In this essay, I will explore the nature of photographs by comparing them with handmade paintings, as well as by comparing traditional film photography with digital photography, and I shall concentrate on the question of realism. Several different notions can be distinguished here. Are photographs such that they depict the world in a “realist” or a “factive” way? Do they show us the world as it is with accuracy and reliability other types of pictures do not possess? Do they allow us, as some have suggested, to literally see the world through them? Below, I will distinguish three kinds of realism about photographs, reject two, and partly endorse one. Indeed, the label “realism,” when concerning photographs, can stand for a variety of very different claims. The first (and quite obvious) distinction to start with concerns what the realist thesis is about: the claim that somehow photographs are more accurate or more reliable or that they somehow depict the world better than handmade pictures can be a claim about the photographic image itself or alternatively a claim about the way in which photographs are produced. In the former case, realism is a thesis about how photographs look and what sort of information they contain, while in the latter case realism is a claim about the process of production of photographs. It is the