Photo realism vs illustration

[davidc]

Which side of the fence do you come down on?

http://petapixel.com/2016/09/10/line-ph ... otography/

As it happens I am writing an article about this very subject on my site. Anyone here feel very strongly that photo realism and photo illustration should not be compared/judged together?

[Rose]

Digital art based on photographic material is a distinct genre. There is a prevalence of such highly manipulated images submitted in PAGB awards that I think it deserves its own category. The PAGB say that there are plenty of 'real' photos achieving awards but they also admit that it's more difficult for some forms of photography to achieve enough impact.

[Mike Farley]

Photographs are not real. At their most basic, they are simply a depiction of the light falling on a scene reproduced in two dimensions. Often the author will have manipulated the result to show something which they consider more aestheticly pleasing than the reality they observed. That can range from boosting saturation or monochrome conversion to the addition, removal or other modification of artefacts. The photographer will have selected what to depict and other elements such as sound and smell, possibly taste even, will have been lost. Inevitably it is an interpretation. Yet because photographs have their basis in reality, people tend to view them as true, whatever the truth of their provenance.

Sometimes this does not matter. Who cares if a sunrise or sunset shot is oversaturated or the colours are unreal? Sometimes I see images where if the scene really had been like that, you would think the world was coming to an imminent end. In other circumstances, such as photojournalism, it is important. To take a topical example, Nick Ut's famous picture of Kim Phuc as a child running naked down a road following a US napalm attack during the Vietnam war. And which Facebook inexplicably recently tried to ban. Who cannot fail to be moved by the horror of it and feel empathy for those involved? Arguably, it and similar images could well have been a contributory factor in influencing public opinion and ending the war. Yet what if it had been staged?

For the majority of people, it hardly matters how a photographic image has been created. They are assessing it aesthetically. Either they find the end result in some way pleasing, or they do not. It is only when competition is involved does it become controversial. Photographing the vernacular is difficult and everything has to come together in just the right way. Someone constructing a work of photo derived art from a set of elements might have more work to reach the end result, but also has fewer constraints. Yet it is not even as straightforward as that. Someone who works in a studio also has a lot of creative control and does not rely on serendipity. In a professional environment, their work could represent the joint efforts of the model, stylist, designer, lighting technician, art director etc.

This has long been one of my concerns with competitive photography in that there is no real way to equate the many different genres. There is no valid method to make comparisons, yet this frequently occurs unless some form of segregation is imposed. An image which has required a considerable amount of skill, and maybe luck, to acquire might fare less well than another which was much more straightforward to produce purely on grounds which are subjective and frequently arbitrary.

[Rose]

I see a difference though between photos that have been highly manipulated during processing... And digital art which includes entirely artificial elements. Like fairy wings for example... (Or fairies... and I know that subject is at least 100 years old... )

[Mike Farley]

I see a difference though between photos that have been highly manipulated during processing... And digital art which includes entirely artificial elements. Like fairy wings for example... (Or fairies... and I know that subject is at least 100 years old... )

Which was one of the things I was trying to argue.

[walterconquy]

As an individual who often manipulates images I am all for using what has been given to us by photoshop. For the last century and a half photographers have done just that. I can name at least a dozen photographers who have manipulated their images be it solarisation, posterisation superimposition and double exposures to name but a few. And those are just those images taken before digital came into being. So to me, as long as it "works" go for it. Wally

[davidc]

I think the underlying question here is whether hugely, heavily manipulated images that are often composited from many other images should be judged in the same categories and alongside more traditional images. I don't think the debate is whether or not tweaking in photoshop can/should be used to make images appear the way we want, that has and always will happen. Maybe another way of slicing & dicing the images in question are to ask "should an image that was photographed from a real-world situation be judged and compared against an image that never existed at all, and is instead a total composite"?

If you take a look at many international and almost every single British FIAP-qualifying exhibition you'll notice that a massive chunk of the "winning" images are what the petapixel guy calls photo illustration. Many of them I think are very good but "bad" photo-illustrations are appalling in my opinion, like children's drawings. Yet they continue to dominate top level exhibitions. The poster is asking whether or not they should be split out so both types of photography compete "like for like". There can still be an overall winner but at least the best in category and gold medals can be split more representatively.

[Rose]

Exactly. There is a place for everything - but not necessarily in the same place ! I just think that digital art/illustration is deserving of its own category.

[Mike Farley]

Exactly. There is a place for everything - but not necessarily in the same place ! I just think that digital art/illustration is deserving of its own category.

The RPS has recognised this and for its distinctions has divided what was the forner Visual Arts category into two, Creative and Pictorial. The former is where reality has been altered and the latter applies where there has been no fundamental change in post processing and most of the creativity took place in the camera.