A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see
It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.
I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.
To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
But of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. As I mentioned, my primary issue is with how heavy reliance on photo reference can result in a photo-like final painting.
As I mentioned in another comment, I have a secondary issue with how photo reference affects the process, but that's another discussion.
Focal length being variable has nothing to do with photography either. It has to do with screens that vary in size and distance. To be able to match the angle of view of our eyes, the camera in a video game needs to vary it's focal length. And of course, our eyes have a focal length too.
Our eyes feel motion blur too. It's just cut out when you saccade your eyes by the brain. Track a car with your eyes and notice the motion blur over the whole street. Now, for video games, it doesn't make much sense until you realize that we use 30/60fps screens. Motion blur is a crutch to minimize the obviousness of low frame rates. In a perfect world of course, you would want your screen to have 144+Hz of refresh rate and let your own eyes do the motion blur, but that's too expensive for now.
So you see, these things aren't actually there because of photography. They are things that our eyes do just as much as any camera. In fact, the only real difference between our eyes and cameras is that eyes operate continuously while cameras operate semi-discretely, though at 200fps+ this converges almost completely.
They are, though (unless you think I'm saying that relative physical distances literally do not exist outside of photography?). You can say our eyes operate as more sophisticated lenses and are likewise constrained by physics and light, to be sure, but the experience of seeing something is very, very different from viewing that thing in a photograph or film.
With your eyes, you cannot study or capture or examine the blurred areas on the periphery of your vision; photography enables that. Similarly, photography enables the capture and examination and artistic presentation of motion blur. Photography creates that apprehension of the world. Painting from or to mimic that apprehension is, I feel, limiting. Even when your subject is not abstract.
What I'm taking issue with isn't the basic principles of light; it's painting a scene the way a camera captures it, rather than the way a painting can. If you truly don't see any representative differences between the paintings of the 'old masters' and the current paintings-of-or-like-photos to which I'm referring, then I think we're just not on the same page here, or I'm simply doing a poor job of explaining what I mean.
A big part of why abstraction took off at nearly the same time as photography is that the differentiation of an artist from a camera had to come from somewhere. Artists that make art that looks like cameras are simply drawing on their strongest reference and not doing much additional decision making.
I do have misgivings about how reference photography affects the process of certain forms of art-making, but that's another issue entirely. In this case, I'm just talking about effects on the product, not the process.
Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique.
As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting.
You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer.
Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development.
Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager.
I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving.
Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".
But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
I mean you can, but generally, artists would call this bullshit explanation. I am pretty sure you are aware of that too :). None of what I talked about was any meta. It was down to eath, pragmatically, "yeah art is also technical ability to make hyper realistic picture".
> But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Again, yes, judged by insight and originality. But, it is not the only valid criterium for art work. Among other things, realistic portraits are pretty low in general if judged by creativity. The old master did not went for creativity there - the realism was actual ambition for many of them.
> Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
I dont understand why the result would had no value. You don't have to like it or find it interesting, that is 100%. This sort of stuff is subjective. What I found out was that many artists often do value technical skill and do see value in the resulting picture, actually.
You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive. And kinda excludes majority of drawings people produce. At least I think. Most of drawings are people trying to figure out how to draw the thing, again and again.
Art, as used currently or in history, does not have to include only super deep I have philosophical opinions or deep feelings or whatever. Plenty of times it is "look guys, I finally managed to draw a nose".
I exaggerated that one, it has value, but to a lesser degree, imo. The value of the painting is in the skill of producing the copy, not really in having the creativity or insight that the original photographer had when taking the photo. The subject is already in 2d, perspective already frozen, and if you're replicating it perfectly you're not adding anything substantial, you're just changing the medium.
Can a copy be considered art? Sure it can, like I said previously anything can be art if framed in an artistic context. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.
> You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive.
I don't think I've tried to define or limit what can/cannot be art in any of my comments. I'm just talking about my personal criteria for differentiating between different levels of artistic quality.
My top comment in this thread merely stated that using someone else's photographs to photocopy into a painting without applying your own insight is a less-creative form of art than if you are framing and taking a picture yourself and you use that as an intermediary medium before copying it to the canvas.
Me building a wooden chair by looking at a picture on ikea's site is a form of craftsmanship. Can it be called art? Sure it can, I might even take a picture and post it on reddit. Is it great art? By my criteria, no. I would say that a chair built by Gaudi has more artistic value than my chair, and please note I'm not saying that my chair isn't a piece of art, just a lesser one.
If someone finds my preserved wooden chair in 1000 years it's historical value would be great but I wouldn't be so sure about it's artistic value, unless it's the only remaining representation of a chair left from the 21st century in any kind of medium.
my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step.
Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser".
Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?
Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc.
Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see.
In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.