is hard to resist describing the difference by saying that the photographs have a kind of immediacy or realism which the etchings lack. (This is not to deny that the etchings might equal or surpass the photographs in realism of some ot
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