Photography changes reality

I’ve talked about not letting reality stand in the way of creating art many times, but you don’t have to change reality to create photographic art. Sometimes we just have to see artistically or a scene just meets our vision. For me, art is about intentionally creating something aesthetic to view.

While the scene in the image above accurately shows the city, it also alters reality, without manipulation through post-processing. How so you may ask. As the caption shows, the photograph above, while only mildly processed in Adobe Lightroom, was a long exposure with a small aperture. The long exposure renders the cars traveling the streets as streaks of light. The traffic signals may show red, green, and yellow lights. The small aperture renders the points of light as starbursts. This isn’t how we see the scene with our eyes.

Again in the image above, the scene is only mildly edited through post-processing, yet I altered reality since we don’t see the flowing water as a smooth surface.

Even when we don’t use long exposures, we alter reality since we freeze time. The cars and people are permanently frozen in time. We have merely captured a fraction of a second of reality. The real world is a moving flowing place.

One could argue that video may show reality, but is it? Can the reality be altered by the choice of a lens focal length or aperture? We, as photographers, can only show a scene close to what it was in reality. This is why I often don’t hesitate to alter reality further.

As a photographic artist, I portray reality as it exists to me. I portray the reality of my world. If I ever have to record something forensically I will not alter the record any further than I have by taking a video or photographic record, but when I create a work with the intent to create art, all is fair game.