MARCH 22, FRIDAY

FAKING REALITY

I read about deep fakes, women’s heads being attached to nude bodies doing lascivious things taken from porn sites. They are obviously fakes, entirely made up, they are not the girl herself. So why are they so humiliating? Why do people get so worked up over Catherine, Princess of Wales, doctoring a photograph of herself and her children? It must be because we are so used to living in a world where we trust a photograph to be the actual person or event or object, unaltered in any way. The person seeing the photograph feels betrayed into believing something that isn‘t true and the person being falsely portrayed feels betrayed because other people will feel that this is really her when it isn‘t, except for her face.

A photograph has up until now been a way to preserve a scene from the past with complete accuracy. It is a way of preserving memories or of stirring up memories with details that we can‘t remember.

But I don’t think this has been true for a while, maybe ever. First of all photographs have always misrepresented actuality, not by being fakes, but by selecting out everything except what the photographer wants to show. They misrepresent by leaving the context out, by heightening only one part of what is around them. Advertising photography has always depended on that. My travel photographs do that. It is only the things that touch me with intensity that I show, these photographs are more indicative of what touches me than they are of the overall place itself. Apple did that when they demonstrated the Vision Pro only with elaborately staged and filmed events.

And it is done deliberately. I crop out or blur out what detracts. And what I select to show I then process. I know Apple through artificial intelligence, preprocesses the scene, then I give Apple‘s photograph processing a second chance by hitting the adjust slider. But after that I lighten or darken parts of the photograph and then intensify the contrast and, very subtly, I hope, intensify the colors. Most people, I think, leave photographs alone without processing them, but their photographs do not appear to be as good. Mine appear to be more real. It is a little bit like putting on makeup before going out.

So in all these ways photographs show the world not the way it actually is. What is happening now, or can happen, is that there are many more ways to enhance a photograph. There are ways to slim a person down, to remove blemishes, to make a person look better. So I guess if you want to make a women look sexy you give her someone else‘s body and have her do lascivious things.

If we assumed that photography wasn‘t accurate and that the processing of photographs means that what you see is as much made up as really there then we wouldn‘t feel betrayed when a photograph was doctored and would think that a nude body attached to a face, an obvious fake, was comic and unreal.

I have the feeling that virtual reality with which I am wrestling now is doing something similar. First I am sitting in my living room and then I am sitting in the Mojave desert. With spatial photography both seem equally real. The line between what is actual and what is projected and what is imagined, blur. Fantasy films with flying dragons and all kinds of special effects transport us to an imagined world. We see through photography and videos everything that we can imagine acted out by actors who feel none of the emotions portrayed and are just doing what their directors are telling them to do, earning a living in the process. We certainly live in a digital world in which actors portray emotions they don‘t personally feel, but acted dramas have been doing that since the time of the ancient Greeks. Mythology, stories that never actually happened, is a way to open us up to our most real and intense emotions and are a way we seek to be fully alive.

So there is some kind of strange balancing act that we live, between the actual and the imagined possible. And I‘m guessing that virtual reality is, and will be, another way of doing this and of blurring the distinction between the two.