Cameras have never "captured the real world" in the sense of approximating what we see.
We never see static images of the world; we have a rather narrow field of vision and move our eyes constantly. So whatever we perceive of the world is basically a function of our attention. Remember those videos where volunteers perform some complicated collective task and fail to see a gorilla passing right between them.
Photos in contrast are static (the photographer has to hint towards the attention-point structure he thinks that reflects what attracted his eye in first place by framing and lighting) and two-dimensional (so the photographer has to select a focus structure that, again, hints at the attention-point structure).
This is why photos of crowds (think of the masses on the streets after the earthquake in Mexico) are either art-level pieces that basically employ the pictorial language of classical paintings; or don't seem to represent the story at all.
We never see static images of the world; we have a rather narrow field of vision and move our eyes constantly. So whatever we perceive of the world is basically a function of our attention. Remember those videos where volunteers perform some complicated collective task and fail to see a gorilla passing right between them.
Photos in contrast are static (the photographer has to hint towards the attention-point structure he thinks that reflects what attracted his eye in first place by framing and lighting) and two-dimensional (so the photographer has to select a focus structure that, again, hints at the attention-point structure).
This is why photos of crowds (think of the masses on the streets after the earthquake in Mexico) are either art-level pieces that basically employ the pictorial language of classical paintings; or don't seem to represent the story at all.