My visits to art museums cause serious fatigue on the extremities, especially my feet. I try to keep my focus from wandering from the art to the pain of walking through the endless rooms of the exhibits. Even when I can focus on the art at hand, my mind should not dwell on its realism. Nobody thinks that the painting of “Washington Crossing Delaware” or the “Mona Lisa” are exact representations of that event or person. Paintings are not considered that realistic. The nature of paintings spans a spectrum from completely bogus (modern art) to realism.

In the 20th century, a new term was coined to describe realistic art: photorealism. Viewers could now compare art to the new standard of reality: photos. But are even those photos realistic?

Our perception of most landmarks, people and events in the world come from photos or paintings. One major landmark I have yet to see is the Eiffel Tower, so I set out on a journey to see it myself without paying the $700 plane ticket from JFK to Paris. Luckily, students at my school, The King’s College, visited Paris last summer. That was my starting point. Those students had all seen the tower. They must truly know its grandeur.

I asked Caroline Judd, a junior majoring in Media, Culture and the Arts, to describe the Eiffel Tower. Judd struggled to put the Eiffel Tower into a cohesive description. She described it as “a tower, and it’s got a wide base with four legs and then narrows at the top. Also, at the top, it goes into the ball thing and then becomes a needle.”

After I formed this image in my head, I can confidently say I understood the basic look of the tower, at least the structure Judd claimed to see. Words, indeed, can paint. Nevertheless, you still need someone to actually put the expo marker to the whiteboard and draw the tower. Because I have no drawing capabilities, I enlisted Judd and Matthew Peterson, a freshman majoring in Journalism, Culture and Society with a disposition for artistic endeavors who has never seen the tower in person.

I had Judd draw the tower from her memory of her visit on a whiteboard. I instructed Peterson to draw a tower based on Judd’s description on the other side of the board. This experiment would determine how well Judd conveyed the look of the Eiffel Tower with her words and whether I and others could know the tower from a mere tourist’s perspective.

The results were quite shocking. Peterson drew a tower that looked like an alien vessel that the Biden Administration would shoot down off the coast of South Carolina.

Judd’s drawing did a fair job of recreating the tower, which matches the image in our minds – except for one important part: the ball. So much for MCA majors.

Somehow, Judd’s memory of the Eiffel Tower has a ball below the needle. I could find no evidence to corroborate this assertion. Josiah DeBoer, a junior majoring in Religious and Theological Studies, commented on Judd’s drawing.

“The Eiffel Tower is not a water tower,” DeBoer said.

Jordan Story, a freshman majoring in Business, chimed in, “There’s not a [ball]; it is a rectangular prism.”

I had one more test. Maybe Peterson simply did a poor job interpreting Judd’s vague descriptions. So I did what every online journalist and content creator is currently obsessed with: I ran Judd’s description through an AI that attempts to translate text into images.

I asked Peterson if he thought DALL-E 2 could produce a better drawing of the tower. Peterson’s response was a decisive “no.”

Photo Credit: Avian Hall – Screenshot from DALL-E 2 interface.

The winner of the best drawing clearly goes to Judd. The battle for last place is contentious. Peterson and DALL-E 2 seemingly fail to understand Judd’s descriptions.

I wanted to know what the Eiffel Tower looked like truly, so I searched for a painting of the famous Parisian landmark. A Google search later —like I said, art museums cause extreme pain in the feet — I found an early painting of the Eiffel Tower by George Seurat, a French artist. It indeed confirmed my basic perception of the Eiffel Tower’s structure. There was still a major problem. It was lots of dots of paint on a canvas. Pointillism sparks my imagination but does not satisfy my desire for a realistic representation of the tower. Also, the top of the tower is not clear. It blends with the sky. This made it extremely hard to negate Judd’s claim that the top of the tower has a ball.

Photo Credit: Georges Seurat, Public Domain

I caved. I did the inevitable, what most people would have done from the start. I found a photograph of the tower. But wait! Oh, no! My perception of the tower had been wrong! Judd must have never visited the tower! She had lied to me. My sources were compromised. Did she even visit Paris? Are her photos of her visiting Paris also deceptions?

Judd made no mention of the ravine that is below the Eiffel Tower. The picture showed the tower's legs stretched across a ravine, and below the tower was a busy street where cars pass back and forth. I clicked on the photo in the google images search to read the headline of the article associated with the photo: “People are falling into a ravine that opened up under the Eiffel Tower!” My heart dropped.

We are turning a blind eye to the deaths caused by what most people consider an icon of Paris. No magnificent architecture is worth any number of casualties. I opened the article, ready to read about this horrifying scandal. I scrolled past the title. Then, I stopped. The subtitle read, “‘Trick of the Eye’ is the latest addition to the street art scene in Paris.”

I had been deceived again by art. This photo was of a piece of street art creating an illusion of a ravine—a form of art capturing another form of art that was trying to add to the art of architecture. Even photography could take liberties to convey something bigger.

I had long held the perception that my photography should be as realistic as possible. A photo should be a reflection of what the human eye sees. I had a built-up resentment toward editing. I thought that there was a sense of expected realism from photography. If I were to edit my photos away from reality, I would compromise the art of not compromising reality. Outside of being pretty much impossible, my obsession with realism destroyed the possibility of creativity.

Art is not about precisely portraying how something appears. The next time I look at a photo of some picturesque snow-peaked mountain with a dark night sky and stars glowing, I must remind myself of the artistic process that occurred for the picture to be formed. It likely had an extremely long shutter speed, surpassing the amount of light the human eye brings in. After that, the photographer likely imported it into Lightroom, adjusted contrast, tweaked exposure, de-hazed the haze, brightened the shadows, and applied his fancy preset that he sells in a pack on his website for fifty dollars.

If I jumped on a plane to Paris today and took a photo of the Eiffel Tower, I would not be worried about making sure that my photo is exactly what my eyes see. If some crazy college-aged photographer asks me when I get home from Paris what the Eiffel Tower looks like, will I say, “This is the Eiffel Tower”? Yes, I probably will. Otherwise, I would have to explain this whole article to them.

At the end of the day, Judd’s description aligns with the reality that the Eiffel Tower is a tower with four legs that become slimmer at the top and goes to a point (ignoring her perception that there is a ball on the Eiffel Tower for the sake of argument).

My picture does not truly capture reality. My picture is instead a creative representation of the Eiffel Tower. My process of taking and editing the photo would include different ways of trying to convey the mood or effect that the tower had on me.

My photo will never replace seeing the tower. No photo, painting, or AI creation can recreate reality. No matter what social media trends tell us, nothing can BeReal unless it is real.

There is a place to create art to try and convey reality. But I hope we never lose the desire to live in reality and see the Eiffel Tower… and take pictures of it.

Photography is a Lie. Seeing is Seeing. And Art is Expressive.