[inasmuch]

I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them.

It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.

I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.

To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.

[jack_riminton]

Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real.

The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real

[sudosysgen]

Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic, it's just physics and our eyes do it too. You can easily notice it in real life.

Focal length being variable has nothing to do with photography either. It has to do with screens that vary in size and distance. To be able to match the angle of view of our eyes, the camera in a video game needs to vary it's focal length. And of course, our eyes have a focal length too.

Our eyes feel motion blur too. It's just cut out when you saccade your eyes by the brain. Track a car with your eyes and notice the motion blur over the whole street. Now, for video games, it doesn't make much sense until you realize that we use 30/60fps screens. Motion blur is a crutch to minimize the obviousness of low frame rates. In a perfect world of course, you would want your screen to have 144+Hz of refresh rate and let your own eyes do the motion blur, but that's too expensive for now.

So you see, these things aren't actually there because of photography. They are things that our eyes do just as much as any camera. In fact, the only real difference between our eyes and cameras is that eyes operate continuously while cameras operate semi-discretely, though at 200fps+ this converges almost completely.

[inasmuch]

> Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic

They are, though (unless you think I'm saying that relative physical distances literally do not exist outside of photography?). You can say our eyes operate as more sophisticated lenses and are likewise constrained by physics and light, to be sure, but the experience of seeing something is very, very different from viewing that thing in a photograph or film.

With your eyes, you cannot study or capture or examine the blurred areas on the periphery of your vision; photography enables that. Similarly, photography enables the capture and examination and artistic presentation of motion blur. Photography creates that apprehension of the world. Painting from or to mimic that apprehension is, I feel, limiting. Even when your subject is not abstract.

What I'm taking issue with isn't the basic principles of light; it's painting a scene the way a camera captures it, rather than the way a painting can. If you truly don't see any representative differences between the paintings of the 'old masters' and the current paintings-of-or-like-photos to which I'm referring, then I think we're just not on the same page here, or I'm simply doing a poor job of explaining what I mean.

[technothrasher]

> I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference.

There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.

[inasmuch]

> There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph

But of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. As I mentioned, my primary issue is with how heavy reliance on photo reference can result in a photo-like final painting.

As I mentioned in another comment, I have a secondary issue with how photo reference affects the process, but that's another discussion.

[syntheweave]

The problem is not really one of the technology, though. At some level, all we are doing in making representational visuals is copying proportions, either spatially by indicating shape and form, or by samples of light. Where the source material doesn't have those proportions we need, the artist is filling in gaps. You can still iterate into The Night Watch from photos by using intermediate sketches; it's just a process.

A big part of why abstraction took off at nearly the same time as photography is that the differentiation of an artist from a camera had to come from somewhere. Artists that make art that looks like cameras are simply drawing on their strongest reference and not doing much additional decision making.

[inasmuch]

Agreed. I don't mean to vilify the technology itself, but rather the ways in which many artists employ it. What bothers me is when that gap-filling you describe is either not being done or is being done in such a way that retains the character and forms of the reference medium. I similarly dislike it when photographers try to make their photos look like paintings.

I do have misgivings about how reference photography affects the process of certain forms of art-making, but that's another issue entirely. In this case, I'm just talking about effects on the product, not the process.