The Camera Lies

If we placed the camera’s role in visual art on a spectrum - on one end a superior truth-teller, and on the other a destroyer of our visual world - I kinda float in the middle-latter side of that spectrum somehow.

I prefer to illustrate from my imagination as much as possible. The end product is the painting, and I have always put a heavy emphasis on conceptual illustrations based off imagination or caricature. Photos can help as reference tools to that end. But they have a firmly diminutive position in the heirarchy, otherwise why not just become a photographer?

When people are choosing to illustrate something based off reality: Eg, a real person, a real building, a real object etc...they can get stuck in the mud, and mentally become the slave to the pre-existing photo without even realising it.

It’s a constant trap to have to avoid.

When the modernists swept through visual art and deconstructed all standards of form and pictoral construction, especially in painting, there was a few attempts at a backlash.

A prominent one in the later 20th century was hyper-realism. This was, basically trying to use photos as a tool to make paintings as realistic as possible. To me they were well-intentioned but badly misguided.

What did they get wrong?

Put simply, I think they were showing too much. Too much detail, too much reality. There just didn’t seem much point. A waste of paint I reckon.

The human eye and mind do not visually perceive the real world the way a camera captures it. And this has never been the case at any stage of photographic technology, no matter who was taking the photos or what technique was used.

Photos taken by a standard phone camera, or even a high-end digital camera, tend to flatten and dull whatever they are photographing. The computer software is trying to process received visual information from the lens and makes numerous compromises and adjustments. They may also capture lots of additional detail that you as a viewer would disregard in real life. And finally the focus on the image becomes transmitted artificially through an in-between layer, meaning that rather than you focusing on what you want to draw/paint, you are going by what the photo (even if its one you took) has deemed the point of focus and the boundaries of the frame. These are subtle and imperceptible to the untrained eye. But if you want to put it to the test, draw/paint any object, person or scene directly from real-life, and then do it again via a photograph of that same object, person or scene. Compare the differences.

You might first beleive the photographic version is superior, but is it? Yes you might benefit from the extra time you can take to get the extra details right before light/weather changes or an annoyed model cut short the session, but at what price? Have you just ended up with an inferior version of what the photo did better? Who’s in charge? You or the camera? Who’s controlling the creative decision-making? Why does the viewer care that you got a few extra blades of grass in or some extra cracks on the vase, or that you got the facial proportions of the model more exactly right? What’s the end goal here? a drawing? a painting? Or an impersonation of a photograph?

I majored in photomedia in Uni and in the crushing drudgery of needing to study the most notable practitioners of a very misguided major-unit selection, I did find a handful of photographers in the world who I did like in an artistic sense, so I’m not trashing photography outright. And I could find even more film-makers and animators that I liked, which are kind of relatives of photography. I still take a lot of photos for reference purposes. Back when I was doing photomedia in high school I was taking digital photos of ugly urban backdrops (beginner urb-exing), tweaked the saturation/contrast in photoshop and printed enlarged versions with a home printer with a dying colour cartridge, resulting in weird discolorations. ..and my high school art teacher called them painterly…. I’m still not sure why, because the crappy printer was carking out and turning my blacks to violet? But I took it as the compliment it was meant to be all the same.

So a photograph, presented in a certain way, can be described as “painterly”, and a painting can be described as photo-like or photo-realistic.

Photos will always influence your work if they are used in any part of the process, however major or minor. They aren’t good or bad in any absolute sense, but they should be understood as a tool and treated accordingly. If you think of them that way I think you’ll end up with work that you are happier with.