چكيده لاتين :
Photographic realism has a history as long as photography. It
has always been seen photographers, theorists, philosophers,
semiologists and others, directly or indirectly, have written
or spoken about this issue. 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. Photography, by its
realistic nature, opens two windows into the world: one,
following 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, in order to discover
unobservable entities, enters to fields like metaphysics,
semantics, and epistemology, respectively, to assert
that the world has certain natural structure and mindindependent,
to explain that scientific theories have facevalue
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 descriptions of the
world. When we speak about authenticity in photography,
two important subjects deserve more 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 inference of human agent in mechanical recording.
The scientific approach in photography believes that this
medium, with relying on its technological abilities, can
discover photographic 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. Finally, 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 to transform reality
to a theory and vice versa, and this type of photography is
the convergence point of perceptual, critical and scientific
realism.
