“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when lying next to the old Skin Horse in the nursery… “Real isn’t how you are made, ” said the Skin Horse, “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes, ” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful, “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once, ” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.”…. “once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

text above from “The Velveteen Rabbit, or how toys become real.” by Margery Williams.

Authenticity in this context might be defined as a photograph of a subject that is not posing for the camera. A staged photograph would then imply the opposite, namely that the subject photographed is aware and affected by the presence of the photographer. Of course, dead subjects have no consciousness, but they become authentic by being photographed as they are found, in other words, the photographer does not physically change the objects he intends to photographs.

Then there is of course the gray area where one can talk about degrees of authenticity. Very few photographs can be all authentic, just as there will be something authentic present in every staged photograph. But I won’t explore this subject further as it becomes too much of a philosophical exercise in this context.

This sadly needs a lot more words to fully explore in detail. We should meet in a bar and drink some wine some day…

Authenticity is just one of many criterias by which one can “value” photographs, but as a finale example: If this photograph ( http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/jn/slides/g22.html ) by James Nachtwey was staged it would have a significant impact on how one would interpret and value the image. But I completely agree with Joerg that authenticity should by no means be the only and most significant factor in which one judges the value of photography in general!

And the point is exactly that people assume certain things about a photo – especially w.r.t. what they like to call “reality” – which, when you take it apart, doesn’t make any sense, because unlike what many people want to believe no photo comes with “authenticity” or whatever else you want to call it. When you see a photo there’s no way to tell whether what you see is real or has really happened or not. So this whole distinction between staged photography and street photography does not make any sense.

But I think I’m repeating myself – probably because I’m not explaining it very well – so I’ll stop here (and won’t comment on this any further).

I have to rely on others here, winogrand-a photograph is a new fact

the camera absolutely transforms. The world is three dimensional, the photo, is two, yet it is a depiction of three dimensional space, and in our minds, we reconstruct another (separate) three dimensional space.

I agree, our minds do some of it, but the camera (the optics, the compression of light values, the transformation of color to bw or color to processed colour, the added noise) transforms reality into a “picture” which is something else. it is another fact.

If I understand you are saying the authenticity is “supposed” or assumed, so yes, examine that commonplace, but there are reasons why, the ones papageorge speaks about.

You say that “the camera transforms facts into other facts in a way that the mind does not”, but I’d object to that statement (since it doesn’t make sense). The transformation (assuming there is one) is not done in the camera – what part of the camera does the work? is there a little device inside the camera for that? – it’s done in the mind, with the mind.

are you about to say there is nothing real? only our perceptions of reality? pure phenomenology?

also ‘street photography” or whatever you wish to call it is not the same as taking a walk on the street. The camera transforms facts into other facts in a way that the mind does not. Otherwise, why the power of art made in this way? It’s is sort of like saying, you want poetry, take a tour through the dictionary…same words, but nothing else.

once you start taking apart the meanings of things they cease to have meaning. There is such a thing as an authentic experience, authentic art, etc, of course they are subjective to the individual. I saw the film RIZE last night-and one of the premises of it has to do with authenticity, not the “aura” of authenticity, and as one of the participants explained, you know it when you see it, there is no school, there is only practice. If you don’t clown or crump one day and come back to it, we all know, you have not been keeping up…etc. This is very ‘street photography”-it is a practice more than anything, and observing it is not the same as doing.

There is a lot of constructed photography that I like, I think I tend to like constructions that have to do with processes, elements, perception, (form) and I tend to not like constructions that have to do with narrative (content).

So here is a question, is there an authentic construction?

this is everything-authenticity is the straw man in the argument here.

Increasingly our world is about the aura of experience and not experience itself. Fashion, style, wealth, privilege, the art world, advertising, are all about establishing an aura, or facsimile of something,-and necessarily it is divorced from the “real thing”-your real experience has to become separate from you so it can be sold back to you as if you ever lost it.
Aura’s are easy, cheap, reproducible, they are like currency, they are negotiable, transactional, ephemeral. The reason that photography has its power is that it creates a fact out of a fact, this is the only authenticity you can have. Creating a fact out of a fiction is only the next best thing.