‘Painterly’ photographs

Ready to go

The idea of a photograph looking like a painting isn’t a ridiculous one. In fact, I personally find it quite appealing, and a very good solution for the times when you don’t have strong enough light to make something more dynamic. It’s certainly a style I’ve been exploring increasingly – beginning consciously with Havana – but what exactly makes a photograph ‘painterly’?

Tribute to Edward Hopper

We need to understand the whys and the characteristics of such an image before we can hope to replicate one photographically. Paintings can certainly be bold and have high contrast; they can have impossible perspectives, or highly real ones; they may be impressionistic or faint – but all of them have one thing in common: they convey the idea of their creator. I believe the process of a painter is very different to that of a photographer: a painter must create every single little detail in their finished product. It is a process of conscious inclusion and creation; he or she has to think about whether the floor should be one texture or another, and then execute it. On the other hand, a photographer doesn’t: we are conscious excluders. We identify our subjects, and the secondary subjects and whatever other contextual elements are necessary to tell the intended story, and then so long as the rest isn’t distracting, we leave it be. Only if something is distracting do we do something about it.

Yellow

That’s difference number one: a much higher level of consciousness over the elements that go into your finished scene. In a painting, there is nothing outside that might have been included: in a photograph, there’s always something else.

The creation process also has bearing on one more important property: light, or perceived light. A painter must create their own highlights and shadows: in this sense, they have the option of making physically impossible light (missing shadows, no distracting reflections, multiple sources, no issues with white balance mixes between candles and daylight etc.) The quality of light in a painting is therefore again a conscious choice. To a certain degree, still life and studio/ commercial photographers also have this level of control; we are photographing things that are static or under our direct influence and we can control the surrounding environment. If you work entirely in the real world with ‘found’ objects, this is definitely not the case: we need to recognise the quality of light we want, and then know how to capture it. There are also none of the dynamic range challenges we might encounter in the real world: I think of the contrast as ‘measured’; it’s enough to separate but never to block up a shadow or blow a highlight unintentionally. It’s one of the reasons this style is a useful thing to have in the arsenal for overcast days.

Tribute to Monet

Beyond what must be consciously created, there are also a few other traits that paintings typically have. I’ve never noticed out of focus elements in a painting, for instance; it’s much easier to convincingly arrange things such that the background immediately behind the subject isn’t anything distracting; you just paint a plain texture. There are definitely no out of focus foregrounds. I don’t have a good explanation for why this is; perhaps because it’s simply easier to paint everything in focus than convincingly replicate bokeh. Or perhaps it’s because it’s a more accurate representation of the way our eyes see the world: we scan from object to object, and it appears that what our attention is directed is always in focus, and the rest not exactly out of focus, but not distracting, either. Lytro aside, this is not an option for photographers. And we all know that refocusing an image changes the composition significantly, anyway.

Wet paint

There’s also the question of perspective, or specifically, forced perspective: in painting verticals are always straight, there’s no geometric distortion in an extremely wide scene, and if the background mountain layers need to be compressed to a certain degree to get everything in, they are. Therefore, we land up with a perspective that’s sometimes physically impossible – but still appears natural to us, again because it’s a direct reflection of the way our brains process the world. I believe that in a photograph, we must therefore stick to perspectives that are representative of the human range of vision – somewhere between 28 and 85mm, or thereabouts, but mostly centered around the normal; add correction where necessary or possible.

Red hotel awning

Lastly, we must consider colour: needless to say, the majority of paintings are in colour, which is often dictated by the available pigments and the perception of the artist. Monet’s warm shift in later life is a famous example of this; degradation of his vision caused him to compensate in such a way that his ‘white balance’ was visibly quite off. I’ve seen very saturated paintings, but I get the feeling that the majority – or at least our impression of paintings – tends to be a little desaturated and with a quite deliberate bias towards being high or low key. Beyond that, there’s frequently a unifying colour palette that links all of the elements in the frame together and lends them a certain level of coherence. We must also consider the physical properties of the medium itself: for instance, there’s this deep, dark textural richness in oil paintings that’s a consequence of both the nature of the pigments and the way light reflects off the paint surface itself; it lends a secondary quality to the subject being represented that’s very difficult to replicate in a photograph. A computer monitor is a very poor substitute to a baryta fiber print that has similar reflective qualities to an oil painting. Perhaps, to complicate things further, there’s also some evocation of a different era simply because of the colour palette used.

Drapes

Like every style, however, there’s no right or wrong – there’s only ‘like’ or ‘dislike’, and perhaps some feeling of suitability to a given subject. I can see this being immediately useful for still life and portraiture, but personally I like to apply it to modern urban scenes; the geometry is quite conducive to abstraction in a modern, semi-cubist way; the colour palette tends to be either very muted or very strong; and finally, I simply don’t feel it’s done that often. The photographs in this article are obviously the best illustrations of a painterly ‘style’ that I’ve been able to produce; I’m fairly sure there’ll be more to come. MT

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