When Is Reality?

Albuquerque Balloon Festival 2015

I lose touch with reality from time to time, and frankly I’m okay with that. That’s what being a photographer is all about. I think we got off on the wrong foot back at the beginning, when we decided that a photograph was going to show us the real world, whatever the heck that was. We understood that a painting was inherently an interpretation, but somehow a scene reflected upside-down through a glass lens, scattered on a sheet of film or piece of glass, and rendered as a monochromatic image, was the real deal. Oh, humanity …

I mean, I get it. A photographic image can be a powerful thing. I’ve been obsessed with them for more than half a century. I collect and admire antique photos, and count among my earliest influences the great images of Steiglitz, Weston, and Adams. But the argument that rages today, especially resonant in the digital era, is if the images we are seeing accurately represent an objective reality, or if they are manipulated to such a point that they can no longer be considered a reliable source of information. I doubt they ever were.

Anyway, I’m hardly one to judge. My own work is a good example of a bad example. My photos are well manipulated long before I print, post and share. They’re the result of many many layers, adding or subtracting textures, colors, sharpness, paint effects, whispers, secrets, and sighs. And it’s not just because i want to see what the technology can do, because honestly I’m not that good at it. I’m just not interested in reproducing what I saw; I’m madly intent on revealing how I felt, both then and now. It’s a life-long process, actually.

Maybe it’s our reaction to the photographs taken by photojournalists or other pro’s. Do we expect that the images they show us from the battlefields, the news events, the football games, even the weddings reflect an objective reality, i.e., the “truth?” This unquestionably holds them to an unrealistic standard, and we’d be doomed to unremitting boredom should that ever be the case, anyway.

St. Johns Bridge, Portland 2020

Photographers are storytellers. The decisions they make on how to compose an image or crop a print, to highlight the color or remove it entirely, to wait for just the right light or add their own illumination, blur the background or hyper-sharpen the entire scene, even the precise moment to release the shutter, all come from this. It’s the craftsmanship we expect and admire and sometimes pay good money for. If it’s just information I want, I’ll read a newspaper. If I want to be moved, I’ll look at a photograph.

And there, mis amis, lies the point. We do seek the truth, and we do value honesty, but there’s no way to agree on what they are. Your reality and mine are different, but that doesn’t mean we don’t share a love of a well crafted image, knowing that we bring to it our own experiences, our expectations and values, our prejudices, our quirks, and see in them our own stories, too. That’s why I love looking at photographs, and why I love making them.

And frankly, we should all be okay with that.