A fine blend of photography techniques, realism and painterly vision

Photorealism as a painterly tool to express on canvas is not exactly a recent phenomenon. Painters from the US and Europe had been seeking inspiration from photos since the early era of photography. Throwing light on its evolution, art scholar historian Dr Alka Pande notes: “The importance of photography in the enterprise of finding an interface between documentary ‘evidence’ and the social imaginary is gaining ground.

Even for itself, photography may be said to have enlarged its intrinsic value as an art form by entering the expanded frame of installation art. Thus it begins to share the peculiarity of the phenomenological encounter the museum/gallery space encourages.” For record, the movement spurred out of the earlier Pop & Minimalism movements. Like the preceding pop artists, the photo-realists wanted to include everyday life scenes and signage, for breaking down pre-conceived hierarchies of subject matter.

They drew from commercial imagery and advertising. Many purists perceived this movement as a setback to modern abstract painting. Photo-realists typically would project an image onto a canvas and use an airbrush for reproducing the effect of a photograph printed on a piece of glossy paper. Estes argued that the painting was merely the technique of finishing it up, involved primarily with the photograph. Flack chose to update the 17th century theme of vanitas by projecting slides of certain opulent still-life arrangements onto canvases, alluding to the fleeting nature of most material things.

Artists around 1430, centuries before anyone could suspect it, secretly used camera-like devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to make realistic paintings. Those like Caravaggio, Lotto, Vermeer and Ingres knew the magic of photographic projection. They saw how good these devices were at projecting a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface.

This was the finding of a thesis ‘art and optics’ by David Hockney who concluded that they knew how good these devices were at projecting a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. What is equally curious about the process is that while the subject matter is generally man-made objects set in an urban environ, many of the works are strikingly and surprisingly devoid of signs of life – as if resembling mere architectural models.