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).

[Pfeiffer Duckett]

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!)

[sun of sand]

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

[Gary L. Quay]

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

[cobalt]

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.

[ic-racer]

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.

[Peter Nolan]

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.

[jnantz]

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 ?

[cobalt]

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.

[Maris Rusis]

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.

[John Kasaian]

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.