Sight and Grizzly Man

Firstly, Harrison, thank you for bringing up the point about the believability of photography within the modern world, I think that in a modern context Barthes' ideas about photography showing reality without truly being influenced by a human hand would need to be reconsidered. I think our generation is, in fact, very skeptical about the realism of photos. No one looks at pictures of models in magazines anymore without thinking "well that's not what they really look like, it's all airbrushed anyway." We find ourselves looking up on snopes.com whether the latest photo released of some politician doing something stupid or inappropriate is Photoshopped or not. Your example of that glass is really a vivid example of, as you mentioned, the obsession with realism that is now a part of photography as it used to be with painting. In addition to this, the use of digital photography and programs like Photoshop allows the artist to have much more of a hand in the creation of the image, which speaks against Barthes' idea of a relatively unaltered picture of reality.
I think an interesting question, though I know it is very vague, is why sight itself is so equivalent with truth in the human mind. We are all very well aware of the fact that our eyes often "play tricks" on us, we even enjoy looking at optical illusions, allowing ourselves to be fooled, and yet we still rely so much on our sense of sight as proof and evidence. This phenomenon, I think, is part of what makes film and photography such powerful art forms. And has our (I think rightful) skepticism towards digital photgraphy, altered our reliance on sight, so much stronger than that on our other senses?
One other, relatively unrelated, point about Grizzly Man: Isabel alluded to this as well, but I think the sense of death that Barthes talks about being embodied in the photo was extremely applicable to Grizzly Man. Partially, of course, this feeling is emphasized by the fact that the narrator talks about Treadwell's death as we are watching the footage of him alive, but also I feel it had something to do with the realism of the footage itself, cut as it was. Treadwell, being basically completely alone, I feel was for many portions of the video very much simply himself in front of the camera. We see him cursing himself for takes that didn't go well, we hear him speaking freely, without a script, often quite inarticulately, his speech fueled much more by emotion than intellect. The footage, no doubt meant to be edited and censored by Treadwell, was instead shown in a very raw and real form. This made Treadwell, for me at least, a very real person rather than a character, removing that duality of identification that is so often a part of cinema. This identification with solely a "real" person, not a fictional character in any way, made the sense of this footage as defying a death that we are consciously aware of throughout the film very powerful.