January 28, 2007
Inter-influences of photography and painting
Pedro Meyer of Zone Zero has written many wonderful and thoughtful editorials about photography over the years. His latest, "So where does painting start and photography end?", tries to explore the latest wave of this dilemma, especially given the painterly effects one can achieve so easily with a computer application like PhotoShop.
As usual, Meyer brings under scrutiny some of his own work, and includes several interesting historical references, such as the Francis Bacon painting, below. It makes for thoughtful reading. I recommend it.
Left: Photograph by John Deakin of George Dyer of Soho, 1964.
Right: Study for head by Francis Bacon of George Dyer, 1967.
An excerpt from Meyer's essay:
A lot of modern art is based upon the use of photography as a reference. Quoting Francis Bacon: "One thing which has never been really worked out is how photography has completely altered figurative painting.” It has been clear for quite some time now, however, that photography has in fact influenced painting. And yet, it remains unclear how painting has been influencing photography in later days...
I believe we have entered a new era where the once defined limits between photography and painting, and their respective fields of activity no longer have very meaningful boundaries.
Comments
I've written on this myself, here
[http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2006/12/digital_art_par.html]
Typically photography is defined by its literalness. In that view, the photographic image is a direct description of reality not a representation of it. In practice of course the photographer has selected from the world just as much as the painter. The image is defined as much by what is outside the frame as by what is included and is inevitably only an approximation of the real world it purports to capture. Although I took my first photograph some 40 years ago, it took me some time to recognise this. Accepting this separation however frees the photographer from the tyranny of literal representation. Since [Digital Manipulation] requires an original photographic image, there is already therefore a degree of selection from the world involved and that of itself is an artistic choice.
By representative I do not necessarily mean figurative. If the apparent parallels between the image as captured and the world in front of the lens had not distracted us, this would have been obvious anyway, as photographers explored the use of differential focus, distorted or out of focus images, solarisation and grain. Some, like Man Ray or Angus McBean, pushed the boundaries to the limits but all of these techniques met some hostility from ‘traditionalists’ before being absorbed and accepted as a part of the aesthetic of photography.
DM, obviously also involves image manipulation. This may be limited to the application of a single filter or tool. At this point some problems of terminology arise, because these filters are described so often in terms derived from painting – brushes, watercolour etc. Where packages like Corel Painter are used to originate a piece of work then this is probably useful since it allows the artist to work by analogy. At its best though, DM is not about mimicry but about creating something that cannot be created in any other way.