More than a few years ago I created an entire body of work by combining multiple images to create a fantasy world. The project was called “The Labyrinth.” What made this project so successful is I was able to make the photographs “believably unbelievable.” It took me a long time to be able to come up with that phrase to describe what I learned to do in photoshop. What peeves me now is that I found a perfectly good word that describes what I worked to achieve. The word is verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the illusion of reality: a thing that is not real, but which seems realistic. That is exactly what the Labyrinth photographs were.
I think it is an important word, because so much of photography, digital imaging and especially motion pictures employ verisimilitude. As photographers, we are more aware of this than civilians, so much so, that I routinely think that any image I see is probably not a single unretouched photograph.
Maybe I didn’t get too photographic today, but at least I have one more wonderful word to use in our daily conversation.
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