Finding it more difficult to distinguish 'photoshopped' images vs. originals?

[Brian Ellis]

There's currently a controversy going on involving a photograph by Paolo Pellegrin. You can read the details here. http://theonlinephotographer.typepad...blog_index.htm if you're not already familiar with it.

My question: would Pellegrin's photograph (which we'll assume was made with film and originally printed in a darkroom) have been any less "real" if instead of posing the subject and photographing him in the background he had found an image of the subject on some other web site and used Photoshop to move it into a photograph he made of the background?

[Drew Wiley]

Well, now that the allegedly objective NG magazine has been frequently using digital images, quite a few of them do look
really fake, even in a cheesy way. All photography is a species of illusionism, but some folks are better at it than others.
And I personally take a strong philosophical approach of actually wanting to discover something with my own eyes, and then
translate that into a print communicating the same subtle values to the public. If I wanted to paint, I'd use paint brushes
instead! As far as I'm concerned, 99% of the "creative" images out there all have a common characterisitc, namely a big
watermark right in the middle of the image, stating, "Made by an Idiot".

[andrew gardiner]

Even in subjective areas of photography, like art, photography has derived a portion of its power from its credibility as a document or witness. Many of the historical photographs we consider great, or classic, would probably not hold up next to the best paintings of their era, based purely on the strength of the imagery. They get their added value from assumptions that go along with the medium itself: this really happened. The photographer witnessed this. The photographer was able to make the image in this moment.

Absolutely... what Roland Barthes would call the 'this has been' -ness of photography.

[Drew Wiley]

What people actually witness seems to be correlated to what they are smoking or ingesting at the time. Too much time at
a computer and just about all us start hallucinating, or at least get blurry vision. The younger generation probably can't
even survive without a constant IV drip of high fructose corn syrup and MSG. That probably explains how things done in
Fauxtoshop actually start looking normal to these people.

[C. D. Keth]

No, computer illustration involves fabricated resemblance not physical causality like a photograph.

It is physical causality. The 3D model can not happen without the participation of the person being scanned. As for fabricated resemblance, it is the most exact resemblance possible at this time. It's accurate down to a hundredth of a millimeter in all three dimensions. I fail to see how that is less real than a chemical photograph other than you seeming to like it less.

[Maris Rusis]

It is physical causality. The 3D model can not happen without the participation of the person being scanned. As for fabricated resemblance, it is the most exact resemblance possible at this time. It's accurate down to a hundredth of a millimeter in all three dimensions. I fail to see how that is less real than a chemical photograph other than you seeming to like it less.

My apologies. I meant causality in the formal philosophical sense that has been deeply investigated since Aristotle's great original work. Causality is the relationship between an event and its effect. A classic example of physical causality is a footprint in a beach. Footprints happen even if no sentient being (eg a sleepwalker) makes decisions. An example of non-physical causality is when the cold drink machine in the office corridor gives me a can of Coke when I drop a $2 coin in the slot. I would contend that photographs made of light sensitive substances are in a persuasive sense "footprints" of subject matter while 3D printers deliver results only if commanded appropriately. The command to print is no more the physical cause of the 3D printout than the $2 coin is the physical cause of the can of Coke.