Chapter Four: Realism and Perspective

Chapter four speaks a lot about the idea of “realistic” and what that concept actually means. Most people think that realistic constitutes as something that you would find in real life, something that is unaltered. Like a photograph. But when you think about it, how often are photographs altered? With the advances in modern technology, it is incredibly easy to doctor a photo and make it look as if it were real. Even more so, pictures that could be taken to look like a snapshot in time could actually have been staged. If things are staged, do they lose their reality, or are they just trying to portray the reality in which the creator intended the viewer to see.

Another interesting fact is the idea about doctoring a photo in the sense to make things look differently. I don’t mean this in the sense of photoshop, where you change the actual elements pictured in the photo, but things such as black and white, cyan and sepia. Black and white film, as well as sepia tones, were used in the past because of the absence of color technology as well as to preserve the photo. Now, with the click of a button we can easily modify a photo to be taken digitally with these specific tones. Changing a photo to black and white can easily give a picture a different feel than what was originally intended.