Chipping Away at Realism
Marin's Figures, Study No. 5
It’s been said that painting is an additive medium, and photography is a subtractive medium. In painting, you start with a blank canvas and add paint to it until you build up an image. With photography, you start with everything that’s in the field of view of the camera and subtract from it. You gradually exclude the things you don’t want in your image by techniques such as camera placement, lens choice, framing, and so forth.
It’s an interesting comparison. For me, another way to think about it is in terms of realism and abstraction. With painting, you start with the ultimate in abstraction – a blank canvas, with nothing on it. The marks you make with paint build towards realism, depending on the kind and number. It’s an oversimplification, of course, and does not do justice to the art of painting, but by way example, a certain number and kind of marks may yield an abstract, and a certain additional number and kind may yield something impressionistic, and yet a further number and kind may yield something photorealistic.
Photography is just the other way around. If you randomly point your camera in any direction and press the shutter, then (assuming proper focus and exposure, of course) you’ll get a photorealistic image of whatever was in the camera’s field of view. The world is a busy, cluttered place – I would argue that the more you exclude from your image, the less realistic the image becomes as a representation of what the world actually looks like.
Here’s where I’m going with this. If photography is the art of subtraction, then I think my interests are leaning more and more towards less realism in my work. The image in this post, for example, uses typical photographic techniques to subtract things out of the frame – camera placement, lens choice, framing, etc., so that all that’s left is the figure, the trees, and the sky. I’ve taken the camerawork even a little further than most, I suspect, by dramatically tilting the camera at the point of capture, introducing a shift in perspective. In the editing, too, I think I’ve been more extreme than most – the trees fade toward white the closer you get to the edge of the frame, the sky has largely been made a featureless white, and at some points along the edge of the frame, the whiteness merges with the background (which sometimes is considered a technical flaw in some photographic circles).
Each step in the process chips away at the realism of the image and introduces just a little bit more abstraction. At the risk of making a judgment about my own work (something I generally try to stay away from), I might say this image does not look like a conventional photograph. That bothers me not at all. I’m much more concerned about making images that resonate with my personal aesthetic sensibilities. Cameras will always produce photorealism, and certainly there’s plenty of photorealism in this image. But at this stage in my photographic life, I feel most of the images I make benefit from as much abstraction as I can reasonably give them.