I was going to ask you if you could put this question in context, but then today I found your response to Silvergem in the 'Don't Bother to Knock' project comments:
"Only half of the"mind Fuck" was fantasy the answers to the 23 F words were real , always in one take ,unscripted and straight from her heart.The idea was to sink Emma Forrests' storyline into the video diary. The result was that reality and fantasy became very blurred even for Asia and I.*
I wanted people to question the material they were watching as I find it interesting how people will suspend belief when they watch movies but have alot more difficulty doing so when looking at Fashion imagery.
*and still is."
Which is what prompted this thread? I don't think everyone in the audience for 'Don't Bother to Knock' was necessarily wholly convinced that they were being presented with a real video diary, so not everybody was entirely able to suspend disbelief in the way you suggest. In fact, as the project unfurled it became quite clear that it wasn't 'real'. There are filmmakers, like Ken Loach for example (I think!), who work in a similar fashion - preparation for a feature involving a lot of work because scenes are largely unscripted, require improvisation. The essential difference between things like this and 'Don't Bother to Knock' being that the end result is based around a convincing core of truth, a probably reality, but it's still a work of fiction - and clearly presented to its public as such.
You yourself use the word 'deceived' in your question, and isn't this partly the answer? Who likes to be truely deceived? Actually, there is one instance I can think of, off the top of my head, where people expect to be deceived and would be annoyed if they weren't, and this is when watching magicians, but even then the success of this process, and the enjoyment you glean from it (if you like that sort of thing), is knowing you're being deceived but not being able to see or work out how. To rejoin your example, apart from the fact that the audience knows in advance that it's not watching anything factual, nobody seeing 'Matrix' is honestly deceived into thinking that in real life anyone could halt bullets mid-trajectory. And this is partly because the place where Keanu Reeves is capable if this feat is in The Matrix, but also at the same time he's doing that his character's body is lying in a space ship thingy on a funky couch with a big spike plugged into the back of his head, of course. That's the story!
Anyway, could the problem with blurring fantasy and reality, in certain contexts, be that it's dangerously close to mythomania? Authors of any illustrative or fictionally based work - in film, theatre, dance, literature etc - tacitly invite their audiences to meet them half way by suspending disbelief, so could the rule of thumb be that people are only happy to suspend disbelief (for their own pleasure, entertainment, edification) if they are aware in advance that they are going to be hoodwinked?
This doesn't address the part of your question concerning the difference between film and fashion photography (I thought the kind of thing you describe was mainly a problem in photojournalism, as in the recent case of the Reuters photographer suspended for souping up his pix of conflict in Iraq, and - much earlier - the still controversial Robert Capa photo of the Spanish Civil War soldier, for example). But then I wasn't aware of there being any criticism specifically levelled at fashion photography where manipulation of imagery is concerned so I'd still like to ask you for a concrete example? Thanks.
