I feel like the company with the highest percentage of people saying it's just a bad pic, is JND statues. "It looks better in real life", "it doesn't look like that really", "the mouth looks normal", "the likeness is 100%"... I don't doubt there are bad photos, but pictures are literally how something looks.
While I don't disagree with you there, there does seem to be something about trying to capture these JND statues with photos. You have some photos where the pieces looks
really off and others where they look phenomenal. I don't think anyone can deny that there is an art to photography, otherwise we wouldn't hire professional photographers for weddings and other special occasions if anyone could do it just as well ourselves. There's definitely some skill required when taking a proper photo and not everyone has that skill, especially when it comes to taking pics of our collections. Just going on the JND group pics for this, you'd be hard pressed to find any two pics of this that look the same from the various posters.
To a certain degree though, I feel like this is the same type of argument that happens with most collectibles in our hobby between the 1/6, 1/4 and 1/3 items across the board (though not as polarizing as JND-most likely due to cost
). There will always be ppl who rave about a statue/figure with those same arguments you mentioned ("It looks better in real life", "it doesn't look like that really") not matter what it is, and others who don't. For instance, I know I'm in the minority, but I personally don't see what's so great about the 1/3 Prime1 Hush Superman statue. I'm a huge Superman fan and have been reading the comics for nearly 30 years at this point and I don't see that statue as the epitome of Superman statues the way that others tend to. I don't really care for it to be honest. Or, right now there's an on-going debate from the past couple of days of whether or not the new HT BvS Batman 2.0 is an actual upgrade, etc. where some are completely happy with the update and others see it as a terrible release (not trying to bring that conversation over here btw, just using an example). And for a final example, most seem to feel the InArt Joker is the end all be all 1/6 TDK Joker; but to my eyes, it was quite the disappointment when I got it in hand.
I also don't doubt that this looks stunning in hand, but this doesn't mean the likeness is 100% or that it's worth the money IMO
For sure, and I definitely wasn't equating likeness to the overall appearance. I think one can appreciate the overall piece of any item while also having other criticisms whether that's likeness, pose, finish, etc.
Not just for this statue, but just about any collectible in our hobby, I personally don't think there will ever be a 100% likeness on anything b/c at the end of the day, there will always be a level of interpretation by the artist. When you consider just how many TDK Joker sculpts there are out there, there are always some who say one is 100% and then there is usually an approximately equal amount saying it's off and looks terrible. It sounds like a cop out, but you literally can't please everyone as we all have an idea of what something/someone should look like in our mind and typically no amount of reference pics will change what we interpret as a good, near 100% anything. Even if we were to take a fullsize life cast of someone, there will be folks who say that's not who it's supposed to be. I mean, Matt Black said he used the Chris Reeve life-mask to sculpt the portrait on the first Sideshow Reeve PF and look at how bad that came out