The master vs. the camera
June 24, 2017 11:10 PM Subscribe
"Why didn't great painters of the past reach the level of photorealism achieved by many artists today?" asks a curious Ouora user. An insightful answerer explains what the Masters saw that photographs don't show.
Yeah, this answer is nonsense and doesn't actually answer the question. The actual answer is that naturalism or realism isn't the true, ultimate goal of art that all artists at all times always strive for, it's one style or genre out of many. The "great painters of the past" were not necessarily trying to produce naturalist works. In fact the idea that art even should necessarily be realistic is a relatively recent belief.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:35 PM on June 24, 2017 [31 favorites]
posted by Sangermaine at 11:35 PM on June 24, 2017 [31 favorites]
It's a good answer, but he doesn't mention one thing that explains why a good realist painting seems more real than a photograph: your eye is constantly adjusting to the point on which it's focussed. This is why a photograph gets blown out values while a painting like The Weeders seems more accurate--if you were actually standing there, focussing on the figures in the foreground, you'd see the details in the dark because your iris would dilate; when you shifted upwards towards the setting sun, your iris would close to compensate, and your overall impression of the scene would have both lights and darks full of detail, while a photograph has to favour one or the other, or neither.
Perhaps a better way to describe this effect is that good realist painting captures the experience of seeing the subject, while photorealism achieves only the mechanical experience of a photograph.
posted by fatbird at 11:38 PM on June 24, 2017 [104 favorites]
Perhaps a better way to describe this effect is that good realist painting captures the experience of seeing the subject, while photorealism achieves only the mechanical experience of a photograph.
posted by fatbird at 11:38 PM on June 24, 2017 [104 favorites]
The answer to this question is simple.
Photorealism didn't exist in the past because photos didn't exist. If you handed Leonardo da Vinci a photograph to copy, I have no doubt whatsoever that he could replicate it in precise detail using just his powers of observation. But Leonardo didn't have such luxuries. He had models sitting in constantly changing light, sometimes swapped out for a studio assistant when the subject was unavailable, and dozens or hundreds of preparatory sketches of his subject. All this garbage about economy of brushstrokes and other nonsense is just elitist bullshit. Literally anyone who has working eyeballs and the ability to wield a stick of charcoal or a paintbrush can learn to draw and paint photorealistically just from observation because today we have magical lamps that can stay on forever. This is what happens in ateliers. Students will spend months or even a year painting copies of Barque drawings or drawing an ear sculpture from observation.
posted by xyzzy at 11:45 PM on June 24, 2017 [28 favorites]
Photorealism didn't exist in the past because photos didn't exist. If you handed Leonardo da Vinci a photograph to copy, I have no doubt whatsoever that he could replicate it in precise detail using just his powers of observation. But Leonardo didn't have such luxuries. He had models sitting in constantly changing light, sometimes swapped out for a studio assistant when the subject was unavailable, and dozens or hundreds of preparatory sketches of his subject. All this garbage about economy of brushstrokes and other nonsense is just elitist bullshit. Literally anyone who has working eyeballs and the ability to wield a stick of charcoal or a paintbrush can learn to draw and paint photorealistically just from observation because today we have magical lamps that can stay on forever. This is what happens in ateliers. Students will spend months or even a year painting copies of Barque drawings or drawing an ear sculpture from observation.
posted by xyzzy at 11:45 PM on June 24, 2017 [28 favorites]
This is great. The point made by many in the link; photographs are not at all "realistic" we have just become really used to them and read them well. Aside from the fact that the definition of realistic covers a lot of ground.
It's an interesting explanation, but I'm not sure I'm convinced, in half of the examples. The answers keep talking about fuzzy things like "warmth" and "people you could have a conversation with", and I'm not seeing it there.
You're also looking at a photograph of the art. We are so used to photos we have a hard time even recognizing our bias's (is that right?) with them.
posted by bongo_x at 12:44 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
It's an interesting explanation, but I'm not sure I'm convinced, in half of the examples. The answers keep talking about fuzzy things like "warmth" and "people you could have a conversation with", and I'm not seeing it there.
You're also looking at a photograph of the art. We are so used to photos we have a hard time even recognizing our bias's (is that right?) with them.
posted by bongo_x at 12:44 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
uh if photos aren't as realistic as paintings dog how come photography straight up destroyed representational painting for like 50 years at least
i mean, everything after the "realism" of grotty gleaners — including impressionism — was specifically a reaction against the photograph in order to compete in areas that the camera couldn't
would that have happened if painting was better at realism, dog? would a movement toward the emphasis of painting surface and materiality for example die brucke have been necessary without the camera?
get your pre-raphaelite bullshit outta here steiglitz already shit in your hats
and don't come at me talking about how current photorealistic or hyperrealistic painters can't compete with past masters unless you're prepared to eat all of Josh Reynolds talking about how realism in painting was a corruption that made it less true to life because it didn't use the platonic ideals to elevate subjects, motherfucker
the real answer to this "were pop songs in the 1800s more realistic than our top 40 today?" bullshit is "In the past, pretty much everything was full of lead so people were basically morlocks, what do you think?"
posted by klangklangston at 1:07 AM on June 25, 2017 [37 favorites]
i mean, everything after the "realism" of grotty gleaners — including impressionism — was specifically a reaction against the photograph in order to compete in areas that the camera couldn't
would that have happened if painting was better at realism, dog? would a movement toward the emphasis of painting surface and materiality for example die brucke have been necessary without the camera?
get your pre-raphaelite bullshit outta here steiglitz already shit in your hats
and don't come at me talking about how current photorealistic or hyperrealistic painters can't compete with past masters unless you're prepared to eat all of Josh Reynolds talking about how realism in painting was a corruption that made it less true to life because it didn't use the platonic ideals to elevate subjects, motherfucker
the real answer to this "were pop songs in the 1800s more realistic than our top 40 today?" bullshit is "In the past, pretty much everything was full of lead so people were basically morlocks, what do you think?"
posted by klangklangston at 1:07 AM on June 25, 2017 [37 favorites]
A post about socially-conditioned perception linked to a quora.com thread cited as originating with an "Ouora user", presumably a typo for a "Quora user", provokes a certain familiar amusement. I was taught, as a greenhanded typesetter in the closing era of the discipline, that typos were God's poetry. That's arguable, I suppose, depending on how you were taught to look at things.
posted by mwhybark at 1:16 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 1:16 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
wait klangy is there a dog? i totes missed the dog
posted by mwhybark at 1:18 AM on June 25, 2017 [12 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 1:18 AM on June 25, 2017 [12 favorites]
What do I, as a lead impregnated Morlock, think? Pass me that cold Eloi if you're not going to finish it. Cheers.
posted by Samizdata at 1:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by Samizdata at 1:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [7 favorites]
A post about socially-conditioned perception linked to a quora.com thread cited as originating with an "Ouora user", presumably a typo for a "Quora user", provokes a certain familiar amusement. I was taught, as a greenhanded typesetter in the closing era of the discipline, that typos were God's poetry. That's arguable, I suppose, depending on how you were taught to look at things.
I, in a non-spellchecked environment, am then God's own poet.
posted by Samizdata at 1:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [7 favorites]
I, in a non-spellchecked environment, am then God's own poet.
posted by Samizdata at 1:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [7 favorites]
and your overall impression of the scene would have both lights and darks full of detail, while a photograph has to favour one or the other, or neither
We have HDR photos now.
posted by markr at 1:33 AM on June 25, 2017 [9 favorites]
We have HDR photos now.
posted by markr at 1:33 AM on June 25, 2017 [9 favorites]
I think it's amusing how software in some phones now painstakingly recreate one of the main drawbacks of traditional photography: defocused backgrounds. Our eyes don't perceive the background of a scene as out of focus because they dart around. But we have been conditioned by two centuries of photography to think that defocused backgrounds are pretty.
Makes one wonder what defects of current smartphone cameras will be considered arty in the future...
posted by Triplanetary at 1:48 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
Makes one wonder what defects of current smartphone cameras will be considered arty in the future...
posted by Triplanetary at 1:48 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
I thought the Quora user's answer was quite good, especially the bit about how we've become accustomed to the common distortions of the lens, which are quite different from the sorts of distortions our eyes produce. Attempting perspective drawing from life vs. photographs makes these distortions plain. His notes on light values were also good. HDR as it is commonly used does not really solve these issues - somehow it does not manage the trick that great painters do of mimicking the tenure and movement of our eyes on the scene.
Photography never really supplanted representational art, it simply extended the availability of representations to a larger audience. The social stratum of individuals that used to buy portraits and other representations largely still does. Photographs and paintings reveal different truths, and tell different lies, and it is hard to honestly compare the two.
posted by Svejk at 2:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [20 favorites]
Photography never really supplanted representational art, it simply extended the availability of representations to a larger audience. The social stratum of individuals that used to buy portraits and other representations largely still does. Photographs and paintings reveal different truths, and tell different lies, and it is hard to honestly compare the two.
posted by Svejk at 2:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [20 favorites]
Photorealism didn't exist in the past because photos didn't exist.
This! And it's not just the benefit of keeping everything in place, but that the photograph has already done the heavy lifting by translating a 3D subject into a 2D one.
Even if you're trying to paint a still life under a constant light source, it will be much easier by taking a photo and working from that instead. When you're looking at 3D objects, it's really hard to trick your brain into ignoring what you know to be the 3D topography in order to see it as a flat 2D representation. Your stereoscopic vision, small body movements, small head movements, etc. are all constant distractions from accurately translating the subject into 2D.
posted by p3t3 at 2:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
This! And it's not just the benefit of keeping everything in place, but that the photograph has already done the heavy lifting by translating a 3D subject into a 2D one.
Even if you're trying to paint a still life under a constant light source, it will be much easier by taking a photo and working from that instead. When you're looking at 3D objects, it's really hard to trick your brain into ignoring what you know to be the 3D topography in order to see it as a flat 2D representation. Your stereoscopic vision, small body movements, small head movements, etc. are all constant distractions from accurately translating the subject into 2D.
posted by p3t3 at 2:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
We have HDR photos now.
HDR photos are a great example of high detail/low realism in photography, though. You can see the texture of the clouds that the sun is shining through, in the same frame as you can see the texture of asphalt in the shade! But the overall effect looks like freaking Predator-vision.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:35 AM on June 25, 2017 [25 favorites]
HDR photos are a great example of high detail/low realism in photography, though. You can see the texture of the clouds that the sun is shining through, in the same frame as you can see the texture of asphalt in the shade! But the overall effect looks like freaking Predator-vision.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:35 AM on June 25, 2017 [25 favorites]
I think one thing that the author quite correctly identified is that a painting from life happens over time. A photograph is a very good way to capture a fraction of a second, but it doesn't do what you or I do when we look at something. Seeing a scene or object in motion, however slight, along with the fact that we're probably moving about too, gives us a different kind of information - more four-dimensional in a sense - than you get from a photo. Our vision isn't photographic, and our memory isn't a book of photos. Painting from life, which intimately involves the use of the imperfect registering and recording apparatus of our own senses, allows us to capture something closer to the realism of human perception. A camera, while immensely valuable for recording light, has no opinion on what the different areas of light and dark might mean. HDR does not really simulate the way the human eye continuously adapts to light and dark as we look around a scene. Getting caught up in the "but a camera records a scene perfectly, therefore it is the more real representation" argument kind of misses the point. I think the most successful photographs actually tend to have a more 'painterly' aesthetic, where the photographer understands that the process of making art is more than just focusing a lens at a scene.
posted by pipeski at 3:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [14 favorites]
posted by pipeski at 3:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [14 favorites]
When you see, the light goes like:
When a painter is working, the process is more like:
Painting isn't going to beat photography for overall detail. A photograph has millions of precisely placed and colored points. And photographs are way cheaper to make. But with skill and time, a painting, having passed through a human eye, can reflect our human experience much more clearly.
posted by panic at 3:19 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
THE WORLD ----> EYESWhen you look at a photo, the light goes like:
THE WORLD ----> PHOTO ----> EYESThe light coming off a photo is just a quiet echo of the light coming off the world—a computer screen can't emit nearly as much light as the sun, for example—so there's no reason to think this is the best we can do.
When a painter is working, the process is more like:
THE WORLD ----> EYES
PAINTING ----> EYES
^.__________/
As the painter works, they're continuously seeing the world, seeing the painting, and trying to bring the two closer together. A photograph is made by a sensor based on how the world looks to a sensor—a painting is made by a person based on how the world looks to a person.Painting isn't going to beat photography for overall detail. A photograph has millions of precisely placed and colored points. And photographs are way cheaper to make. But with skill and time, a painting, having passed through a human eye, can reflect our human experience much more clearly.
posted by panic at 3:19 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
You will almost never be able to photograph a sunset without blowing out the lights or losing all of the information in the darks, without a solid background in photography and cameras.
/points phone at sunset over city
/touches screen
/gets a picture that looks exactly like what my eyes see
The only thing I have a solid background in is sleeping in.
You can still see the information in the foreground that would be lost in a photograph
About here is where I decided the commentator is a terrible photographer, and probably isn't in any position to talk credibly about photorealism. Choosing a handful of photos that show extremes of light and dark and comparing them with soft, dewy 70s-vaseline-lens paintings isn't an argument, mate, it's you flogging an agenda.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 3:22 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
/points phone at sunset over city
/touches screen
/gets a picture that looks exactly like what my eyes see
The only thing I have a solid background in is sleeping in.
You can still see the information in the foreground that would be lost in a photograph
About here is where I decided the commentator is a terrible photographer, and probably isn't in any position to talk credibly about photorealism. Choosing a handful of photos that show extremes of light and dark and comparing them with soft, dewy 70s-vaseline-lens paintings isn't an argument, mate, it's you flogging an agenda.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 3:22 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
If you were to compare pre-photography portraits with anything contemporary, it would be portrait photography, not hyperrealism. Say, the portrait of Innocent X with an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Portraits are a genre with certain restrictions and expectations, and hyperrealism is rarely appreciated. You use the light, the setting and the props (including dress) to create a flattering image of the person you are portraying. They might not find it flattering, mind you, Innocent X certainly didn't, but the point is that the great artist knows better because they are great artists.
If you want realism from old masters, go look at the still lifes, like this one by Caravaggio. This was a genre where extreme realism was valued, but even here, the composition, the light and the background remind you that it is a work of art, not just a random "snapshot" of some fruit and vegs on a table.
The artists, wether they are painters or photographers, were probably never very interested in what we'd call photographic realism. As soon as you try to take a picture or draw one, you realize there is no such thing as an accurate representation of a thing or a person or a space. The framing in itself is an esthetic choice, and from then it just goes on and on. Color is crazy - something everyone agrees is blue, because it is that blue shawl you bought and it was clearly blue and not green or black (or white hahaha) will sometimes be pink in one setting and black in another, if it's folded it can be all the colors in different parts. If you have photoshop you can easily check this. Back in the days before color photography, understanding that and seeing that was a very particular skill which took a lot of seeing and painting to achieve. But once you had learnt it, I bet you'd be more interested in figuring out things to do with it, creating things that were not "realistic" but which had other qualities. Velasquez, who painted the pope, also painted Las Meninas, a totally weird picture which you can look at for days and still not entirely "get". Among other things, it is a painting about painting about constructing a space and composing a group and a narrative, about using light and perspective manipulatively. It is art, not mere reproduction of whatever life is. Leibovitz also does these elaborately constructed and lighted group portraits.
There are several reasons "realistic" portrait painting (and every other form of genre painting) became less in demand and therefore less interesting for serious artists for a while. Photography was a part of it, but really not an important part - till recently you'd still need a painter for a monumental portrait with permanence. There are different interpretations of what happened, but I personally believe that the main driver was that the relationship between artists and clients changed radically. When artists became independent professionals selling products, rather than being hired for long periods of time by clients to provide various services, they also gained an independence they could both use for painting realist portraits (still today a job), or they could develop new forms of art, more in line with their own interests - which were often more art-centric interests like exploring what painting or art can be. For some, like van Gogh, it had nothing to do with the market. Others were quite shrewd about marketing their products as "the new", hence "modernism". This transition took a couple of hundred years, so you can have Dutch painters operating as independent businessmen from shops while Michelangelo was basically forced to paint the ceiling in the Sixtine chapel.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of photorealism or hyperrealism (with some exceptions), but it's interesting to note that even these painters who seem to be all into accurate representation are actually all about showing off their painterly skills. Well, that is how it appears to me, and why I don't enjoy their work. As xyzzy pointed out above, anyone can learn to paint, if they dedicate the time. For me, there needs to be more than that, and these days, the media used isn't really that important, neither is the divide between abstraction and realism.
posted by mumimor at 3:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [41 favorites]
If you want realism from old masters, go look at the still lifes, like this one by Caravaggio. This was a genre where extreme realism was valued, but even here, the composition, the light and the background remind you that it is a work of art, not just a random "snapshot" of some fruit and vegs on a table.
The artists, wether they are painters or photographers, were probably never very interested in what we'd call photographic realism. As soon as you try to take a picture or draw one, you realize there is no such thing as an accurate representation of a thing or a person or a space. The framing in itself is an esthetic choice, and from then it just goes on and on. Color is crazy - something everyone agrees is blue, because it is that blue shawl you bought and it was clearly blue and not green or black (or white hahaha) will sometimes be pink in one setting and black in another, if it's folded it can be all the colors in different parts. If you have photoshop you can easily check this. Back in the days before color photography, understanding that and seeing that was a very particular skill which took a lot of seeing and painting to achieve. But once you had learnt it, I bet you'd be more interested in figuring out things to do with it, creating things that were not "realistic" but which had other qualities. Velasquez, who painted the pope, also painted Las Meninas, a totally weird picture which you can look at for days and still not entirely "get". Among other things, it is a painting about painting about constructing a space and composing a group and a narrative, about using light and perspective manipulatively. It is art, not mere reproduction of whatever life is. Leibovitz also does these elaborately constructed and lighted group portraits.
There are several reasons "realistic" portrait painting (and every other form of genre painting) became less in demand and therefore less interesting for serious artists for a while. Photography was a part of it, but really not an important part - till recently you'd still need a painter for a monumental portrait with permanence. There are different interpretations of what happened, but I personally believe that the main driver was that the relationship between artists and clients changed radically. When artists became independent professionals selling products, rather than being hired for long periods of time by clients to provide various services, they also gained an independence they could both use for painting realist portraits (still today a job), or they could develop new forms of art, more in line with their own interests - which were often more art-centric interests like exploring what painting or art can be. For some, like van Gogh, it had nothing to do with the market. Others were quite shrewd about marketing their products as "the new", hence "modernism". This transition took a couple of hundred years, so you can have Dutch painters operating as independent businessmen from shops while Michelangelo was basically forced to paint the ceiling in the Sixtine chapel.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of photorealism or hyperrealism (with some exceptions), but it's interesting to note that even these painters who seem to be all into accurate representation are actually all about showing off their painterly skills. Well, that is how it appears to me, and why I don't enjoy their work. As xyzzy pointed out above, anyone can learn to paint, if they dedicate the time. For me, there needs to be more than that, and these days, the media used isn't really that important, neither is the divide between abstraction and realism.
posted by mumimor at 3:28 AM on June 25, 2017 [41 favorites]
It is hard to argue that the painters of the 17th and 18th centuries weren't interested in realist painting when there was a whole set of techniques that focused on being as realist as possible: trompe l'oeil. Of course, this was often seen as a bit gimmicky, and other painters were trying to accomplish other things. Rembrandt liked to explore the ways artificial light played across human features, while Vermeer was interested in painting rooms lit by natural light from outside. Frans Hals deliberately chose to use broader, rougher strokes in some of his portraits to give a sense of animation to his subjects, as though you might have caught them in mid-conversation. This, in turn, was one of the inspirations for Manet, during the foundation of Impressionism (which I would argue was less of a response to photography than to the more stultifying aspects of 19th century neoclassical and romantic painting).
This is also one of the reasons why portraiture didn't go away with the advent of photography: painters (and their subjects) were trying to accomplish different things than what could be done with a photograph.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
This is also one of the reasons why portraiture didn't go away with the advent of photography: painters (and their subjects) were trying to accomplish different things than what could be done with a photograph.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
wait klangy is there a dog? i totes missed the dog
Perhaps a more profound question is why none of the great masters tried their hand at Dogs Playing Poker? Well not poker, Whist or Gillet or some contemporary non-dog like activity? And certainly not all or every great master but why not any whimsical or perceptually peculiar variant on reality? I mean dogs doing human things is a joke but there seems to be an explosion of theme in art post photography. Not just impressionism/cubism/abstract but commercial art and illustrative. Is it just that technology allows more leisure or has there been an growth in societal ability to encompass more possibilities?
posted by sammyo at 4:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
Perhaps a more profound question is why none of the great masters tried their hand at Dogs Playing Poker? Well not poker, Whist or Gillet or some contemporary non-dog like activity? And certainly not all or every great master but why not any whimsical or perceptually peculiar variant on reality? I mean dogs doing human things is a joke but there seems to be an explosion of theme in art post photography. Not just impressionism/cubism/abstract but commercial art and illustrative. Is it just that technology allows more leisure or has there been an growth in societal ability to encompass more possibilities?
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posted by sammyo at 4:09 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
You are looking for someone like Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Actually there are several whimsical old masters and whimsical works by old masters. I don't know why they are not widely known
posted by mumimor at 4:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
Actually there are several whimsical old masters and whimsical works by old masters. I don't know why they are not widely known
posted by mumimor at 4:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
"Why didn't great painters of the past reach the level of photorealism achieved by many artists today?"
The quick 'well actually' answer is: well actually they did. Have a look at Holbein here from 500 years ago.
They guy answering has had a certain kind of art school education and been taught to think about art in a certain way... some of what he says is interesting but a lot is just prejudice about certain types of art and painting and technique.
Sure you take a photo of sunset to emphasize the sky colours, you are going to lose all the shadow detail if you just paint a copy of that. But you can take a number of photos at different settings to get all that detail to copy from if you want.
Also he doesn't acknowledge there are the genres of Photorealism and Hyperrealism that come with a whole host of history / philosophy etc etc
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:30 AM on June 25, 2017 [21 favorites]
The quick 'well actually' answer is: well actually they did. Have a look at Holbein here from 500 years ago.
They guy answering has had a certain kind of art school education and been taught to think about art in a certain way... some of what he says is interesting but a lot is just prejudice about certain types of art and painting and technique.
Sure you take a photo of sunset to emphasize the sky colours, you are going to lose all the shadow detail if you just paint a copy of that. But you can take a number of photos at different settings to get all that detail to copy from if you want.
Also he doesn't acknowledge there are the genres of Photorealism and Hyperrealism that come with a whole host of history / philosophy etc etc
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:30 AM on June 25, 2017 [21 favorites]
I thought the Quora user's answer was quite good, especially the bit about how we've become accustomed to the common distortions of the lens, which are quite different from the sorts of distortions our eyes produce.
This was my take, and it also made me wonder if this is why I am really bad at recognizing people from photos.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 5:40 AM on June 25, 2017
This was my take, and it also made me wonder if this is why I am really bad at recognizing people from photos.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 5:40 AM on June 25, 2017
/points phone at sunset over city
/touches screen
/gets a picture that looks exactly like what my eyes see
This is a very interesting comment, and may shed some light on different reactions to the Quora piece. I have never had this experience, for any subject, with my own photography or anyone else's. I have always taken it for granted that photos look like photos and paintings look like paintings and they both differ in various ways from direct visual perception. For me, this is illustrated most regularly by the phenomenon of people who 'don't photograph well' and its converse, the 'ugly pretty' fashion model. I wonder if there is some visual latency issue here.
posted by Svejk at 6:06 AM on June 25, 2017 [16 favorites]
/touches screen
/gets a picture that looks exactly like what my eyes see
This is a very interesting comment, and may shed some light on different reactions to the Quora piece. I have never had this experience, for any subject, with my own photography or anyone else's. I have always taken it for granted that photos look like photos and paintings look like paintings and they both differ in various ways from direct visual perception. For me, this is illustrated most regularly by the phenomenon of people who 'don't photograph well' and its converse, the 'ugly pretty' fashion model. I wonder if there is some visual latency issue here.
posted by Svejk at 6:06 AM on June 25, 2017 [16 favorites]
The quora answer has fragments of insight in the pudding of its words -- which is pretty much a Quora best case scenario. It's true that a deep grokking of perspective, shadow, translucence and anatomy serve an artist well, and that a poor knowledge in any of these areas results in works with weaker verisimilitude.
That being said, the idea that photographs are quite artificial looking and we have become blind do these artificialities via habituation is at least quasi-silly. There's a nugget of truth there, yes, but the significance is being overblown in some of the comments here.
If you want to trick a human being into thinking a flat representation is actual a real thing in the world, it is, dollars to doughnuts, far more straight-forward to achieve this by capturing and reproducing optical effects with a camera facilitating an image than it is via a paintbrush facilitating a fabrication of an image. The second requires mastery while the first requires only competence.
That's the bottom line. You can trick people more easily with photos. Not all of the people all of the time, but most of the people most of the time. I'm a trained fine art painter who now works in visual effects...this is my bag, man.
Pedanting on pupil response or image distortion is trivially true but in most situations inconsequential. Hand-waving away detail as if it is not the cornerstone of verisimilitude is like favouring a really striking poem about strawberries over actually eating a strawberry...capturing the essence of something is awesome, and very artistic, but abstraction cuts to the bone of a thing only in the intellectual, emotional or spiritual senses, not the sensory.
Also note there was quite a bump in realism when many master painters began using mirrors and light projection to create more stable (and even traceable) references, like Jan van Eyck, for example. The subtleties of actual optics were best harnessed using optical means, engineered to persistence, so they could be copied with an eye to the tiniest detail and subtlest gradation.
The average photo is more "realistic" than the average painting. Any argument otherwise is bound to track in some bullshit on its shoes.
posted by Construction Concern at 6:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
That being said, the idea that photographs are quite artificial looking and we have become blind do these artificialities via habituation is at least quasi-silly. There's a nugget of truth there, yes, but the significance is being overblown in some of the comments here.
If you want to trick a human being into thinking a flat representation is actual a real thing in the world, it is, dollars to doughnuts, far more straight-forward to achieve this by capturing and reproducing optical effects with a camera facilitating an image than it is via a paintbrush facilitating a fabrication of an image. The second requires mastery while the first requires only competence.
That's the bottom line. You can trick people more easily with photos. Not all of the people all of the time, but most of the people most of the time. I'm a trained fine art painter who now works in visual effects...this is my bag, man.
Pedanting on pupil response or image distortion is trivially true but in most situations inconsequential. Hand-waving away detail as if it is not the cornerstone of verisimilitude is like favouring a really striking poem about strawberries over actually eating a strawberry...capturing the essence of something is awesome, and very artistic, but abstraction cuts to the bone of a thing only in the intellectual, emotional or spiritual senses, not the sensory.
Also note there was quite a bump in realism when many master painters began using mirrors and light projection to create more stable (and even traceable) references, like Jan van Eyck, for example. The subtleties of actual optics were best harnessed using optical means, engineered to persistence, so they could be copied with an eye to the tiniest detail and subtlest gradation.
The average photo is more "realistic" than the average painting. Any argument otherwise is bound to track in some bullshit on its shoes.
posted by Construction Concern at 6:13 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
The average photo is more "realistic" than the average painting. Any argument otherwise is bound to track in some bullshit on its shoes.
I would agree that the average photo is more realistic than the average painting for capturing a moment in time, but I'm not sure that the top-percentile photos are better than the top-percentile paintings for capturing the way humans perceive objects contextually through time and space. Context and perception often sound like unscientific weasel words, but humans seem to be gestalt perceivers in the way we translate visual information - we store a rubric and then fill in the details later upon object recognition. Then we pretend we noticed all those details the first time. In a contest where a photo and a painting randomly selected from their respective distributions were presented to an objective observer of the universe to decide which was the correct representation, the photo wold probably win. But first we'd have to find an objective observer of the universe.
The Quora question is sort of like "would you rather have a perfect 3D model of your deceased father or one of his old sweaters that perpetually held his personal scent?"
posted by Svejk at 6:34 AM on June 25, 2017 [13 favorites]
I would agree that the average photo is more realistic than the average painting for capturing a moment in time, but I'm not sure that the top-percentile photos are better than the top-percentile paintings for capturing the way humans perceive objects contextually through time and space. Context and perception often sound like unscientific weasel words, but humans seem to be gestalt perceivers in the way we translate visual information - we store a rubric and then fill in the details later upon object recognition. Then we pretend we noticed all those details the first time. In a contest where a photo and a painting randomly selected from their respective distributions were presented to an objective observer of the universe to decide which was the correct representation, the photo wold probably win. But first we'd have to find an objective observer of the universe.
The Quora question is sort of like "would you rather have a perfect 3D model of your deceased father or one of his old sweaters that perpetually held his personal scent?"
posted by Svejk at 6:34 AM on June 25, 2017 [13 favorites]
wow, I wasn't expecting the link in the OP to generate such heated discussions! Mumimor, thanks for liking that piece by Holbein - amazing!
posted by rebent at 6:54 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by rebent at 6:54 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
As a trifocal wearer, and myopic of over 40 years experience, I bring to you one more apple for your cart disruption.
Consider spectacles. Consider the changes of the eye's capabilities over the age of the painter. Consider the nuances that make up "defective" vision - astigmatism, shortsightedness, longsightedness, and incipient cataracts.
Consider the beauty of the world I behold with or without my glasses. Each in turn so different that I've always deeply pondered what it must be like to see the world in such sharp focus 24/7 without the ability to rest the eyes that simply taking off my glasses offers me. I can stare into the distance, uninterrupted, simply due to my own inherited shortcomings.
posted by infini at 7:02 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
Consider spectacles. Consider the changes of the eye's capabilities over the age of the painter. Consider the nuances that make up "defective" vision - astigmatism, shortsightedness, longsightedness, and incipient cataracts.
Consider the beauty of the world I behold with or without my glasses. Each in turn so different that I've always deeply pondered what it must be like to see the world in such sharp focus 24/7 without the ability to rest the eyes that simply taking off my glasses offers me. I can stare into the distance, uninterrupted, simply due to my own inherited shortcomings.
posted by infini at 7:02 AM on June 25, 2017 [8 favorites]
the real answer to this "were pop songs in the 1800s more realistic than our top 40 today?"
"Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold,
Shine upon my brow today;
Life is fading fast away."
--
"Fuego Gasolina,
That body is a sinna
Fuego Gasolina, lina, lina,
Fuego Gasolina,
That body is a sinna
Fuego Gasolina,
When I move it back,
And when I shake it fast they love it."
posted by pyramid termite at 7:38 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
"Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold,
Shine upon my brow today;
Life is fading fast away."
--
"Fuego Gasolina,
That body is a sinna
Fuego Gasolina, lina, lina,
Fuego Gasolina,
That body is a sinna
Fuego Gasolina,
When I move it back,
And when I shake it fast they love it."
posted by pyramid termite at 7:38 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
I don't really have any problem with his thesis or even the conclusion he draws but he talks a lot of smack about photography that isn't really warranted. All his criticisms of photos are from images where the photographer either wasn't striving to mitigate the concern or lacked the talent/equipment to do so.
"You will never be able to photograph a sunset without blowing out the lights or losing all of the information in the darks."
Uh, image masks and scene specific gradiant filters are two ways to do this in camera, HDR is one common way to do it in post processing, dodge and burn were common ways of handling this in the film days.
"Can a camera focus on the foreground and background simultaneously, while leaving the middle ground out of focus? It cannot."
Meet the Light16 , a camera that certainly can do that if you wanted. And it is buck simple to do this automatically post processing images.
"Have you ever noticed how things become distorted near the edges of wide angle photographs?"
Well ya, that is an artistic/money decision. You can take even 360 degree photos without distortion using a Catadioptric camera for example.
Also not all hyperrealism paintings have the flaws he is calling out only the photorealism examples. Critiquing the entire field this way is dishonest in the same say that calling out HDR for "unrealistic colour" is. Sure it can be used that way but it doesn't have to be and isn't by a lot of people.
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
"You will never be able to photograph a sunset without blowing out the lights or losing all of the information in the darks."
Uh, image masks and scene specific gradiant filters are two ways to do this in camera, HDR is one common way to do it in post processing, dodge and burn were common ways of handling this in the film days.
"Can a camera focus on the foreground and background simultaneously, while leaving the middle ground out of focus? It cannot."
Meet the Light16 , a camera that certainly can do that if you wanted. And it is buck simple to do this automatically post processing images.
"Have you ever noticed how things become distorted near the edges of wide angle photographs?"
Well ya, that is an artistic/money decision. You can take even 360 degree photos without distortion using a Catadioptric camera for example.
Also not all hyperrealism paintings have the flaws he is calling out only the photorealism examples. Critiquing the entire field this way is dishonest in the same say that calling out HDR for "unrealistic colour" is. Sure it can be used that way but it doesn't have to be and isn't by a lot of people.
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
wow, I wasn't expecting the link in the OP to generate such heated discussions! Mumimor, thanks for liking that piece by Holbein - amazing!
Yeah in truth, I would love to participate in this thread but I am seriously SO MAD that I can't do so rationally. I haven't been this agitated about a post on the blue for a long time. There's a lot I want to say but really I just want to fight everyone so I'll see myself out.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:59 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
Yeah in truth, I would love to participate in this thread but I am seriously SO MAD that I can't do so rationally. I haven't been this agitated about a post on the blue for a long time. There's a lot I want to say but really I just want to fight everyone so I'll see myself out.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:59 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
Credit must be given where it is due, and it was fearfulsymmetry who linked to the amazing Holbein portrait.
posted by mumimor at 8:55 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by mumimor at 8:55 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
It depends on what you think the nature of "seeing naturally" is whether you consider photorealism more or less "true" to the experience of seeing things in real life. Photos often do look extremely unnatural because they capture a distinct moment, completely frozen in time, which isn't actually ever how we see things naturally. We don't go around looking at the world as a frozen object of contemplation, our heads fixed rigidly into one perfect position, never wavering or changing focus, the world standing perfectly still.
I'd bet it was actually the novelty of the way the medium captured images of reality and it's brazen unnaturalness (without deconstructing that problematic framing too much for purposes of discussion) that gave photography an edge over previous naturalistic styles of painting.
Besides, photography lends itself to more efficient industrial production methods: if you're a skilled photographer, you can mass produce photos much more efficiently than an old school painter ever could.
I'd argue the success of photography had less to do with its superior verisimilitude than the obvious industrial process advantages of producing photo representations and the fact photos don't actually show us the world as we really see it, but a more idealized, easily objectified and less ambiguous version of what we would see naturally in a visual depiction of reality.
It's the hyperreality of photography that makes photos so appealing, and the sentimental connections we have to them because their production requires actual, real life engagement with their subjects. With photos, we know they at least connect to something in reality, even if they don't necessarily offer a "truer" representation of the human experience of seeing. That gives them a more personal, emotional heft paintings don't always have.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
I'd bet it was actually the novelty of the way the medium captured images of reality and it's brazen unnaturalness (without deconstructing that problematic framing too much for purposes of discussion) that gave photography an edge over previous naturalistic styles of painting.
Besides, photography lends itself to more efficient industrial production methods: if you're a skilled photographer, you can mass produce photos much more efficiently than an old school painter ever could.
I'd argue the success of photography had less to do with its superior verisimilitude than the obvious industrial process advantages of producing photo representations and the fact photos don't actually show us the world as we really see it, but a more idealized, easily objectified and less ambiguous version of what we would see naturally in a visual depiction of reality.
It's the hyperreality of photography that makes photos so appealing, and the sentimental connections we have to them because their production requires actual, real life engagement with their subjects. With photos, we know they at least connect to something in reality, even if they don't necessarily offer a "truer" representation of the human experience of seeing. That gives them a more personal, emotional heft paintings don't always have.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
There is no such thing as a truly realistic 2D representation of the real world. Hyperrealism is as much a choice as any other style. The world is not two dimensional, and we don't perceive it that way. Vision is much more dynamic than any still two dimensional representation. Even if your subject were somehow perfectly still (which they almost never are), the light and your perception of it is changing, and your eyeballs are jumping all around in your head, focusing on different aspects--looking at details, adjusting to varying light levels--the whole time you're looking. That experience cannot be accurately replicated in two dimensions, not in paintings or in photography. It can only be referenced. And there are always artistic choices involved in doing that.
Some of those choices are nearly imperceptible and can be very difficult to tangle out, particularly since we don't really have a common vocabulary to describe the visual shorthands we've internalized. His point about why we perceive that first painting as being realistic is on point. It's not realistic. It just has a number of visual referents in common with photos, which are also not really 'realistic' when it comes to the way humans see things. Hyperrealism is a perfectly legitimate artistic choice, and something that does require a lot of technical skill, but it's not somehow objectively correct or better than other choices.
And because we don't really have a common vocabulary for these things, it can be difficult to articulate. But the fact that something someone is saying doesn't make instant sense to you isn't reason to dismiss it all as bullshit.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:08 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
Some of those choices are nearly imperceptible and can be very difficult to tangle out, particularly since we don't really have a common vocabulary to describe the visual shorthands we've internalized. His point about why we perceive that first painting as being realistic is on point. It's not realistic. It just has a number of visual referents in common with photos, which are also not really 'realistic' when it comes to the way humans see things. Hyperrealism is a perfectly legitimate artistic choice, and something that does require a lot of technical skill, but it's not somehow objectively correct or better than other choices.
And because we don't really have a common vocabulary for these things, it can be difficult to articulate. But the fact that something someone is saying doesn't make instant sense to you isn't reason to dismiss it all as bullshit.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:08 AM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
I'm fascinated and repelled by the whole framing of the question. It ignores a whole history of passions and counterpassions, desires and priorities, schools and economic settings, definitions of "realism" and "stylization," in favor of a simple, smug assumption that a drawing that resembles a photo is the best drawing, so we have the best drawings now. You can't explain or justify millennia of art history to a person who believes that Rembrandt couldn't "achieve" what the creator of this piece did.
I have a couple of notes. One is that visible artifice is important to painting. Hiding your artifice isn't that great a trick, and your ability to pull it off depends heavily on what your own generation normalizes or defines as "artifice." (Think of the rapid evolution of our bullshit detectors about CGI and computer graphics.) The bravado of old-school portraiture has a lot to do with saying, "Look, you can see that I made this with oil and particles of stone and animal hair, but when you look at it, you think you see a fish or a fruit or a personality, don't you?" This piece has something of that bravado, but without the sense that artist and viewer are in on the same joke.
My other note is that I appreciate this post as a defense of 19th-century academic painting, which is kind of a reviled form these days. The Alma-Tadema piece he uses is all about marble, and the Solomon is all about flesh that looks like marble, and to my Impressionism-soaked eyes they both look pretty lame, but yeah, I can dig that a passion for marble and marble-like things was once the mainstream aesthetic and that these men trained hard to achieve it. (Honestly, the 1890 equivalent of this person's question would totally be, "Why couldn't the Old Masters achieve the same command of light as Solomon. J. Solomon?" And the answer would be the same: they didn't have the same inflated view of the importance of this particular aspect of art, so they didn't wanna.)
Also, that the piece the questioner chose for their example is really viscerally gross, and I can't figure out what that substance is that she's licking off her face.
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:16 AM on June 25, 2017 [12 favorites]
I have a couple of notes. One is that visible artifice is important to painting. Hiding your artifice isn't that great a trick, and your ability to pull it off depends heavily on what your own generation normalizes or defines as "artifice." (Think of the rapid evolution of our bullshit detectors about CGI and computer graphics.) The bravado of old-school portraiture has a lot to do with saying, "Look, you can see that I made this with oil and particles of stone and animal hair, but when you look at it, you think you see a fish or a fruit or a personality, don't you?" This piece has something of that bravado, but without the sense that artist and viewer are in on the same joke.
My other note is that I appreciate this post as a defense of 19th-century academic painting, which is kind of a reviled form these days. The Alma-Tadema piece he uses is all about marble, and the Solomon is all about flesh that looks like marble, and to my Impressionism-soaked eyes they both look pretty lame, but yeah, I can dig that a passion for marble and marble-like things was once the mainstream aesthetic and that these men trained hard to achieve it. (Honestly, the 1890 equivalent of this person's question would totally be, "Why couldn't the Old Masters achieve the same command of light as Solomon. J. Solomon?" And the answer would be the same: they didn't have the same inflated view of the importance of this particular aspect of art, so they didn't wanna.)
Also, that the piece the questioner chose for their example is really viscerally gross, and I can't figure out what that substance is that she's licking off her face.
posted by thesmallmachine at 9:16 AM on June 25, 2017 [12 favorites]
All his criticisms of photos are from images where the photographer either wasn't striving to mitigate the concern or lacked the talent/equipment to do so.
As a tangent to that point, we're not just inundated with photography but we're inundated with really good photography. Most people are unable to replicate the quality of the photos we see every day in the paper or in advertisement with the skills and equipment available to them.
For instance, I go birding with a guy who's also a photo nerd. The camera gear that he takes out into the field is worth more than the car that drives him there. It takes a lot of patience, practice, skill, and really expensive glass to capture a picture of a bird in a tree that's as good as you can see with the naked eye. And even then, for every 20 pictures he takes, maybe one turns out as well enough to go into Lightroom for processing and touchup. Maybe one out of a hundred is good enough to print or sell.
They say 90% of everything is crap, but that's really generous. We quickly discard and ignore photos that don't jump out at us. It's easy to look at really good portrait photography all day, but looking at someone's selfies is so painfully tedious. We don't define good photography by how realistic it is, so it's ridiculous to define painting that way. But it's what we've grown to expect living in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Also the picture that follows the question, the woman's face with honey on it, it's a weird choice as it doesn't seem very realistic to me. Her forehead and nose and eyes and jawline are in super sharp focus, but the hair by her ears is just an indistinct blur. That's not how a camera depth of field would capture it and that's not how the eye would see it in person. Also the placement of the honey on the face is weird, the brow is protecting the eye sockets, but the honey is above the cheekbones to beneath the bottom eyelid at the deepest part of the eye. If you focus on under her eyes, it flattens out her face. It doesn't look to me like honey was poured on the model's face, it looks like makeup or a prosthetic or the painter's imagination was applied to make a sexy looking image, creating an uncanny valley effect for me. That picture elicits a reaction from my brain for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because of this detailed unrealism.
posted by peeedro at 9:22 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
As a tangent to that point, we're not just inundated with photography but we're inundated with really good photography. Most people are unable to replicate the quality of the photos we see every day in the paper or in advertisement with the skills and equipment available to them.
For instance, I go birding with a guy who's also a photo nerd. The camera gear that he takes out into the field is worth more than the car that drives him there. It takes a lot of patience, practice, skill, and really expensive glass to capture a picture of a bird in a tree that's as good as you can see with the naked eye. And even then, for every 20 pictures he takes, maybe one turns out as well enough to go into Lightroom for processing and touchup. Maybe one out of a hundred is good enough to print or sell.
They say 90% of everything is crap, but that's really generous. We quickly discard and ignore photos that don't jump out at us. It's easy to look at really good portrait photography all day, but looking at someone's selfies is so painfully tedious. We don't define good photography by how realistic it is, so it's ridiculous to define painting that way. But it's what we've grown to expect living in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Also the picture that follows the question, the woman's face with honey on it, it's a weird choice as it doesn't seem very realistic to me. Her forehead and nose and eyes and jawline are in super sharp focus, but the hair by her ears is just an indistinct blur. That's not how a camera depth of field would capture it and that's not how the eye would see it in person. Also the placement of the honey on the face is weird, the brow is protecting the eye sockets, but the honey is above the cheekbones to beneath the bottom eyelid at the deepest part of the eye. If you focus on under her eyes, it flattens out her face. It doesn't look to me like honey was poured on the model's face, it looks like makeup or a prosthetic or the painter's imagination was applied to make a sexy looking image, creating an uncanny valley effect for me. That picture elicits a reaction from my brain for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because of this detailed unrealism.
posted by peeedro at 9:22 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
The framing is problematic because "realism" has a lot of different aspects. The realism he's elevating is the whole experience of seeing the subject, and arguing (correctly, I think) that master-level painting does it better than photographs. Realism as literalism in light capturing obviously favours cameras, especially because we've had a century or more of getting used to reading photographs as literal capture of sense data, even though it's demonstrably different, in its current form, than what our eyes actually pull in.
Which is what makes the intersection interesting: HDR can address what he pointed out about exposed values. Perspective-through-lens issues could similarly be addressed by multi-lens cameras, as they currently do for stereoscopic vision. If you had an insect eye camera and stitched together a bunch of exposures, you'd get photographically the same effect as moving your eye around, and photographs would take another step to fully replicating the experience of seeing something.
posted by fatbird at 9:26 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Which is what makes the intersection interesting: HDR can address what he pointed out about exposed values. Perspective-through-lens issues could similarly be addressed by multi-lens cameras, as they currently do for stereoscopic vision. If you had an insect eye camera and stitched together a bunch of exposures, you'd get photographically the same effect as moving your eye around, and photographs would take another step to fully replicating the experience of seeing something.
posted by fatbird at 9:26 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
the woman's face with honey on it, it's a weird choice as it doesn't seem very realistic to me
This actually makes it a good example for his purposes because, despite being visually odd and full of camera-driven distortions, we have no problem at all reading it as a real-life moment. This speaks to our habituation to photography and bias towards towards reading it as full of verisimilitude by default.
posted by fatbird at 9:29 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
This actually makes it a good example for his purposes because, despite being visually odd and full of camera-driven distortions, we have no problem at all reading it as a real-life moment. This speaks to our habituation to photography and bias towards towards reading it as full of verisimilitude by default.
posted by fatbird at 9:29 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
I agree about Holbein. His sketches of people make photographs look like wishy-washy impressionism.
posted by Segundus at 9:32 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 9:32 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
...
—from Monet Refuses the Operation, by Lisel Mueller
posted by oulipian at 9:44 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
...
—from Monet Refuses the Operation, by Lisel Mueller
posted by oulipian at 9:44 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
I never fail to be amazed and pleased, when I see an actual Van Gogh as opposed to any of the many, many prints, especially a portrait, how startling they are. Some of the portraits seem like they're about to jump right out of the frame.
As far as HDR goes, perhaps Ivan Albright was onto the idea long before it came along.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:50 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
As far as HDR goes, perhaps Ivan Albright was onto the idea long before it came along.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:50 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Artists know what we can't see, and how we compensate for that. Therein lies their ability, one ability, among others. To paint or photograph realistically for fine art marketability, takes high skill. I am reminded of the triangular discussion of art, The Work as it stands, or hangs on a wall; The Artist and what the artist used to make the art, including the artists skill; The Viewer and what the viewer wants to see, knows, can see, and range of consciousness.
I think High Dynamic Range photography especially of the landscape is a visual nuisance, that is embraced by the Oh Cool, set, a mind set that somehow real is not enough. It is becoming a visual meme, that degrades the magnificence of what we are, and how we perceive our surroundings.
Great photographers, know what great painters know, their photographs reflect their interest in the visual realm. Their skills manifest in highly prized imagery. Today, in this world, there are really great realist painters. There are millions of realist painters who are schooled, skilled, and inspired. I saw a photograph of a sea of people, the classroom had maybe 500 students in China, all painting the same thing, it was a test environment at an art school there. There are lots of realist painters.
The challenge is our appetite for digital input in life, deliberately augmented by the commercial opportunities. The fact that most of our education is going to come off the web, sooner than anyone can compute, means that if we do not reward visual literacy, a strong aesthetic sense, and train for that, our digital world will be ugly, craven, a pop nightmare that mutates incessantly to capture the attention of jaded six year olds, not to mention the rest of us, ad infinitum.
So great realistic painters past and present know there is only so much we can focus on in the instant we view a work. Great painters make a focus point, and leave out distracting detail farther out from the focus point, unless they don't in the case of massive landscape pieces. I am still a sucker for see though ocean waves in paintings, the Dutch were very good at painting the sea. I love the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée d Orsay for many reasons, besides the impressionist works there, Van Gogh's, Starry Night on the Rhone is there, and that is my favorite piece of art, anywhere.
When Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings were cleaned they turned out to be very cartoon like, bright, almost minimalist. I like them even better because of it.
posted by Oyéah at 10:10 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
I think High Dynamic Range photography especially of the landscape is a visual nuisance, that is embraced by the Oh Cool, set, a mind set that somehow real is not enough. It is becoming a visual meme, that degrades the magnificence of what we are, and how we perceive our surroundings.
Great photographers, know what great painters know, their photographs reflect their interest in the visual realm. Their skills manifest in highly prized imagery. Today, in this world, there are really great realist painters. There are millions of realist painters who are schooled, skilled, and inspired. I saw a photograph of a sea of people, the classroom had maybe 500 students in China, all painting the same thing, it was a test environment at an art school there. There are lots of realist painters.
The challenge is our appetite for digital input in life, deliberately augmented by the commercial opportunities. The fact that most of our education is going to come off the web, sooner than anyone can compute, means that if we do not reward visual literacy, a strong aesthetic sense, and train for that, our digital world will be ugly, craven, a pop nightmare that mutates incessantly to capture the attention of jaded six year olds, not to mention the rest of us, ad infinitum.
So great realistic painters past and present know there is only so much we can focus on in the instant we view a work. Great painters make a focus point, and leave out distracting detail farther out from the focus point, unless they don't in the case of massive landscape pieces. I am still a sucker for see though ocean waves in paintings, the Dutch were very good at painting the sea. I love the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée d Orsay for many reasons, besides the impressionist works there, Van Gogh's, Starry Night on the Rhone is there, and that is my favorite piece of art, anywhere.
When Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings were cleaned they turned out to be very cartoon like, bright, almost minimalist. I like them even better because of it.
posted by Oyéah at 10:10 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
This actually makes it a good example for his purposes because, despite being visually odd and full of camera-driven distortions, we have no problem at all reading it as a real-life moment.
I don't know how quora works, but I'm assuming that image was chosen by the person asking the question. If so, it's really funny to me that someone could look at an image of a preternaturally attractive, flawless, symmetrical female face, covered in viscous goo, making a come-hither sexy pose, and use the word realism to describe it. It's fantasy.
posted by peeedro at 10:15 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
I don't know how quora works, but I'm assuming that image was chosen by the person asking the question. If so, it's really funny to me that someone could look at an image of a preternaturally attractive, flawless, symmetrical female face, covered in viscous goo, making a come-hither sexy pose, and use the word realism to describe it. It's fantasy.
posted by peeedro at 10:15 AM on June 25, 2017 [6 favorites]
The average photo is more "realistic" than the average painting. Any argument otherwise is bound to track in some bullshit on its shoes.
That's cool too, but the discussion is about a very minority painting style, and the best of the best.
I think a lot of people are put off because the main answer was unnecessarily dickish about photorealism as a form, but didn't make me want to go all in on proving his whole life to be wrong. I'm also getting the feeling that a lot of people only read part of that. I read the whole page like a sucker, but there were a lot of interesting opinions there.
I have been blown away by photorealistic works and can really enjoy them, but often more like building ships in a bottle, or writing on grains of rice, than many other forms of art. It almost always falls into the category of amazing, but slightly off putting because of the obsessiveness, craft.
I'm fascinated and repelled by the whole framing of the question. It ignores a whole history of passions and counterpassions, desires and priorities, schools and economic settings, definitions of "realism" and "stylization," in favor of a simple, smug assumption that a drawing that resembles a photo is the best drawing, so we have the best drawings now.
It seems to be quite a Rorschach test.
posted by bongo_x at 10:17 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
That's cool too, but the discussion is about a very minority painting style, and the best of the best.
I think a lot of people are put off because the main answer was unnecessarily dickish about photorealism as a form, but didn't make me want to go all in on proving his whole life to be wrong. I'm also getting the feeling that a lot of people only read part of that. I read the whole page like a sucker, but there were a lot of interesting opinions there.
I have been blown away by photorealistic works and can really enjoy them, but often more like building ships in a bottle, or writing on grains of rice, than many other forms of art. It almost always falls into the category of amazing, but slightly off putting because of the obsessiveness, craft.
I'm fascinated and repelled by the whole framing of the question. It ignores a whole history of passions and counterpassions, desires and priorities, schools and economic settings, definitions of "realism" and "stylization," in favor of a simple, smug assumption that a drawing that resembles a photo is the best drawing, so we have the best drawings now.
It seems to be quite a Rorschach test.
posted by bongo_x at 10:17 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
If your iphone photo of a suset looks exactly like what you see you most likely have low-performing eyes. I am never not astonished by the dynamic range of the eye.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:18 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:18 AM on June 25, 2017 [15 favorites]
The point is:
Sorry darling, I didn't catch it quite right. You'll have to sit for me in the nude again so I can spend a few more hours studying your body.
posted by Burn_IT at 10:37 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
Sorry darling, I didn't catch it quite right. You'll have to sit for me in the nude again so I can spend a few more hours studying your body.
posted by Burn_IT at 10:37 AM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
The point is:
Hmmm. I'm sorry, I don't remember where we met, but obviously you do.
posted by bongo_x at 10:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Hmmm. I'm sorry, I don't remember where we met, but obviously you do.
posted by bongo_x at 10:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
I never fail to be amazed and pleased, when I see an actual Van Gogh as opposed to any of the many, many prints, especially a portrait, how startling they are. Some of the portraits seem like they're about to jump right out of the frame.
You're absolutely right. I think that's partly because the paints have layers and do add a third dimension effect that isn't really reproducible in photographs.
And on the same vein, we're not only talking about the difference in our own eyes, but the environment and medium we see photographs and paintings. For example, the same picture on our desktop monitor is different from the one our smartphone: screen calibration, LED/backlight differences, different manufacturers of of plastic/glass/sheen on screens, and the surrounding lighting ALL create differences in one single picture. And when the picture is printed/developed, then there's the kind and model of printer (or technique used) and what paper and ink are used. So, this can get super complicated real fast.
For paintings something similar happens. Not all of us can see the Mona Lisa. So, we end up seeing a photographic of a painting that then is seen on our screens. A painting that is in a museum, where back in the day most paintings were a part of private collections to hang in some patron's house and not really designed to be seen on a small phone screen. So, there's just layer after layer of technology, adjustments, and limitations that an image goes through before it even reaches our eyes.
posted by FJT at 10:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
You're absolutely right. I think that's partly because the paints have layers and do add a third dimension effect that isn't really reproducible in photographs.
And on the same vein, we're not only talking about the difference in our own eyes, but the environment and medium we see photographs and paintings. For example, the same picture on our desktop monitor is different from the one our smartphone: screen calibration, LED/backlight differences, different manufacturers of of plastic/glass/sheen on screens, and the surrounding lighting ALL create differences in one single picture. And when the picture is printed/developed, then there's the kind and model of printer (or technique used) and what paper and ink are used. So, this can get super complicated real fast.
For paintings something similar happens. Not all of us can see the Mona Lisa. So, we end up seeing a photographic of a painting that then is seen on our screens. A painting that is in a museum, where back in the day most paintings were a part of private collections to hang in some patron's house and not really designed to be seen on a small phone screen. So, there's just layer after layer of technology, adjustments, and limitations that an image goes through before it even reaches our eyes.
posted by FJT at 10:57 AM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
I have a lot I could say about this, but I don't quite have the words. What I can say is: that painting of the young lady that he held up at the end as a modern masterpiece of realistic portraiture was kind of ... there. It's incredibly well-executed and technically accomplished. But it conveys very little about its subject. The portraits by the Old Masters that he points out do indeed have a great immediacy and complexity to them, which that portrait lacks. The lady looks pleasant and bright, but that's kind of it.
Also, this may be neither here nor there, but I can't help but notice that there is a great deal of innocence and softness in that image, whereas the initial painting that he takes apart is highly sexualized.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:08 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
Also, this may be neither here nor there, but I can't help but notice that there is a great deal of innocence and softness in that image, whereas the initial painting that he takes apart is highly sexualized.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:08 AM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
Hrmmmmm, I may regret coming back to this thread but there are a couple things:
"Photorealism" was/is a style of painting that is conscious of the influence of the camera and is sardonic and meta about how cameras influence the phenomenology of seeing.
19th century academic painting was certainly influenced by photography as a new technology, but not yet concerned with photography as a subject matter into itself.
The obsesssion with photography as "objective" rose in parallel with the diminishment of the human being in the hierarchy of epistemology, and our replacement by mechanical devices as "better" at perceiving "truth." People are not to be trusted; the camera and the computer tell the truth. It's only now that mechanical image manipulation is becoming so uncanny that people are starting to re-question the photograph-as-photograph as a signifier of "the real."
The privileged place of photography has done more damage to visual arts than any other technology. It's not photography's fault--it's a cultural problem. Rockwell used a photo projector, but his work lacks the deadness of today's photo-based painting.
The greats of 20th century illustration al used photos. Rockwell as mentioned; Leyendecker; Bernie Fuchs; Howard Pyle; N. C. Wyeth. And wildlife painters like Robert Bateman. None of them look like the work of folks like Nelson Shanks, whose paintings are bloodless if "accurate".
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:31 AM on June 25, 2017 [10 favorites]
"Photorealism" was/is a style of painting that is conscious of the influence of the camera and is sardonic and meta about how cameras influence the phenomenology of seeing.
19th century academic painting was certainly influenced by photography as a new technology, but not yet concerned with photography as a subject matter into itself.
The obsesssion with photography as "objective" rose in parallel with the diminishment of the human being in the hierarchy of epistemology, and our replacement by mechanical devices as "better" at perceiving "truth." People are not to be trusted; the camera and the computer tell the truth. It's only now that mechanical image manipulation is becoming so uncanny that people are starting to re-question the photograph-as-photograph as a signifier of "the real."
The privileged place of photography has done more damage to visual arts than any other technology. It's not photography's fault--it's a cultural problem. Rockwell used a photo projector, but his work lacks the deadness of today's photo-based painting.
The greats of 20th century illustration al used photos. Rockwell as mentioned; Leyendecker; Bernie Fuchs; Howard Pyle; N. C. Wyeth. And wildlife painters like Robert Bateman. None of them look like the work of folks like Nelson Shanks, whose paintings are bloodless if "accurate".
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:31 AM on June 25, 2017 [10 favorites]
I always feel a little a bug up my ass when I see a painting of a photo in a museum or high end gallery. I agree with the article that there's generally not enough information in a photo to make a convincing painting out of it. At the far end though, I have to admit that I can be deeply impressed when see a huge, insanely detailed painted copy of a photo.
That said, I've enjoyed being part of Julia Kay's Portrait Party on Flickr. When you join, you post several photos of yourself that members can draw from, and you in turn make do paintings an drawing of other members. Everyone is learning, practicing, and everyone gets to see how they might look to other people. The quality is very uneven but that's part of the charm. It's a lot of fun.
posted by bonobothegreat at 11:46 AM on June 25, 2017
That said, I've enjoyed being part of Julia Kay's Portrait Party on Flickr. When you join, you post several photos of yourself that members can draw from, and you in turn make do paintings an drawing of other members. Everyone is learning, practicing, and everyone gets to see how they might look to other people. The quality is very uneven but that's part of the charm. It's a lot of fun.
posted by bonobothegreat at 11:46 AM on June 25, 2017
—from Monet Refuses the Operation, by Lisel Mueller
Oh thank you so much for sharing this. The very first time I saw a Monet, I knew. And the big Seurat in School of hte Art Institute in Chicago? I stood for long minutes, almost in tears. Pointillism and the play of light through leaves moving in the wind I can have whenever I want.
posted by infini at 12:15 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Oh thank you so much for sharing this. The very first time I saw a Monet, I knew. And the big Seurat in School of hte Art Institute in Chicago? I stood for long minutes, almost in tears. Pointillism and the play of light through leaves moving in the wind I can have whenever I want.
posted by infini at 12:15 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
This is interesting because so much of sight relies on how our brains process information and the shortcuts they take to understand it. For instance, we don't see all colors of the rainbow equally. Our eyes are much, much better suited to discerning greens and reds, while blue is almost an afterthought, for evolutionary reasons. And the rods of our eyes can detect faint light better than the cones, which is why we can see faint light "out of the corner of our eye" at night but have trouble seeing it straight on.
Things like that first painting look "photo-realistic" because it emulates artifacts from photography that we take to be normal now. It is a lot like how people expect music to have a specific sort of balanced loudness that is an artifact of how mp3s compress sound. We simply grow accustomed to things. Both photos and mp3s convey a certain precise sheen of information that is a small subset of what our eyes/ears can see/hear, but it is easily digestible and comes prepackaged for our brains to experience. An 17th century person who lived without so much as a light bulb would find photorealism an uncanny valley-level false.
A really interesting intersection to this argument is Vermeer. I highly recommend watching Tim's Vermeer, a very convincing argument that Vermeer (Girl with a Pearl Earring fame) was basically using an innovative camera obscura to create his paintings. There are some specific examples of lighting that is simply beyond what any other other painter can create from their eye alone.
Ultimately, the value of painting is that it is an interpretation and reconstitution of sight. Paintings are instilled with the human experience of seeing and understanding BEFORE the painting is even attempted. Photos mechanically reproduce things and much of the art of photography is one of editing/selection. The goal of the "old masters" is to faithfully capture the essence of seeing a thing. Some of the "softness" is precisely to emphasize hard points of focus (eyes, for instance) and everything is meant to provide balance and convey intent. So they are packed with more useful information to a viewer beyond reproduction of a view (which itself on exists as a mental construct).
posted by lubujackson at 2:21 PM on June 25, 2017 [10 favorites]
Things like that first painting look "photo-realistic" because it emulates artifacts from photography that we take to be normal now. It is a lot like how people expect music to have a specific sort of balanced loudness that is an artifact of how mp3s compress sound. We simply grow accustomed to things. Both photos and mp3s convey a certain precise sheen of information that is a small subset of what our eyes/ears can see/hear, but it is easily digestible and comes prepackaged for our brains to experience. An 17th century person who lived without so much as a light bulb would find photorealism an uncanny valley-level false.
A really interesting intersection to this argument is Vermeer. I highly recommend watching Tim's Vermeer, a very convincing argument that Vermeer (Girl with a Pearl Earring fame) was basically using an innovative camera obscura to create his paintings. There are some specific examples of lighting that is simply beyond what any other other painter can create from their eye alone.
Ultimately, the value of painting is that it is an interpretation and reconstitution of sight. Paintings are instilled with the human experience of seeing and understanding BEFORE the painting is even attempted. Photos mechanically reproduce things and much of the art of photography is one of editing/selection. The goal of the "old masters" is to faithfully capture the essence of seeing a thing. Some of the "softness" is precisely to emphasize hard points of focus (eyes, for instance) and everything is meant to provide balance and convey intent. So they are packed with more useful information to a viewer beyond reproduction of a view (which itself on exists as a mental construct).
posted by lubujackson at 2:21 PM on June 25, 2017 [10 favorites]
One of the more frustrating things about this discussion is that it's one that's been had for, what, like 150 years now? The main answer itself is pretty much Rockism for Figurative Painting, and it's inane for all sorts of reasons — Quora really is Yahoo Answers + BA, with doltish middlebrow aesthetic preferences asserted boldly.
Things like: and your overall impression of the scene would have both lights and darks full of detail, while a photograph has to favour one or the other, or neither are just bullshit, and ignorant of the tremendous amount of work put into huge tonal ranges in prints by everyone from the f64 Ansel Adams school to Ed Weston and Mapplethorpe, and in its defense of "Old Masters," it ignores that the use of tonal range and contrast for composition was huge for them too — Caravaggio had huge swaths of black-on-black.
The only real answer is that Old Masters didn't have the tools, context or desire to paint in a photorealistic or hyperrealistic style, not to assert that really they were more realistic than photography, man.
Maybe one reason this whole thing pisses me off so much is that I shoot both some pin-sharp photos (mostly digital) with pretty great glass and I shoot a bunch of toy cameras and experimental cameras, like Holgas, that have plastic glass, vignette distortion and a dream-like quality that I do think is more representative of how I experience the world, but that doesn't make them more "realistic," and arguing that it does is stooping to the level of not even wrong.
Or, to reference a pretty fun book I got out of the library a couple months back, Rendering with Markers, rendering with any sort of graphic media is a set of choices about emphasis and technique — he points out that attempting to be "realistic" with rendering markers will be less effective at communicating the emphases that a good composition should, despite a good rendering having an overall sense of effective realism (and in many cases, an extremely exacting scale replication). Photorealistic painting or hyperrealistic painting is no different, and photography's difference is in amount, not kind.
But the Quora jaggov wants to imply that Old Masters were real art and photos/photorealism isn't, and that's shit that photographers had to fight hard against to be taken seriously for a LONG TIME — like almost 100 years between the birth of cameras and when straight photography (not pictorialism) could be considered fine art, and even then it was another 50 years before color photography was treated as fine art. Because the avant garde moves faster than the audience, that same battle is being fought with digital imagery, and it's dumb again.
It's OK to prefer an Old Master oil paint aesthetic, but to dress it up in terms of artistic worthiness or realism is to retreat to the stupid prejudices of the past and to declare one's opinion ignorant of the direction of art in general for the entire life of the critic.
posted by klangklangston at 2:26 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
Things like: and your overall impression of the scene would have both lights and darks full of detail, while a photograph has to favour one or the other, or neither are just bullshit, and ignorant of the tremendous amount of work put into huge tonal ranges in prints by everyone from the f64 Ansel Adams school to Ed Weston and Mapplethorpe, and in its defense of "Old Masters," it ignores that the use of tonal range and contrast for composition was huge for them too — Caravaggio had huge swaths of black-on-black.
The only real answer is that Old Masters didn't have the tools, context or desire to paint in a photorealistic or hyperrealistic style, not to assert that really they were more realistic than photography, man.
Maybe one reason this whole thing pisses me off so much is that I shoot both some pin-sharp photos (mostly digital) with pretty great glass and I shoot a bunch of toy cameras and experimental cameras, like Holgas, that have plastic glass, vignette distortion and a dream-like quality that I do think is more representative of how I experience the world, but that doesn't make them more "realistic," and arguing that it does is stooping to the level of not even wrong.
Or, to reference a pretty fun book I got out of the library a couple months back, Rendering with Markers, rendering with any sort of graphic media is a set of choices about emphasis and technique — he points out that attempting to be "realistic" with rendering markers will be less effective at communicating the emphases that a good composition should, despite a good rendering having an overall sense of effective realism (and in many cases, an extremely exacting scale replication). Photorealistic painting or hyperrealistic painting is no different, and photography's difference is in amount, not kind.
But the Quora jaggov wants to imply that Old Masters were real art and photos/photorealism isn't, and that's shit that photographers had to fight hard against to be taken seriously for a LONG TIME — like almost 100 years between the birth of cameras and when straight photography (not pictorialism) could be considered fine art, and even then it was another 50 years before color photography was treated as fine art. Because the avant garde moves faster than the audience, that same battle is being fought with digital imagery, and it's dumb again.
It's OK to prefer an Old Master oil paint aesthetic, but to dress it up in terms of artistic worthiness or realism is to retreat to the stupid prejudices of the past and to declare one's opinion ignorant of the direction of art in general for the entire life of the critic.
posted by klangklangston at 2:26 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
visible artifice is important to painting. Hiding your artifice isn't that great a trick, and your ability to pull it off depends heavily on what your own generation normalizes or defines as "artifice."
I've come to think that a lot of we call “style” boils down to repetition. (Sort of cribbing from Hofstadter's "systems acquire meaning from self-reference.") Artists tend to have a set of traits about their art that repeat and are recognizable. Brush strokes, color palettes, subjects, compositions, themes, word choice, medium. These can be more or less abstract, like [uses lots of reds and yellows] or [deals with death in a detached sense].
Monet’s brushstrokes are the same style on the left side of a canvas as they are on the right side, and from one canvas to many others. That way, each of Monet’s brushstrokes isn’t just one isolated piece of information to look at, but each refers to the whole canvas, and to his entire body of work. (And of course, Monet has a whole suite of abstract traits that repeat and define his work; the brush strokes are just the big great obvious ones.)
You find highly repeated stylistic elements in paintings, novels, furniture, ziggurats, standup comedy, fan fiction, filmmakers, and twitter accounts. You find these in individual people! Your friends have traits that repeat about them over and over every time you see them—how they look, how they sound, their foibles, their go-to jokes—and you like and are comforted by these things. (The human brain is biased to like what it recognizes!)
Frequent advice to young artists is to work on “finding your voice,” which I take to mean, “Find what’s distinct about you that can be repeated and recognized, that will distinguish you from other people doing similar things.” My point is that this kind of “style / repetition,” is a good and important part of creating art!
But style comes not only from artistic choices (or subconscious tendencies), it also comes from technological limitations imposed by medium.
Oil paints, etched engravings, 8-bit computer graphics, hand-drawn animation, 8mm film, stone carving—Each of these technologies for creating visual images has limitations that prevent it from achieving perfect realism—that make looking at one of its creations distinct in our brain from looking at its subjects in the real world.
Creators and audiences might prefer these limitations not to exist—early video game creators could have sold more units with modern high-res graphics—BUT, the limitations in fact confer certain very valuable identity to whole genres of artistic creation. There's something we love about 8-bit Mario that cannot be captured in 3D Mario, and that would never have existed without the decade's limitations of tech.
Digital photography certainly has a suite of restrictions that human perception does not; but, overall, a photograph is a much faster, cheaper, and easier way to create a naturalistic image than anything else we have right now. But my point is that, counterintuitively, that isn't entirely a good thing. It means that, as a photographer, you have fewer obvious ways to impart an image with your style. You can repeat elements of composition, subject, and color editing (and people who are popular on Instagram DO THIS A LOT). You can add grain in post. But you don't, without brushstrokes, have as easy an ability to create a visual pattern that repeats five times every inch that gives your work stylistic unity as compared to the visual world or your medium at large. (Except of course pixels and JPEG compression!)
posted by little onion at 2:34 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
I've come to think that a lot of we call “style” boils down to repetition. (Sort of cribbing from Hofstadter's "systems acquire meaning from self-reference.") Artists tend to have a set of traits about their art that repeat and are recognizable. Brush strokes, color palettes, subjects, compositions, themes, word choice, medium. These can be more or less abstract, like [uses lots of reds and yellows] or [deals with death in a detached sense].
Monet’s brushstrokes are the same style on the left side of a canvas as they are on the right side, and from one canvas to many others. That way, each of Monet’s brushstrokes isn’t just one isolated piece of information to look at, but each refers to the whole canvas, and to his entire body of work. (And of course, Monet has a whole suite of abstract traits that repeat and define his work; the brush strokes are just the big great obvious ones.)
You find highly repeated stylistic elements in paintings, novels, furniture, ziggurats, standup comedy, fan fiction, filmmakers, and twitter accounts. You find these in individual people! Your friends have traits that repeat about them over and over every time you see them—how they look, how they sound, their foibles, their go-to jokes—and you like and are comforted by these things. (The human brain is biased to like what it recognizes!)
Frequent advice to young artists is to work on “finding your voice,” which I take to mean, “Find what’s distinct about you that can be repeated and recognized, that will distinguish you from other people doing similar things.” My point is that this kind of “style / repetition,” is a good and important part of creating art!
But style comes not only from artistic choices (or subconscious tendencies), it also comes from technological limitations imposed by medium.
Oil paints, etched engravings, 8-bit computer graphics, hand-drawn animation, 8mm film, stone carving—Each of these technologies for creating visual images has limitations that prevent it from achieving perfect realism—that make looking at one of its creations distinct in our brain from looking at its subjects in the real world.
Creators and audiences might prefer these limitations not to exist—early video game creators could have sold more units with modern high-res graphics—BUT, the limitations in fact confer certain very valuable identity to whole genres of artistic creation. There's something we love about 8-bit Mario that cannot be captured in 3D Mario, and that would never have existed without the decade's limitations of tech.
Digital photography certainly has a suite of restrictions that human perception does not; but, overall, a photograph is a much faster, cheaper, and easier way to create a naturalistic image than anything else we have right now. But my point is that, counterintuitively, that isn't entirely a good thing. It means that, as a photographer, you have fewer obvious ways to impart an image with your style. You can repeat elements of composition, subject, and color editing (and people who are popular on Instagram DO THIS A LOT). You can add grain in post. But you don't, without brushstrokes, have as easy an ability to create a visual pattern that repeats five times every inch that gives your work stylistic unity as compared to the visual world or your medium at large. (Except of course pixels and JPEG compression!)
posted by little onion at 2:34 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]
But the Quora jaggov wants to imply that Old Masters were real art and photos/photorealism isn't,
Well, there's the problem. This isn't at all a photography vs painting argument. That has little to do with the subject at hand as far as I can tell, and I don't understand lumping photos and photorealism together. That seems like lumping building ships in a bottle and building ships together.
The statement was that a painting of a dog, that looks like a photograph, is better than a painting that doesn't. Which seems as silly to me as saying a photograph of a dog, that looks like a painting, is better than a photo of a dog that doesn't. The second one is what people do with cheesy filters on their phones. (I am pro making photos of dogs look like paintings, by the way.)
posted by bongo_x at 3:12 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
Well, there's the problem. This isn't at all a photography vs painting argument. That has little to do with the subject at hand as far as I can tell, and I don't understand lumping photos and photorealism together. That seems like lumping building ships in a bottle and building ships together.
The statement was that a painting of a dog, that looks like a photograph, is better than a painting that doesn't. Which seems as silly to me as saying a photograph of a dog, that looks like a painting, is better than a photo of a dog that doesn't. The second one is what people do with cheesy filters on their phones. (I am pro making photos of dogs look like paintings, by the way.)
posted by bongo_x at 3:12 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
There is a good study of this: Art & Illusion by Gombrich. It asks why, since most things have always looked more or less the same as they do now, reoresentational art has styles and evolves. Also lots of other stuff.
posted by hexatron at 3:37 PM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by hexatron at 3:37 PM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
"Mr. Benjamin, paging Mr. Walter Benjamin to the blue courtesy phone..."
posted by overeducated_alligator at 3:45 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 3:45 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Quora really is Yahoo Answers + BA
British Airways? Bachelor of Arts? Business Administration?
It's a pity that this obscurity mars an otherwise fine putdown of Quora
posted by thelonius at 4:08 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
British Airways? Bachelor of Arts? Business Administration?
It's a pity that this obscurity mars an otherwise fine putdown of Quora
posted by thelonius at 4:08 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]
"The statement was that a painting of a dog, that looks like a photograph, is better than a painting that doesn't. Which seems as silly to me as saying a photograph of a dog, that looks like a painting, is better than a photo of a dog that doesn't. The second one is what people do with cheesy filters on their phones. (I am pro making photos of dogs look like paintings, by the way.)"
And even those cheesy filtered paintings can be regarded with aesthetic critique — can be regarded as art. I mean, it IS just as easy to argue that people who hold the hyperrealistic or photorealistic style to be better than e.g. expressionistic style are dumb — and there are plenty of them. But so many of the answers for this question sound like they're the same people insisting that it's just not a real experience to read a book on a Kindle, man, what about the pages?
"British Airways? Bachelor of Arts? Business Administration?
It's a pity that this obscurity mars an otherwise fine putdown of Quora"
Since you got it on your second guess, and it was kind of a toss-off quip, I'm content in believing the meaning will be apparent even without the polish that could have made it sparkle.
posted by klangklangston at 4:54 PM on June 25, 2017
And even those cheesy filtered paintings can be regarded with aesthetic critique — can be regarded as art. I mean, it IS just as easy to argue that people who hold the hyperrealistic or photorealistic style to be better than e.g. expressionistic style are dumb — and there are plenty of them. But so many of the answers for this question sound like they're the same people insisting that it's just not a real experience to read a book on a Kindle, man, what about the pages?
"British Airways? Bachelor of Arts? Business Administration?
It's a pity that this obscurity mars an otherwise fine putdown of Quora"
Since you got it on your second guess, and it was kind of a toss-off quip, I'm content in believing the meaning will be apparent even without the polish that could have made it sparkle.
posted by klangklangston at 4:54 PM on June 25, 2017
>"You will never be able to photograph a sunset without blowing out the lights or losing all of the information in the darks."
Say what you will about painting, but you can fix this shit even in film by bracketing your exposures and using the best exposure for each part of the print. You can also use a mask or split-grade print.
Also, the focal length of a camera lenses don't distort the subject, distance from the lens does. Portrait lenses allow you to frame tightly while far enough away from the subject to avoid distortion.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 5:07 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Say what you will about painting, but you can fix this shit even in film by bracketing your exposures and using the best exposure for each part of the print. You can also use a mask or split-grade print.
Also, the focal length of a camera lenses don't distort the subject, distance from the lens does. Portrait lenses allow you to frame tightly while far enough away from the subject to avoid distortion.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 5:07 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
This made me curious though, are there any pre-Renneisance painters that went for the more "real" look in their painting?
posted by ymgve at 7:28 PM on June 25, 2017
posted by ymgve at 7:28 PM on June 25, 2017
Roman funerary paintings. They're breathtaking.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:52 PM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:52 PM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
ymgve: we have lost almost all of the ancient Greek and Roman painting, which was as beloved as sculpture in their time, due to natural processes of decay. But the Fayum portraits survive.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:54 PM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:54 PM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]
Well yes there are pre-renaissance painters who were into realism, and not necessarily religion. There were plenty of murals on walls in Rome, and among other cultures. But you never know how people see, what people see. We tend to think in the west that each of us is the same, but different ways of living and different environments leave people seeing differently. There are certainly some incredible realism on The Silk Road. There are pictures of people who were contemporary to the time. Try Thousand Buddha Cave, the images two dimensional, and three dimensional employ excellent figure structure, and an understanding of color and light.
Here is a description of what is there.
posted by Oyéah at 7:55 PM on June 25, 2017
Here is a description of what is there.
posted by Oyéah at 7:55 PM on June 25, 2017
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posted by CrystalDave at 11:29 PM on June 24, 2017 [32 favorites]