Christopher Howse

Charles Saatchi’s photo play

The Naked Eye plays some remarkable games with pictures. But what does it amount to?

‘For most of us, ballet is simply a bore’, says Charles Saatchi — except when photographed by Tatiana Mikhina 
issue 23 November 2013

The game that Charles Saatchi plays in The Naked Eye is to find photographs of subjects that look surprisingly like something else. A stork in mid-flight seems to have a jet-trail streaming from it; an ant silhouetted on the rim of a cup seems to be the same size as a helicopter hovering in the sky next to it. An elephant, if you really suspend disbelief, looks as though it is balancing on outstretched trunk (but it was done, with the help of a taxidermist, by Daniel Firman, who wanted, for some reason, to show what an elephant might do in low enough gravity).

One of the book’s rules is that the images must not be Photoshopped, though since photographic images have been manipulated since they were first invented, there is no universal law that says hidden wires are more honest than computer-generated images.

Some of the photographs here simply show unusual events.

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