Realism in Photography: From the Perceptual to the Scientific

Photographic realism has a history as long as photography. It has always been seen that photographers, theorists, philosophers, semiologists and others, directly or indirectly, have written or spoken about this matter. However, this issue is still open and controversial. Realism, in its philosophical definition, is affirmation of entities independent of our thoughts and senses. The process of photography, in itself, is a suitable place for incarnation of this attitude. The photography, by its realistic nature, opens two window into the world: one, in the follow of our vision but through suggestion of various contiguities; other, for development and expansion of our knowledge. The perceptual realism proposes that the objects of our environment are subjects of our perception; that is, the thing we perceive with our senses has real and objective existence and is independent of our perceptions. The conceptual realism is a matter about real existence of genera. In scientific realism, it is supposed that objects of confirmed theories, including unobservable entities, exist objectively. In fact, scientific realism, to discover of unobservable entities, enters to fields like metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology, respectively, to assert that the world has certain natural structure and mind-independent, to explain that scientific theories have face-value and truth-conditioned descriptions of observable and unobservable things, and to claim epistemologically that mature and predictively successful scientific theories are well-confirmed and approximately true of the world. When we speak about authenticity in photography, two important subjects appears to need most attention: the medium of photography and the photographer. As much as it concerns to the latter, intentionality of the photographer, politics of representation, mainstream culture of the era, demands and needs of audience/viewer, opportunities and challenges, and so on, can lead to different conclusions. The former, which is related to recording tool, has always been confronted with objective and pure recording of reality. In other words, the so-called photographic realism follows the expectation which believes that photograph is something the real viewer sees no difference between that and his/her lived and perceived reality. In photography, perceptual realism involves similarity of the object of a photograph to one’s visual perception of the same object, to say that, something beyond confirmation of a thing’s existence in front of the camera— likeness. This likeness needs to be free of any infer of human agent in mechanical recording. The scientific approach in photography believes that this medium, with relying on its technological abilities, can discover act as an assistant to our visual perception system and make the unobservable observable. In this paper, it is attempted to study the perceptual and the scientific in photography, and to analyze comparatively different opinions of the theorists who accept or deny transparency of photographs. At last, by description of realistic realism in photography and epistemological analysis of capabilities of this medium, it will be concluded that in realistic photography it is possible that the reality be transformed to a theory and vice versa, and this type of photography is convergence point of perceptual, critical and scientific realism.