Realist Art/photography?

[John Kasaian]

I was just at a friend's website where he displays his oil paintings. His preferred genre is "Realist" and IMHO he's quite good at it. It got me thinking about photography though. I get the impression that photography is considered by many to be somehow "low class" if the attempt is to record something in the "Realist" genre.

I'm a little confused here. Realist painting has been around long before photography. The intent (if I have this right) is to paint something and make it look like it really does look, and it is certainly a legitimate activity.

So what is wrong with photographing something to make it appear as it really does, with any manipulating done to restore what information might have been lost in the process do to error in exposure or the incapacity of materials?

Just curious---your thoughts?

[Martin Miller]

The collectors of Gursky, Struth, Hoefer, Burtynsky, et al. apparently think there's nothing wrong with photographic realism, and they are even willing to pay top dollar to get them.

[Nathan Potter]

If the photographer considers him/her self an artist then there are no limits on realism, abstraction or anything in between. Any limits and preferences are imposed by the attitudes of the viewers.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[sanchi heuser]

Painting or photography is only the medium. What is really decisive is the idea behind.
What is my intention, what drives me to make photographs, paintings, videos etc ?
What is it I'm searching for? What attitude do i have to the world when I make photos, paintings etc ?
And if it is art or not, that isn't the point. If you feel you have to do it,
just do.

sanchi

[John Kasaian]

I think it was Ansel Adams who had a story about a guest who saw a fossil(or something like that) while at his home in Carmel and mistook it for a piece of sculpture and proceeded to exclaim what statement the artist had made with the sculpture. When the guest asked Ansel who the sculpture was, Adams informed him that it was in fact, a fossil.

After reading some "artist's statements" I was struck by how many Byzantine photographers can get.

[Maris Rusis]

Photographs, in a somewhat technical philosophical sense, are one of the few ways to get pictures of the external world that have not been fabricated out of coded descriptions.

Realist painting takes the "mind's eye picture" in the artists brain and outputs it onto canvas (say) via a hand/brush/ paint system that can be learned at art school. The "mind's eye picture" is something that the artist has generated not only from what they have seen but also from what they remember, feel, imagine, and confabulate. A good realist painting is a "mind map" from the artist and as such is a complex and wonderful thing in its own right. But the elements of a "mind map" do not bear a necessary one-to-one correspondence with items in the external world.

It is a striking thing that modern digital picture making is a remarkably accurate mechanisation of realist painting. The original eye/brain/hand cycle of the traditional painter is faithfully replicated step by step by the sensor/computer /printer cycle. All the virtues of realist painting are available to the modern digital picture maker. All the sins are available too including the capacity to generate plausible lies.

Photography is a thing apart. There is no eye, brain, hand, no sensor, computer, printer involved at all. A physical sample of subject matter arrives in a sensitive surface, occasions marks, and the accumulation of marks is the photograph. A photograph is an impression like an actual foot-print in a beach. Everything else is a like a picture of a foot-print on a beach. Photographs bear a one-to-one relationship to reality in the same way that foot-prints infallibly confirm the existence of feet.

That photography is hostage to reality is its greatest virtue and ironically its greatest failing. But fortunately we are not stuck only with photography. There is a universe of realist painting or digital confectionary if we want a bit of imaginative visual fun.

[John Kasaian]

Well stated, Marsis. Thank you!

[D. Bryant]

Where is Tim Atherton when we need him?

Don Bryant

[Drew Wiley]

When painters like Chuck Close began making huge deadpan paintings based on
photographs, they were referred to as "Photo-Realists". Then when photographers like
Stephen Shore started copying the same general subject matter, they were labeled as
"Photo-Photo-Realists". So I guess now that Chuck Close is himself having large format
negatives turned directly into mural sized digital prints, and has skipped the canvas altogether, that would make him a "Photo-Photo-Photo-Realist"!

[Struan Gray]

My favourite writer on art, Peter Campbell, wrote a piece for the London Review of Books recently about Gerhard Richter's paintings of photographs. The first paragraph alone is worth a read:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n09/camp01_.html

The rest of the article is good too, if your library has the magazine, or if you feel like coughing up the one-time price.

More Richter here: http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/paintings/ (ABRFPW - a bit risqué for prudish workplaces).