The idea that man is obsessed with realism stems from this desire to capture life, but painting as well as photography is an art form therefore involving an artist's judgement and controlled by a person. It was not until the early 19th century that photography became a possibility and images were captured straight onto silver copper plate at first (Louis Daguerre, 1836) and later onto silver chloride paper (Fox Talbot - Talbotypes, 1839). In 1887 Hannibal Goodwin invented the celluloid film which was an important step in the creation of cinema, but these photos were black and white and due to the immobility of early camera equipment they were very contrived. Many scientists and photographers wanted more realism and many early attempts at creating moving images came about. The Zoetrope' or Daedulum is one of the earliest devices to show a moving image but was very rudimentary and could only show a fraction of a second of movement repeating over and over. Even the Fusil Photographique' of Marré (1882) could only capture a very small amount of movement by taking multiple still photographs. It was not until the invention of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope that moving images could be displayed for public viewing and even then it was only viewable by one person at a time. The Lumiere brother's invention in 1895 of the Cinématographe, a combined camera and projector, allowed them to screen to large audiences and for the first time allowed collective viewing such as we have today, using film as a form of entertainment rather than a medium of purely capturing reality.
André Bazin suggested that "photography and the cinema [ ] are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in it's very essence, our obsession with realism'. Reality itself is that which is real. The things we see around us is reality. Realism on the other hand is an aesthetic and artistic concept, it is the recreation of reality through some medium such as painting, sculpture or even film.
