Photography and Fiction

[claudiocambon]

To me photography is all about making a fiction believable, plausible.

Bill Jay did a book where he claimed to have found a series of nudes at a London flea market, which instead....

Duane Michals' narratives are fictional as a narrative, although they are not posing as anything else.

[Maris Rusis]

There is a tension in the art world between the gallery display of an actual assemblage, installation, tableaux, or performance versus a photograph of the same.

Personally I would prefer to see the real thing unless the photograph brings something to the viewing experience that mere looking cannot.

I suspect that the use of photographs in many cases is prompted by the fact that assemblages, installations, etc..., are awkward to set up, difficult to transport, and a nightmare to store and market. Photographs are much easier to vend to collectors.

[AF-ULF]

Kirk,

Have you explored the work of Wright Morris? He published three books he called "photo-texts". My favorite is "The Home Place." Every other page is a photo, which stands independent of the text. Together, the test and photos create a whole greater than the text or photos create alone.

[Brian Ellis]

Great examples of pre-Photoshop cutting and pasting by both Robinson and Rejlander. Of course we could do it a little faster today. IIRC it took Rejlander about about two years to make his image. Each individual in it is a separate photograph. Robinson's is less elaborate, he only had to paste the sky and the man into his.