It is real, or is it fake?

Photography has always had a tenuous relationship with the real word, but as we get further into the digital age, the links between photographs and reality are disappearing.

We entered the age of photography with an industrial attack on the landscape and portrait artist. Before the daguerreotype only artists could document the world for posterity. After, anyone could do so, and thus we have an extensive record of the world from about 1850 forward.  For scores of years, photography provided indisputable evidence of reality. However, today the digital manipulation of photographs can lie and cheat, or create an alternate reality.

And if that wasn't enough, now we have a post-modern take on photography where the intent is to fool us into thinking that a picture of something real is a picture of something fake. This started when Olivo Barbieri started taking photographs using a special tilt-shift lens that manipulated depth of field to fool us into thinking we were looking at a model. (Follow the Barieri link for some examples of his work). Ironically, this illusion relies on a limitation of photography--close-up lenses have poor depth of field--plus assuming that everyone is familiar with this artifact.  And, just as the digital domain makes it easier to fake reality, it also makes it easier to fake fakery.

Here is a recent on-line magazine article that is a must see: 50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography.  For do-it-yourself buffs here is a Tilt-Shift Photoshop Tutorial, there is a tilt-shift Flickr tag and it brings up these examples, and for the obsessive, a comprehensive Tilt-Shift Link Collection.  If you want to do this in the analog domain, here is a nice $2k Nikkor special lens to get the effect. Finally, there is my attempt above, taken along Cienega Road in Hollister, California, which will pop up a larger version if you click on it.