Where is that fine line separating reality from unreality? What is reality, how is it determined? Sometimes, when we dream, we are convinced to the last that everything that happens to us on the other side of the edge is real, and even when we wake up, we have a feeling for a long time that maybe it was all real! We have developed a belief in the technical nature of the photographic image obtained, as they wrote in the 19th century, mechanically, without human participation. Before the invention of photography and cinema, humanity did not have a tool capable of working with reality without intermediaries. In other words, photography is unbiased, unlike painting, where the resulting image is the fruit of the artist’s intellect, and even if the artist paints a canvas from a real object, it turns out not a real object on the canvas, but its interpretation, one of the possible ideas about it. Unlike painting photography (and cinema) is able to capture reality accurately, and this ability has become an obstacle and a subject of dispute that has lasted for at least 100 years. Sometimes the echoes of this dispute are heard in our time: what is photography, is photography an art, or is it just a mechanical means of fixing reality. Photography, which so suddenly and swiftly burst into a person’s life, overturned what had been remaining unshakable for a hundred years. It has become one of the catalysts of the process of transformation of society. It forced itself to be reckoned with; it became the herald of a new time, a new world, a new reality. However, it took more than a decade for a person to simply realize that photography is a new reality, accept this reality and learn how to apply and use such a powerful tool as it is. For the most part, humanity is always late, does not keep up with the passage of time. It is an illusion that we are building space and reality, in fact, we adapt to the changes taking place around us, we are always in the role of catching up. Photography is a good visual example of the above. Becoming the forerunner of a new reality and time, a tool with incredible capabilities, a new way of knowing and interpreting the world around us, photography, at first, was forced to imitate painting. It is difficult for a person to accept everything new, he is always more comfortable in a habitable territory, and he needs time to realize and overcome his fear.  Only in the era of global upheavals (I am talking about the First World War, the revolution in Russia, political, and economic, social transformations in the world in the period between the great wars) photography became something more than a means of preserving memory, an attraction and a faded caricature of painting. It has become a tool and a means of shaping reality. Incredibly, by today there are very few serious works on photography that fully consider it not from the point of view of shutter speed and aperture, but as a phenomenon that has shaped our time, as a new language accessible and understandable to everyone, as a means (I don’t want to use the word “manipulation”) of forming consciousness. Of course, we are not talking about photography in its purest form, but all those industries that have appeared thanks to photography. We are talking about cinema, television and the Internet as a new media space, which has become a logical continuation of the processes that photography started. The reality of the twentieth century is completely shaped by photography and cinema, and most of the ideas about that period are formed by the reality created by photography and cinema. The visual image has become an unshakable truth, if any event was photographed or filmed, it means it is true, it really was. No matter how many articles or books are written about any event, no works can overcome the reality created on a photograph or film. Take for example the storming of the Winter Palace, what do you know about this event? In the mass consciousness there is only the truth that was shown in the film by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigoriy Alexandrov “October” – a shot from the cruiser Aurora and the fleeing sailors. That’s it! However, if you still think that photography is a tool of memory and fixation of reality, then you are deeply mistaken. Photography does not capture reality, but only our idea of it, this is a significant difference. On the one hand – the natural accuracy of space fixation, documentality and persuasiveness inherent in the nature of a photographic image, and on the other hand – the human mind, subordinating space to its will with the help of a camera! A person with a sensual nature and an open mind is able to focus the camera in such a way that it captures reality to a greater depth, thus exposing the processes that are hidden behind things that are familiar to us at first glance. There is always a person behind the photo! This makes the photo unique, and the image obtained by the photographic process lies on the thin edge of reality! Although the photo was the first, they fully understood, realized and applied the possibilities of the photographic image in the cinema. The directors who used the language of cinema to create their own reality, the embodiment of their ideas and designs, became those who fully realized the potential of a new type of image. Only photo and film images become the reality or what we take for it.