Is photography an approximation of reality?

Yes. Always has, always will be. I mean, nothing in our world is two dimensional.

Sometimes I like to try to represent the world as accurately as I can. I like the feeling of recording an event. These photos get minimal modification: denoise, hot pixel removal, white balance, crop, rotation, exposure compensation.

Other times I just like creating art. Sometimes I modify my photos so much that they aren’t even recognizable any more. The photo was just an inspiration, a catalyst that sparked off a series of experiments that resulted in a final piece that cannot be called a photo, but is still a valid piece of art.

Is photography real anymore

Just as real as anything else. It just happens to be a flat thing with tone and colour that you can look at, like a painting or a map.

Are we really capturing a true image of reality when we press that shutter release button, or is it just an approximation of reality?

A photograph is just an abstract representation of light and surface from a point view, it’s up to the viewer to decide if it depicts something ‘real’.

And, where / when do we (I, you, or whomever) draw the line between a ‘photograph’ and a ‘graphic arts project’?

I useful way to describe photography is “lens-based arts” - that draws a relatively clear line in the sand.

Photomontage has also been a thing for a long time, one of the earliest examples being the Cottingley Fairies. Whether it is achieved in camera, in the darkroom or on a computer doesn’t seem to matter much.

Lastly, while historically artistic value has always been a criteria for evaluation of a photograph, has this criteria changed now such that it allows for incorporation of elements which aren’t real, or aren’t possible?

This can be answered by responses to the other questions, but if you showed me a “pure” photograph, I could turn it around and show you a photograph that “isn’t real” and describe the ways the light and materials have been manipulated along the way.

It’s worth mentioning that truth and reality can exist in purely fictional compositions. There is no bright line between clearly real, or purely documentary, and total fantasy… it’s a broad spectrum.

For photography to be real anymore it would have needed to be real at some point in the past. It wasn’t. It has at most been a reasonable approximation of reality, but sometimes pretty far. How is B&W photography real? The world is in color. Using color filters when shooting B&W would alter relative tonal relationships at the time of exposure. There’s your in camera image manipulation long before digital cameras were invented.

OK, B&W isn’t real, but color is. Nope. Every color stock reproduced the color world differently depending on the sensibilities of the chemists who developed the emulsion. If they were all different, which one of those realities was really real?

Film is tangible and electronic impulses are not. That’s the only difference.

The word that comes to mind is bias.

It’s inescapable. The simple act of deciding what to include and what not to include in your shot is shaping whatever slice of reality you’re trying to capture. From your position. Literally from your mindset. From your subjective aesthetic. From your focal length. With your film stock. With your camera’s sensor. With the characteristics of your lens. With your camera’s “Out of camera” processed JPEGs. With your processed RAW files.

We’re working with two-dimensional representations of frozen moments in time here — also not reality.

Plus technical limitations (dynamic range).

Not to mention that even if you could record your reality, we really have no way of knowing if it matches someone else’s.

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The takeaway is that it doesn’t matter. Photos make us think, feel, remember. All fuzzy things that are hard to define.