Years ago, a Japanese inflight magazine did a series of interviews with writers and publishers set up around the idea of fiction vs. non-fiction. One of the people interviewed was a publisher of delectable art books featuring nature who maintained he published only nonfiction. But even the most representational of the flower paintings was not a real flower but a fictionalized version, filtered through the eyes and hands of an artist. The lines between fiction and nonfiction are necessarily blurred. All fiction contains nonfiction and vice versa. There may be absolute truth and objective reality, but surely it is beyond humans in their current incarnation to tell. We are too biased, too limited, and too easily tricked, even without the wizardry of photoshop.
Look at these.
The first is indeed a photograph–of a black and white line drawing by Paul Lung. Here is another he did.
The second is a painting within a photograph. The woman and the furniture have been painted to look like an oil by Alexa Meade, who then photographed the results.
Another by Meade.
[via cracked.com]
