Parallels
Filed under Essay.
“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”
I'm moving through an overcrowded market square, somewhere in Martinique, I think. I don't even know anymore. Everywhere I look the light plays tricks on me, deep shadows carving bodies and structures and...
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Bureaucrats stumbling in their own labyrinth. Such hubris. They fractured reality and lost control. They were always going to lose control...
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The concept of shooting virtual worlds isn't new. I've been experimenting with this for years—I just never bothered moving the images out of our PS4 until a couple of weeks ago.
The question hanging over these images is obvious: do we consider this photography? The answer, I guess, depends on how we define the art form. If it's a series of decisions and reactions leading to an image; if it's based on capturing a changing environment around us, using tools to freeze a moment as it's evolving...then yes, this is photographic.
The images you see here aren't screen grabs of pre-programmed (and pre-composed) scenes. Most high-end immersive games now include a Photo Mode which usually provides the traditional controls we expect: focal length, aperture, exposure compensation. Entering this mode freezes the moment and allows us to re-position the camera in the virtual space (the way we'd reposition ourselves), change settings, focus etc. In some cases we can control the environment itself, changing the weather or the time of day...things we obviously couldn't do IRL. In this case, it becomes quite different from shooting reality. We don't control reality. Unless we're in a studio... in which case... hmm.
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I barely made it. They came out of nowhere, dozens of them, clawing—I had to run, hide and wait. This was the nearest building. It's abandoned, of course, but that's probably for the best. Encounters don't usually end well out here. I still feel electrified and bursting with chemicals, but there's a quiet beauty to these rooms and it helps me breathe again. I need more bullets...
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Can I still do this? Leave her behind again? This mirror... I just can't look at myself anymore...
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The impulse, however, remains eerily similar. When I'm moving inside an open-world game, the "need" to shoot is triggered by the very same factors and emotions that affect me in everyday life: light, people, objects, geometry; how all of these interact. When I hit pause I've already seen an image in my mind—I know WHY I'm there, in Photo mode, I know which settings to change, where to position the camera. And yet there still exists a chaotic, unknown element that will influence the final results: some images will work better than others, some will be dismissed entirely.
So I can't help thinking that, at its core, this image-making process isn't all that different.
But it can get even closer to the real thing.
Red Dead Redemption 2—one of the most engaging games I've ever played—doesn't just rely on a Photo Mode: you can equip a camera, in which case nothing stops, nothing freezes. You simply walk around, capturing life as it moves in front of your lens. You miss shots. You grab others you weren't expecting. I remember standing on a corner, on the streets of fictional Saint-Denis, framing a picture and waiting for someone I'd noticed to pass in front of me. And then hearing a horse, turning around and hitting the shutter, scrambling to run further away to get another angle. I remember people noticing me if I wasn't careful, breaking that fourth wall.
In those moments, I was reacting to a beauty over which I had no control. I was not God in some parallel universe.
I was a photographer.
There's a new generation of consoles coming, ready to push the boundaries of photorealism. There is AR and VR. Maybe fears about the future of photography are irrelevant. Maybe our craft will morph to encompass vast worlds, richer and stranger than the one we inhabit.
But we'll still weave our stories, we'll still interpret what we see.
It is, after all, the human thing to do.
P.S Images captured in Uncharted 4, Control, The Last Of Us Part II, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Ghost of Tsushima.
