ABSTRACT

Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism. Painting and drawing are techniques for producing pictures. Paintings can be as realistic as the most realistic photographs, if realism resides in subtleties of shading, skillful perspective, and so forth; some indeed are virtually indistinguishable from photographs. Even photographic motion pictures in "living color" are manifestly mere projections on a flat surface and easily distinguished from "reality". The author argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between photographs and painted portraits of Abraham Lincoln, that photography is indeed special, and that it deserves to be called a supremely realistic medium. Amidst Bazin's assorted declarations about photography is a comparison of the cinema to mirrors.