Fotos

Every time I make an attempt to argue that photographs are somehow different, I get a lot of pushback (thanks guys) and I have to regroup and try again. This is me trying again, because, damn it, photographs are different.

The most common complaint boils down to “what about photorealistic paintings?” so let us try to address that and see where it leads us.

A photograph (normally) takes us differently than does a painting (normally). A photograph of Margaret Bourke-White out on some art-deco eagle thing on a skyscraper induces vertigo. A painting may also induce vertigo, but it does it either through some sort of abstraction, or by being hyper-realistic and functioning the same way a photograph does. The photograph induces vertigo by directly indicating great height, and our body reacts to that.

A photograph can arouse us sexually (thank you for that specifically, my noble commenter). Again, it does so directly. There is little-to-no leap of imagination here, we see the object of desire, and we feel desire. Again it is a body-reaction, it is somatic. There is a brisk market, I am informed, for pornographic photographs. The market for pornographic animations and drawings is, while surprisingly robust, quite a bit smaller.

You could probably make a similar argument about the somatic experience of revulsion and a sufficiently grotesque photograph, but in the first place I don’t want to think about those photos and in the second place I think you can fill in the details yourself.

Speaking of animation, there is a well-known phenomenon called the uncanny valley. This was first observed with robots: a robot that looks completely unlike a human is fine, as is a robot that looks very much like a human. They can be likable. A robot that looks a lot like a human, but not enough like a human, is disturbing, unpleasant. The same is true for animations (and, one assumes) for drawings of people. There is a region of “similar, but not similar enough” in which we as humans find the renderings unpleasant. One might say, uncanny.

The existence of this “valley” indicates that there are two sides. One might argue that we visually understand the unlike-people drawings in one way, and the like-people drawings in another. Some theories of the uncanny valley (though not all) argue that the valley is induced by a conflict between two different ways of understanding the renderings. We cannot decide if it’s “real” or “drawn” in some sense. Again, though, this argues that there is something different about the way we understand sufficiently realistic renderings.

Allow me to stipulate then that photographs, often or usually, affect us in one way and that paintings and drawings, often or usually, affect us another way.

I am now going to do a Mathematician Trick.

Let us point at the category of stuff that affects us the first way. It’s mostly photographs, but includes hyper-realistic paintings, it includes the output of so-called AI algorithms, and for all I know it includes a few obviously not realistic drawings and so on. It’s a bunch of stuff, but mostly it’s photographs.

Let us also point at the category of everything else, the stuff that doesn’t affect us that way. This includes mostly paintings, drawings, and so on, but also a few photographs. Abstract photographs and, for all I know, a few perfectly realistic photographs that for some reason “don’t work.”

The trick is to simply declare the bunch of stuff we’re interested in to be a category in and of itself, and to name it, and then go to work studying it.

We could make up a fancy word for the first category, “pseudo-photographs” or something, but I think I might just make life simple and call them “fotos” in contrast with “photographs” because, well, that’s what they mostly are.

Maybe a better name that’s less silly sounding, but not too clumsy will occur to me.

Anyways, these creatures are the things I am mostly interested in.

What’s nice about this way to slice things is that it papers over the problem of “well, what’s AI output anyways?” conveniently. While there remain important philosophical questions here, we recognize them as roughly the same questions as “what’s a photorealistic painting anyway?” the only difference being the agent that made the thing.

To a dumb rube like me, who is interested pretty much exclusively in how humans see these things, how humans react to these things, we needn’t much worry about the philosophical details of what’s what. They’re realistic enough to induce the body-sensation of being there, and that’s enough for me.