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Thread: Realist Art/photography?

  1. #11

    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    The term Realism is a misnomer. It does not refer to an opposite to abstract artwork. Instead, especially when it's capitalized, it refers to a group of painters in France working in the mid nineteenth century, who refused to paint anything they could not see. They wouldn't paint an angel because they couldn't see any. They also tended to depict images of social ills that they perceived. It also refers to a group of writers working about the same time who wrote with the idea that sociaty was something real and could be understood as such. The Neo-Realists were a group of film makers in Italy right after WWII. They made their films using non-professional actors and told stories about the lower classes. Photo-Realism came later as a post-modern discussion of material, where the source of any particular painting was a photograph.

    The ground gained by the Realists is still being used today, but we tend to catagorize the style as 'documentary photography'. The act of manipulating images to fix errors or to make a scene look more 'real' is just standard photographic practice. There ate plenty of successful fine art photographers still working that shoot straight and are still highly regarded because message and idea are more important then craft is today. (At least in the art world!)

  2. #12

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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    I don't get this. Photography is "realist"
    How can it not be. Maybe it is THE realist. Maybe it the realist photography can be. Is it perfectly real from the onset or manipulated reality from the beginning
    No manipulation=realist?
    You might be able to say the act of photographing something is in itself a manipulation when compared to what we have the ability to see
    Maybe our sight is a manipulation of the world in that we can focus on different things rapidly/make corrections so those things are easier seen
    There are limits to both sight and film. Film/lenses/photography may not have the same dof or dynamic range or whatever else but a person may also be blind, seeing the world distorted if they can see anything at all

    I see manipulation of photos/art in general as the mimicking of sight while combining some of our favorite sighted memories
    Its not so much raw creativity "making something up" as it is making something up out of all we've experienced
    whether that conglomeration of events makes "art" photography unreal doesn't really matter all too much if you also see our vision as perhaps not being entirely realistic ..in that our eyes and brain function just the same only faster and better to the point that we believe what we see is actually true and uncompensated

  3. #13
    Gary L. Quay's Avatar
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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    Quote Originally Posted by John Kasaian View Post
    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?
    Nothing is wrong. One can create many a photograph that does nothing but depict something that is the way it is, and still have the viewer say "wow." Photography is always about the frame, i.e. what you choose to leave out. Carlos Santana famously spoke about his guitar playing having as much to do with the silence between the notes as with the notes themselves. An artist makes this same choice. Realist art, like photography, chooses subject matter, perspective, and framing. It's all subjective, as is the idea that realist photography is not art, or is "low class."

    --Gary

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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    Quote Originally Posted by Pfeiffer Duckett View Post
    fine art photographers still working that shoot straight and are still highly regarded because message and idea are more important then craft is today. (At least in the art world!)
    Well stated. I am greatly saddened, however, at the extreme to which this philosophy has been taken. In my humble opinion, this explains why past generations were graced with the vocal stylings of Lady Day, and we are subjected to.... Beyonce... but, to the original post.

    I think the reason some may deem photographic realism lowbrow is due to the fact that most people probably are convinced they can do the same thing. I used to dream of one day buying a dime store polaroid and making images just as good, if not better, than Ansel's creations! After all, they are just pretty pictures of mountains and such... right? A Polaroid One Step, a round trip bus ticket, and I would have been on my way to stardom! Yeah, right.

    I had a fantastic art teacher in high school who told us that the reason we stand in awe of what we consider great artistic works is directly related to our perceived inability to mimic such work. It's great because you think you can't do it. To a degree, this is legitimate. I think Kind of Blue is the greatest album ever produced anywhere by anybody. I love the recording not only for the technical acumen demonstrated by the players, but the superb writing of the music itself.

    Photography is, even in its most elementary form, abstract in nature. We as photographers take a small part of reality recorded on a piece of film, sensor, plate, or what have you, and present it outside of its original context. The way in which this is done is just as influential a factor on the success of a photographic work of art as is the the technical execution thereof. I admire the draughtsmanship of Vermeer, but am just as moved by the magnificent abstractions of Joan Miro. Each has its place.

  5. #15
    ic-racer's Avatar
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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    Quote Originally Posted by sun of sand View Post
    I don't get this. Photography is "realist"
    ng entirely realistic ..in that our eyes and brain function just the same only faster and better to the point that we believe what we see is actually true and uncompensated
    Realism, like Modernism are art movements. Thus they are capitalized. Pfeiffer Duckett description is a good one.

  6. #16

    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    There isn't anything paricularly "realistic" about a photograph compared to any other two dimensional representation.

    Who hasn't taken a photo a person they know to be beautiful and have it turn out ugly? Who hasn't taken a picture of the most gorgeous, breathtaking scene only to look at the photo later and find the "reality" lost in the mundane?

    If a photo represented reality we would all be equal - but looking up from the stygian depths I am depressed to realize this is not the case. Reality varies with a good photographer taking half a step to the right, or waiting half a second for the beam of light or asking the model to tilt his head a couple of degrees or even having the foresight to take the group shot while the best man is still one drink short of punching the groom's dad.

    Photography isn't even always good at being accurate, let alone realistic. As many students of botany will tell you a good drawing of a plant is often much more informative about its stucture than any photo because it abstracts and clarifies from the specimen the important information while even a sharp photograph can be confusing.

    People have been walking over beds of fossilized footprints for millenia before they became footprints. The reality of the footprint requires a certain knowledge of what it is. Even then if you showed a picture of Friday's footprint to Robinson Crusoe it would not mean the same thing to him - the fact that someone had taken the photo would imply he wasn't alone on the island anyhow so the footprint would have less impact.

    No, I'm afraid people looking for reality will need to look somewhere else than photography, even when it is not "touched up". "It is photographed therefore it is" won't cut it.

  7. #17
    multiplex
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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    i am not sure john. maybe photography is low class or the bastard son of realist painting
    because it is not a painting or drawing, but is made with a recording device
    and chemicals ( and a computer ) not by a brush or chisel or hand-tool and canvas/paper/ &C -- it is a mechanical art.

    maybe the problem is viewers think photographs are trying too hard
    at being something they are not ?

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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    This is what I used to believe as a visual artist. I always rushed by any photographs present at an art exhibit in favor of the "real" art work, thinking that photographers who exhibited their work as art were simply people who couldn't draw, yet wanted to be artists. Interestingly, I've heard from more than one successful photographer of one kind or another (usually commercial/portrait) that this was exactly the case.

  9. #19
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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    Quote Originally Posted by Peter Nolan View Post
    There isn't anything paricularly "realistic" about a photograph compared to any other two dimensional representation.
    I would offer the observation that there IS something particularly realistic about a photograph that separates it from virtually any other kind of representation. A photograph is generated when a physical sample of subject matter travels across space (at 300 000 Km/sec!) and penetrates the sensitive surface, lodges in it, and occasions changes that result in marks.

    A number of corollaries follow.

    Only real things are capable of delivering physical samples. Photographs cannot be made of imaginary things, past events, or things that have not yet happened.

    A photograph and its subject must simultaneously exist in each others presence for the physical connection to be possible. A photograph confirms the existence of the subject. A subject is a necessary (but not sufficient) precursor to a photograph.

    A subject that gives off a physical sample of itself gets lighter. A film receiving an exposure gets heavier. For the record an 8x10 sheet of 100 ISO film absorbing a middling exposure (zone V if you like) experiences an increase in mass of about 10 to the minus 24 kilograms. All of those kilograms come from the subject. This mass does not sound like very much but it is incomparably greater than nothing at all. And if that 10 to the minus 24 kilograms hit you in the eye you would surely feel it. After all it arrives with a muzzle velocity of 186 000 miles per second.

    At the moment of exposure the camera rocks backward due to the physical impact of light. The effect is not large but it is not zero. It's a fun calculation. Try it!

    One could continue with film getting hotter when exposed, latent images being heavier than no exposure, and so on but the central argument is this: The core of photography lies in an event that takes place in physical reality and many people, not just philosophers, would assert that this is the only kind of reality that actually exists.
    Photography:first utterance. Sir John Herschel, 14 March 1839 at the Royal Society. "...Photography or the application of the Chemical rays of light to the purpose of pictorial representation,..".

  10. #20

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    Re: Realist Art/photography?

    There have been lots of good responses. Certainly a photograph can be of somethong which exists only in the mind of the photographer, but it can also be an accurate record of something which is admissible in a court of law. A straight landscape or architectural shot can be jaw droppingly beautiful but so can a photograph that has been highly manipulated. Some of my favorite photographs are brutally realistic but are special because they are of a very small of something larger, making them abstractions (albeit realistic abstractions.)
    But where does the double standard begin? When does a beautiful photograph of a covered bridge become something others sneer at as "calender art?" Where do curators get off by making disparagng comments about "rocks, trees and rivers?" (which I read once in Photographer's Market?)
    I realize that there is a major Ansel Adams mojo thing going on and seeing lots of photographs that are basically copies or homages to Adams' is about as dull as a toddler's plastic spoon compared to the real deal, but IMHO there are many B&W landscapes and photographers who specialize in the genre that display a great deal of merit (I see them all the time on this forum, btw!) I do not recollect ever hearing of anyone criticizing B&W portraits as being Hurrell-oids or Wee Gee rip offs.

    I haven't been to a photography art gallery recently, but IIRC all sorts of genres were exhibited the last time I was at the local co-op.

    But that is a co-op and members can exhibit what they like.

    I'm curious about what I'd find in a commercial gallery. You folks in NY and LA---what do you see being exhibited in galleries there? Is there a healthy assortment of subjects and styles represented?

    I'm curious.
    "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White

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