January 18, 2015

Authentic definition:

entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience, reliable, trustworthy, not fake or copied.

The appearance of posed, young and old good looking people in a photograph doesn’t mean authentic.  It seems to me that imagery is becoming more and more homogenized in this look a like selfie culture.

Authentic, real, natural looking people are all advertising descriptions that companies want to see in their ads to sell their particular product.  If you have to describe your experience while living it you are not experiencing it as authentic you are putting words as a barrier to that experience and thus losing authenticity.  

Authentic is a symbol and abstract concept disguised as the real deal to appeal to a perceived lifestyle and to be exploited and commercialized by ad men to sell their products.  Just like the American flag is used to sell patriotism and loyalty etc…

The ad men laugh at authenticity because they know the end game in using these real looking subjects is sales, period.

Authenticity is living in the present tense and enjoying the moment.  Opening your senses to the sounds, smells, light and feelings that are brought forth when in the presence of natures beauty.  And connecting with your subject first hand not through a hand held device. You don’t get authenticity through the appearance of authenticity in a photograph but only in the intense relationship with your subject.

A photograph is a copy. It is a copy of a scene, an artifact of something that happened. It is a copy of a live experience not the experience itself.  

In being present in the environment you felt, heard and sensed the present moments and felt it first hand.  Not a secondary experience through a photograph or video.

Photography in today’s social media frenzy is entertainment not authentic.  It needs to be visually exciting to attract the visually illiterate to spend a few seconds looking at the subject.

Just the word authentic has lost all meaning. If everything is authentic then nothing is.

Photographs like words can be taken out of context and are used deliberately to confuse or mislead the viewer.

What limits the appearance of authenticity is the motive behind the image creator. If you think about truthfulness as authentic then nothing in image creating is authentic. We yank the subject from it’s mooring in time and lose the moments before and after the shutter was tripped. Was the moment before or after the shutter was tripped more authentic.  Through personal influences and personal choices we filter out the details we don’t like and add the ones that we like. These are not authentic, factual, genuine, or trustworthy, objective truths. These are personal decisions by the photographer to express his vision of what he sees as his truth.

The photographer looks for subjects that interest him.  He explores his environment and begins to make a connection to subjects that appear because he is conscious of the details being presented.  He selects these details and his timing to create his inner connections from past explorations through a mechanical device.  The created scene is only authentic to the photographer.  The details in the scene will connect with some viewers because they see the similarities in details as important clues for themselves as well.  And this connection to the image is authentic for them only in as much as they can connect with the message being presented.

Truth is in a photograph if the image represents the purpose intended by the image creator. But the resulting image is a by product of not the real internal intensity, a revelation not the actual.  A photograph is an appearance of something not the real physical appearance. The image isn’t authentic but has the appearance of something real to viewers that can see and feel the clues given to them by the image creator.