On Photorealism

 

A while back I had watched a video on the Perspective YouTube channel about the photorealist painter Robert Townsend who got a trove of slides from eBay. There was one particular woman that was in the photographs that he thought was photogenic (photorealist) and looked like a celebrity. What's particularly interesting to me is that you can access different levels of a photograph and it is subjective: people will see different things. This particular woman captured his attention but if I looked at it I would see something different. What I would see in photographs taken in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that there's a lack of the internet. The internet changed our lives in really deep ways. If you looked at a photograph taken in the 1970s and the internet and social media existed then they would look different as they would probably be posing for the internet. If you look at the painting after it's done thinking about those things then that's what you bring to it--which is different from what the artist is seeing. If you walked up to the painting and the artist wasn't there to describe it--or you didn't know anything about it--you would be looking at different things. One of the things about having too much information about a painting is that it tells you what to see. People want to see what they want to see or they'll find different things that the artist didn't see.   

1/15/2023

The Illuminated Riff: