ABSTRACT
Increasingly car companies are publishing press pictures and advertisements that offer for sale a car that is not yet in production. If no physical model of the car exists to purchase and drive on the road as shown for example in the press picture in Figure CS5.1 how has it been photographed? The answer frequently lies in using a computer simulation of the new car. The use of simulated photo-real images of objects raises issues around the authenticity of the image (for a more in-depth discussion of ‘The Constructed Image’ see Chapter 4). Such questions form a significant part of the history of pictorial representation. Photography is haunted by the question of ‘the real’ and in the case of advertising the collaborative work of the art director and photographer compounds the sense of not really knowing what is there. One is tempted to say that advertising photographs are ‘designed’ or constructed. For product and car photography the production team has evolved to include a digital artist incorporating computergenerated imagery (CGI) into the photograph.
