The Camera Only Lies

For some reason, when I first saw this:

it reminded me of Hockney. The most recent thing I’ve read, or heard, about Hockney was a recent radio interview (BBC: At Home With David Hockney), in the opening few minutes of which we hear Hockney talking about photographs, how the chemical period of photography ,and its portrayal of perspective, is over, and how a new age of digital photography allows us to reimagine this sort of image making.

Hockney also famously claimed that lenses have played an important part in the craft of image making Observer: What the eye didn’t see…. Whether or not people have used lenses to create particular images, the things seen through lenses and the idea of how lenses may help us see the world differently may in turn influence the way we see other things, either in the mind’s eye, in where we focus attention, or in how we construct or compose an image of our own making.

As the above animated image shows, when a lens is combined with a logical transformation (that may be influenced by a socio-cultural and/or language context acting as a filter) of the machine interpretation of a visual scene represented as bits, it’s not exactly clear what we do see…!

As Hockney supposedly once said, “[t]he photograph isn’t good enough. It’s not real enough”.