How did painting change with the advent of photography? There are all kinds of viable explanations for this. In this work, however, another suitable explanation is to be presented. Photography is said to have placed in front of the painters the self-referential mirror that reality itself cannot be represented even in the most realistic representations. That reality is something never attainable by the photographer. That the mechanized man, with his eyes resembling a camera obscura, can never recognize a real reality and therefore a fortiori painting. These findings, which result solely from the observation of the camera, provide a possible explanation - which itself makes no claim to truth - as to why the styles from Impressionism to Surrealism may have developed. Not because photography replaced the realistic image, but because it made the impossibility of a representation of the real apparent. In the end, perhaps it can be said that photography liberated paintings from the bondage and illusion of realism and provided new possibilities of which we did not see that we did not see.