Is this a real photograph?

This post is mostly a reaction to a a couple of posts on "[The Online Photographer].(theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/09/disillusion.html)"

I just thought it might make an interesting debating point. I was also very unsure about the logic of the TOP posts.

I don't print: therefore, I am not a photographer ...

I was once subscribed to a forum where any comment that did not include "the print" was ignored. 😉

I had an SLR back in the 1980's and mostly took slides...

I would say, we have a captured image, be it contained in negative / slide film, digital, or some form that then allows it to be viewed on some other medium and that is when we are seeing the "photograph"

Not really. More properly, it is an array of words, one array per pixel.

... unless it's a Foveon raw - for which "development" is not strictly necessary:

These are the "latent" sensor values, no "development" and, of course, no de-mosaicing.

Or even a Bayer raw with the two green pixels averaged and no de-mosaicing:

Because they are what the sensor saw, I claim that they are real photographs, more real than raw conversions.

image maker or content creator 😁

If one merely skims the surface of photography, probably not.

I am not convinced that is true because a camera can see a scene one way and record the scene according to its sensor design and functionality.

If you point two cameras, one with a foveon sensor and one with a non-foveon sensor sensor, at the same scene both cameras will see the same scene but the recorded raw data will be totally different.

Is it really a single moment in time? It seems to me that conversations like this on photo forums always fall back to the underlying assumption that there is an inherent "truth" in a photograph because it is a scientific capture of exact data. We then always fall back on the position that a photograph captures the absolute truth of an object and that is the defining property of a photo, because we desire that it is so. We want photography to be about truth and science because we find it easier to form a rational understanding if we shoehorn it into our own rational framework.

But is that really true?

As John Sloan has often said, there is no truth in an object. What he means is that we can only ever see the world from a single point in space at any one time and because we can only ever see it through human perception we can never actually see the "truth" of the data. It is always modified. If we look further:

But that is not what the sensor saw. In fact it is so far removed from that data as to make the statement nonsense Yet we do not see it as nonsense because we desire there to be a truth in the data as part of our rationalisation of photography. This is the data on the screen, there is no inherent "truth" in it:

The image is a resized jpeg on a computer screen, there is nothing in either the resolution, (resized by algorithms calibrated to human vision) or the actual colour (the actual wavelengths of light transmitted by the screen) that relates directly to the data the camera saw. It is an illusion that's calibrated entirely to fool the eye that it is seeing a real object. From the focus of light, through the capture of information to the display of the photograph, none of the process is at all about capturing the actual true scientific data that defines an object, it is simply about creating an image that looks real to the human eye. As the human cognitive function always prevents you from seeing the absolute data defining the photograph with reference to the absolute data of actual light reflected/captured/displayed seems to miss the point and mis-understand photography. Even the best of the best lenses are defined by the humna eye and visual comparision even theough we still use numbers to rationalise those choices.

So back to your statement quoted above, What about early photography? Early views of the empty streets of Paris (there are some of Notre Dame that I am thinking of), shot with such slow film that the people become invisible. A single moment in time? Where is the "truth" in the scene?

We have always tried to relate a photograph to the truth, but it remains and always has been simply an image that has been created by the photographic process. As that process evolves so the definition of what constitutes a photograph must also evolve. And the one thing about photography that is becomming increasingly obvious with digital and the onset of AI is that you can't blindly believe there is a "truth" in a photo. Perhaps it's always been this way?

That is what I said in the version of my post that was sin-binned to the Dumpster.👍

Who are the "we" you are referring to?

If you are also including danhasleftforum then your statement is not true. 😉

Not always true.

Sometimes we want photography to be just about art and nothing more.

While I get where you are coming from on at least some points, we "see" with our eyes and the photograph is an attempt to recreate a scene we saw. I will say that the photograph often has the ability to capture and re-tell info that we didn't see ourselves at the time - meaning more "true". E.g. a bird in flight. But even in a static scene, we get the opportunity to pour over it and see detail we probably missed.

Well isn't that the purpose??? We take photographs to re-see the scene. If we want to "see" some other underlying aspect / reality of the object / scene we will need to use a different device.

Maybe we need a meta physics forum...

I doubt that would help at all.

This thread still hasn't come up with a definitive answer to Nigel V's question "Is this a real photograph?" referring to his image in his op.

All you will ever get is a variety of opinions in reply to the question above, not a definitive answer.

NCV posted an image in his op, not a photograph for the reasons posted earlier.

I believe my picture in the OP is a photograph. Nothing changed in the scene in front of the camera. A series of exposures taken one after another were just added together. Nothing changed except for shutter time length.

It is commonly agreed that a double or multiple exposures made on a single negative is a photograph, rather than an image. Some cameras allow HDR combinations (multiple exposures) in camera, I believe. Doing it out of camera makes no real difference. The algorithms are much the same.

From the point of view of trying to recreate the scene on a viewing medium, I would say it is most definitely a photograph. More so because a methodology is used that attempts to recreate the scene as faithfully as possible.

[Edit] you beat me to it...

But in your op you said you combined 3 images.

Why are those 3 images not referred to as photographs but their combination you do refer to as a photograph?

The way I see it, the 3 photographs you combined resulted in an image, not a photograph.

All photographs are images but not all images are photographs.

Not my point, whiuch is better illustrated in your comment below:

A photograph nearly always abstracts the view, but does it capture and retell info? How does DOF, or having a fixed point of focus (and therefore every other point defocussed) reveal detail you didn't see before? Because it was moving too fast for you to see it? So what part information does the photo omit? And what if you saw that same bird in a static situation?

The camera doesn't capture information that you don't see, or can never see. Really all you are doing is looking at a bird in flight in abstract, so are viewing it like a static object. Like an audiophile who listens more to the quality of the kit than the music, photographers zoom in to see the quality of their kit, not the bird. Sharpness in images is largely the illusion of boosted edge contrast viewed at the appropriate distance. Zooming into an image on the screen is actually the process of you viewing a fixed pixel screen at a fixed distance while you scroll through resizing algorithms until you get to as close to 1:1 as the process allows. But I bet you relate the process (automatically) to you moving closer to the bird until you can see the detail. But that's what we do, we relate what we see when viewing images to our experience of viewing the real world (a feather with a magnifying glass). You would be surprised by just how much of what you see when viewing a photo is you relating abstracted info to your memory and experience in the real world and how little of it is the actual data in the photo.

Much the same way in which we interpret blur as motion, (it is not motion captured but a pure abstraction of an object by the photographic process that we translate as motion), so we see other things in photos as a direct comparison to experience and not as a consequence of the recorded data. Are Victorians always stoic or is that just a consequence of holding a static pose for a long exposure?

"We capture your memories forever." One of the all time great ad slogans and one we still hold as true, but there's little truth in it apart from what we wish to believe. Photos basically represent the "truth" we wish to believe, often little more than confirmation bias. Even with family photos that meaning or memory is not fixed but changes with experience, memory and even the fading of memory. The point is that there is no inherent truth in an object through human eyes, just as that truth is never seen by human eyes when viewing a photo, it's always coloured by memory and experience.

So if I were to condense this to a binary argument it would be this:

We can either define photography by our understanding of how a the photographic process works and captures/displays an image, or by how we as humans respond to and react to different types of image. And which one gives you the better understanding of what a photograph actually is?

From where I sit looking at on screen jpegs as what was captured by the sensor, and relating screen zooming to zooming in on detail are the concepts in the meta-universe because they don't relate to the reality of what is actually happening, like a photo they are just your perception rationalised by experience and the need for an absolute answer.