The act of seeing actually starts with the act of seeing images, which involves such complex phases and makes us the inspectors of visual stimuli, even in the case of visual impairment; people are able to adapt their selves to sense images by defining them with a different type of transduction and in a different sphere of knowledge. Wherever we live, we live with images. We are surrounded by images and unlike words; images construct our ways of thinking and imagining. We introduce ourselves with sense of self-images, we are introduced with other kinds of images by means of images and we imagine images through mental images. So, within these intertwined concepts about “images”; realization of a separation between real, fantasy, image and representation get quite impossible. There is a double-edged argument on alienation of real through images and in the absence of images; we are exposed to representation of images and images of representations within the same context and that makes spectators both to be able to feel secure and alienated through what they see.
Photography, due to its use in the areas like medical science, archeology, history and architecture, is considered as a tool for ‘giving a permanent form to the enlarged images of the microscope’ (Hugh Diamond – editor of The Photographic Journal), which illustrates the effect of photography on the documentation/construction of the real. The photographic “document” is predictably perceived as neutral, styleless and objective record of visual information. Beneath this understanding about photography, as we all know, the existence of photographer is ignored and camera is evaluated as if it can work independent from an operator. While documents are seen as objective, mechanical copies characterized by detail and functionality, “art photography” stand for the status of invention and subjectivity. However, this kind of discrimination is considered as pseudo-separation due to the characteristics of photography in general, as an invented tradition or ideology that performs in modern society, specifically, in mass image forms like advertising, legal documents, pornography, anthropological images, topographic views, and so forth. In his essay “ The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin stated that photography and cinema, serve the basic human need for illusion and realism, which actually a confusing definition due to the problems in classifying these concepts. In Bazin’s perspective, photographs are objective and authentic copies of things and looking at a photograph force viewer to accept it as real the existence of the object reproduced. He stated that; the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of space and time that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image might be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model which it is the reproduction; it is the model.
To conclude, within this endless range of images in modern narratives, images do more than just representing reality, they construct it. This construction of reality repeated itself with the help of culture and history as a myth of nature. Images are documents to help the myth of “real” or “nature” repeating over and over in various spectrums. So, having a sense of distinction between fiction and real / art photography and documentary / nature and culture is just for the sake of having the sense of distinction but nothing else. This sense of distinction about representation and image serves our understanding of understanding, because we use schemata in order to define everything, and without distinctions or boundaries schemata would not work as it has supposed to do. Besides “widen” our understanding about the self and the other, for me, having the distinction between illusion, reality, representation and image does not refer anything about illusive reality or reality itself.
References:
Edwards, S., (2006) Photography: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press
Photograph: Roger Fenton - Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)