Like many hobbyist game designers before me, I recently had the idea of taking photographs of beautiful fantasy-like settings, for lack of a reliable source of custom illustration, and use them in a game book. No matter how hard I tried though, I just couldn't make the photographs feel like a fantasy world. This includes photographs taken in Weta Workshop's Hobbiton set in Waitomo. Confused, I looked at lots of photographs of imaginary fantasy worlds and, to my surprise, I had to admit that I couldn't find a single one that fooled me into believing I was looking at a magically historical setting. By contrast, I don't question the reality of a beautifully illustrated fantasy scene in a Pathfinder rulebook or a sci fi scene in a Warhammer 40,000 Codex. This seems counter-intuitive. After all, when I watch Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, I feel very much like it's real.
What's with the suspension of disbelief, still images, and illustrations of fantasy or sci fi settings? I don't have any scientific research to back this up, but I have some theories on the subject. My hypothesis is that illustrations and digital art seem better at conveying fantastic reality than even elaborately staged still photographs. My theory is that it has to do with the persistence of suspension of disbelief.
Motion pictures tell stories that inspire emotional investment, which allows for suspension of disbelief. As long as the story holds our attention, we're willing to overlook the secret knowledge we all have that we're just watching a play.
In a very good movie, if there were a moment that you might start to remember that you're just watching actors playing make-believe together, then a story or emotional beat suddenly pops up and distracts you back into the fantasy world. Part of what makes a movie "good" is that it makes you want to forget that it's a play. Like a great magician, the movie makes you actively complicit in the lie.
A still image can also tell a story, but not the same way a motion picture does. A still image doesn't change, so you're not forced to suspend disbelief in favour of catching up on literally what's happening in the moment. Instead, the moment itself is suspended. You understand that the still image is a representation of something, not an event happening at this very moment, changing as the moments go by. You have time to scrutinize every detail of the photo, and with too much scrutiny comes the reminder that a staged photograph in a non-existent world isn't "real". You see through the fiction, whether you want to or not. You know what exists and what's fantasy, and a still photo doesn't have the stage magic to misdirect your attention away from the things you aren't supposed to notice or think about too hard.
Interestingly, I find that even still captures from movies don't "sell" the fiction like the motion picture does. The Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game use screengrabs from the movies throughout the rule books, and while they're beautiful photos that evoke fond memories of great movies, they don't fool me. That's not really Aragorn or Legolas or Frodo or Sam, those are actors. I don't mean to recognise them as actors, but my mind isn't occupied with keeping up with the action and so it eventually resolves what I'm looking at to the nearest point of reality.
There are two advantage to illustrations, I think.
First, the nearest point of reality from an illustration is whatever the illustration represents. We resolve an illustration of the Great Sphinx of Giza back to the actual sculpture, but we resolve an illustration of a living breathing sphinx to a fantasy. There are no wires for us to notice, no costumes to critique, no special effects to deconstruct. It's an illustration. We understand that it isn't real, so the mind's eye activates powerful imagination to resolve it to something that we want to be real. An illustration is a shared illusion, from the vision the illustrator proposes and the vision the viewer creates in response.
Secondly, there's a language to illustration that we all basically understand. When we see an illustration, we understand that it never represents the truth. An illustration might suggest something that exists or existed in reality, but nobody mistakes it for anything more than an illustration. We're used to that. We've been conditioned to understand that a drawing is itself a method of telling a story. It's one of the primary languages of fantasy and science fiction, because we accept and expect that these are not real.
In fact, most of us expect illustrations on our fantasy and sci fi book covers, and in our game books. Photographs look wrong. It's not just because somebody's trying to put a photo where traditionally a drawing would be, it's because the native language of sci fi and fantasy is illustration, a language that accepts the unreality of its subject.
It seems that not all pictures meet the exchange rate of a thousand words. Illustration is the native visual tongue of the fantasy and sci fi storyteller, and if you haven't got a drawing then you'd better keep your audience distracted so they don't notice that your images aren't impossible enough.