Reality, Fiction and Different Ways Of Seeing

“Photography is the inventory of mortality... photographs show people as being so irrefutably there.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography

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Ifat

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Our latest model shows off her impressive Blowfish lip job

Have a look at the above two photographs. Similar pose, similar lighting, but very different art-forms. Or are they? Without doubt photographers will prefer the photograph, and the CGI artists will prefer the render. But what’s the difference?

Well, I’m entirely new to this CGI thingy, but I’ll have a bash at analysing the two.

The photograph captured the mood and expression of the model in a split second in time. Click. Instant art. On the other hand, the CGI image took three days to get the pose and lighting right and for Rich to create the base image, and then an additional day to render the whole thing, and it’s not even rendered to the highest resolution either. To render this to the best quality that Rich could do it, it would take about forty hours on a quad processor server. At this point, photographers would say, “Why bother? Just take the damn photo instead.”

Because I’ve lived and breathed photography for a couple of years now, my natural bias is towards a photograph being superior to a render. No matter how good the CGI image is, I can always tell the difference. Reality triumphs fiction every time. To me, photographs are real, alive, exact, they record the moment and they capture the mood and emotion of the model in a way that a render never could. The reality of a photograph is, IMO, what makes it such a powerful art-form compared to CGI. However that’s just my uneducated opinion. Rich would just say that the reasons for looking at both are different. They have different objectives. Just because I prefer a photograph doesn’t make it superior, it just means that both types of art communicate a different message and in a different way. Each requires a different way to see.

With a photograph the viewer can imagine himself in the same room as a gorgeous nekkid chick. She’s a real woman, tangible, mortal, he can fantasise about her, admire her as a person rather than an inanimate object. She is shown in the best possible light, the photograph emphasises her beauty and form, and most importantly the image is very personal. In the case of a portrait nude, a photograph would convey emotion, and it would create an emotional response from the viewer. This emphasis on capturing reality is why photography is so darn powerful. A photograph goes way beyond a simple recording device – it communicates both emotion and truth captured in a single moment in time.

None of that reality happens with CGI. The model is quite obviously a work of fiction. It’s more like a painting, a surreal representation that conveys an entirely different message. You don’t fantasise about being with a CGI chick. Instead you might note that the image resembles a real photograph (apart from the lips - clearly they are not of this world), but it is still always “close but not quite.” That doesn’t mean you can’t be moved by a nude render of course. Believe me I’ve seen some CGI erotica that has made me incredibly horny, but I wouldn’t fantasise about being with a character in a render because it’s not real. Instead I would fantasise about being in that scenario myself. My imagination extrapolates and creates the story. How would I feel if it were me doing that?

CGI is in its infancy at the moment. But what happens in the future? I’ve seen how fast this technology is developing, and I’m telling you that after a couple of years (probably less) of Rich practising and developing CGI erotica, the skill, technology and genre will develop to such an extent that you, the viewer, simply won’t be able to tell if the model is real or virtual. Already there are talented photographic artists who use both photographs and rendering to create powerful artistic images, which don’t classify as either photographs or CGI, but a combination of both art-forms. Photoshop was just the start. Every month new software is being developed which will allow artists to further blur the lines between the two. One day, not too far from now, your brain simply won’t recognise that it isn’t a real person in the image, and you will respond to it as you would to a photograph. This bending of reality has major implications for the future of both photography and painting, as well as movies and other mixed media.

Because Rich is such a mischievous soul, it’s his aim to practise both photography and CGI, but to confuse the two. He intends to continue with his photography for the next few years (hurrah! I’m happy again!) but he also wants to become so darn good at CGI that you fantasise about the render as you would a real woman. With time, (a lot of) effort and technology, he believes that her features will eventually be so realistic that you will barely be able to tell the difference. He wants to blur reality and fiction, combine the two and use both camera and computer as tools to manipulate reality.

A bold claim of course, and he has a long way to go. Let’s see if he can pull it off. Knowing Rich I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the experiment as much as we’re going to.

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Images are of Ifat. One and Three are real (just checking.)