Rising tide with blue plastic bag

We have little trouble accrediting photography with the ability to produce a "true likeness" a credit that is seldom extended to painting or etching or sculpture. We endow the medium with an evidential quality that only gives way in the face of the most blatant amendment.

The capturing metaphor that we adopt to describe, at least in part, the function of photography has the tendency to suggest a fleetingness to life, a vulnerability at the heart of human existence. Such a suggestion might be true enough but it is also and simultaneously overwhelmed by the volume of images that are assembled during the course of even the shortest life, such a volume ensuring only the most passing attention to its individual parts.

"Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message." (McLuhan 1964)

Photorealism, a sort of bastard child of photography, inherits some but not all of its characteristics and twists them into a new and unique shape of its own. "Evidence" becomes loaded with irony as photorealism challenging us to question our senses or our sense of humour. Photography's intrinsic effect of memorializing is mocked by photorealism as photorealism's own "intrinsic effects" deliver its unique message, for nothing but the imagination of the artist is "captured" by image making in virtual 3D even as the artist feigns "evidence" by virtue of the blood relationship with photography.

With this medium the world appears as it never was but as it might have been or yet might be, the "unique message" of photorealism aptly communicating the uncertainty of post-human times.