Do pictures lie?

Disclaimer:

I admire all the wonderful photos on LTHForum, and the food porn gets me all lathered up. But I have this nagging doubt about what role they do, and should, play in my thoughts about places.

Let me try to explain.

The Bride and I have had an ongoing argument about Princess Di and Prince Charles - she thinks he is a big jerk and Di was a wonderful person. My routine response is to challenge this - her opinion is, in my opinion, based on how photogenic one is. He might be a really nice guy and she might have been a totally hard-assed... and we would never know, because the pictures and media coverage associated with them took on a life of their own based primarily on hwo well they pohotograph (IMO, admittedly), and do not necessarily have much to do with the reality. It is impossible for us to know.

On a related note, and bringing this closer to home, before I found the Bride and total happiness, I briefly dated a food stylist, whose job was to make food pretty for photos, so I know that those beautiful, mouth-watering pictures one sees are usually not of food that one would really want to eat. I have looked behind that curtain and seen what is there.

Of course, some may say I also have a personal axe to grind here, since I am not a very good photographer, and the whole process of posting and linking to photos seems a pain to me. But that is not the main point since I love the photos others post.

I just wonder how much the pictures do, and should, influence my opinion of a place. You see, I know that a photograph does lie - it presents itself as an objective representation of reality, but it really is a very personal representation of the photographer's view of something - more polemic than description, if you will, I wonder about all this.

Some will respond, quite properly, by asking what we can trust. Certainly the words do not convery anything other than a subjective view. To that I would reply, yes, and no. It is possible to do a more objective and analytical report verbally, IMO, though I am not sure how often that is done here, and doubt that people want that either. But more importantly, the words do not lie in the way photos do, by presenting themselves as purely representational, while actually being nothing of the sort.

End of Platonic musing on the nature of reality for the nonce. Please return to eating well and reporting on it, with good pix, and let this fall into the obscurity it deserves. But it has been bugging me lately since while I enjoy the artifice of a pleasing appearance as much as the next guy or girl, I like to think I avoid being unduly influenced by that artifice.

I try to take photos that seem to me to sum up what a place is about:





or to portray the food in an unstyled manner that vividly conveys the flavor and texture:





So it's my point of view, certainly, but no more so than my words; it may or may not succeed at being so evocative, but again, no more so than my words. If it looks great but actually sucked, I'll either skip the photo (why glorify the sucky?) or at least note the fact.

The key, I think, is to NOT do what commercial photographers do, and make everything look the same, plated the same (I picked out the pieces I shot at Cal Pep above, but I didn't style them in the classic fashion), and basically dressed in a way that shimmers but doesn't really look that edible. I take pictures of the food as an extension of relating my honest experience, and hopefully, at least, don't put up pictures that don't do so honestly.

Gary's caption on the image in this post about Hecky's should ably answer the original question.