A Quote by Lev Manovich

... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.
... what is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism - the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.
It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.
We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school - I have no romance with computer work. There's no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.
Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.
For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.
In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?
I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.
Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist
Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.
Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures.
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
When you make a film that is based in reality, reality will come up all around it.
The reality, or substance, of professional wrestling is the ability to perpetuate a fantasy. I never distinguished between fantasy and reality. I made my fantasy reality for over 60 years.
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