Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]

 ... what is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism—the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image. 
 Straight photography has always represented just one tradition of photography; it always coexisted with equally popular traditions where a photographic image was openly manipulated and was read as such. Equally, there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continue to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred. Digital technology does not subvert “normal” photography because “normal” photography never existed. 
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