This is Yinka Shonibare's version of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
The original was an etching made by the painter and printmaker Francisco de Goya. The original was a portrait of the artist with his head on the table as owls and bats attacked him. It was meant to show what happens when reason is ignored. Another thought is that the piece shows Goya's creative process and the unleashing of the imagination, emotions, and nightmares.
Shonibare appropriated the iconic etching and gave it a contemporary art feel. The photo is of a white-haired man, not a self portrait of Shonibare like it should be if he were going to replicate the original, surrounded by realistic-looking owls and bat creatures moving in to attack him.
In Goya's version, the owls are symbols of folly and the bats are symbols of ignorance.
A quote from the original is "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."
Though a fairly realistic image, Shonibare's piece isn't realistic in concept. The idea of personified owls and bats so large that they can't possibly exist is definitely not real. However, the way the animals were created and those personified expressions they were almost makes the whole seen look real. Judging the piece on realism, it would fail in portraying the world exactly as it is, but it certainly succeeds in trying to make the viewer think that the image they are seeing actually happened.
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I can see that one could critique this image from the standpoint of realism, though I wonder if that is the most useful approach, especially with photography. Do you think there might be some message involved, beyond simply attempting to realistically reproduce the world? It seems that the appropriation here might be making a point. Like a lot of Shonibare's work, this features European clothing made out of African textiles. It seems to me that there might be a political statement involved in having a European figure in the clothes of the era of both the Enlightenment and colonialism dreaming and producing "monsters." Could it be a comment on the dark side of the Enlightenment, or saying that Colonialism was one of the monsters created in the age of reason?
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