Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination,
where everything is or should be in the right place and in the right
light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed
to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and
not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.
That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph
is almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, or
something is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or,
if it's coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.
If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them; they hide
what we want to see, or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden.
Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the water
just where we want to see something reflected. That's the way things
actually happen in the real world. But in the world of 'Let's pretend,'
in the world of art, they don't happen so. There everything happens
right, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that might
sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do--which is so
very much better.
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