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Smoke And Mirrors : Manipulated Realities

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Smoke and Mirrors: Manipulated Realities Photography is an art form that plays with the mind. Photographs are perhaps one of the most layered and contradictory objects we can see around us. They represent reality, but yet somehow they don’t - they don’t capture the whole of reality, rather just a snapshot of it. There is always a constant battle going on between the two photographic considerations: make the photographed object look as beautiful as possible or tell the truth. What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, but it proves to somehow represent it. This treacherous and ambiguous relationship with reality is what makes photography interesting, yet so astounding; it raises questions about the …show more content…

van den Born’s “social experiment” makes one wonder if actually going to South East Asia for 5 weeks would have been a more worthwhile endeavor, but one would be remiss in thinking so. Van den Born states that her trip was actually a school project meant to showcase how Facebook doesn 't accurately reflect what people are genuinely doing or how they are living. Speaking to media in her home country, she said: “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.” Ultimately, van den Born’s project addresses the definition of "reality." It is no doubt that people are constantly sharing images from their vacations and daily lives, but, her project begs the question, how much of it is real? While we necessarily don’t spend hours in Photoshop for sharing ordinary photos; however, we are building, rather fabricating, our own little story that we choose to post on social media to share with the

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