Photorealism

I was in Sausalito yesterday, walking around, when I saw this composition. The interesting thing is that I didn’t see it as any kind of great photograph, but I did see it as a typical photorealist subject.

The ever-reliable Wikipedia states: "Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting of a photograph." But that doesn’t quite nail down the category. What I’ve noticed is that the artists who practice photorealism are not—definitely not—photographers. They may be taking photographs, certainly, but not in a way that an actual practicing photographer would. A photographer, even a landscape photographer, has as a primary concern "the decisive moment," that moment when all is revealed and the shutter is tripped.

When we view photographs we cannot help be struck by the notion of the moment. The photographer, whether photographing a pepper in a funnel or capturing a little boy with a loaf of bread, is, we feel, engaged in the evanescence of the moment—for him, the decisive moment.

The photorealist painter’s aesthetic object, however, is focused more on the ordering of objects on a flat surface. Nothing to do with the "moment." From a photographer’s standpoint, the arrangements you see in most such paintings would be just a little bit too static, the compositions undynamic and flat. (Big generalizations.) But fascinating nonetheless.

That may be exactly the point. I find photorealist paintings, and realist paintings in general, to be aesthetically valuable in many cases not only as exquisite objects in their own right, but also as points of reference when navigating the thorny issue of photography as art.

Photo: Sausalito Visitor Center—Marin County, 2008