The Connections Between Painting and Photography

(Disclaimer: I'm on the midterm struggle bus, so here's some food for thought about photography that I wrote up a while ago. I'll return to the Beatles next week.)

You may have seen the trailer for the film, "Loving Vincent" floating around on Facebook or other social media. (If you haven't click here) This clip perfectly illustrates the link that exists between painting and photography, and how there are many ghosts that exist within photos.

"Loving Vincent" is unique because every frame of this film is a full-size oil painting. This is an incredible artistic feat, just for starters. Most films consist of frames that are essentially photos, taken by a machine and stuck together in a reel. What is interesting about this is that it takes history and turns it on its head, in the past we have seen photos replace painting instead of the other way around. (Who sits to have their portrait painted anymore? Compare that to the frequency of selfies and school picture days.)

The other interesting point to make is that these aren't real paintings. They are images of the paintings strung together to form animation. Photos of paintings are still photos.

Clearly the ghost of painting is haunting these photos, and this work as a while. Another ghost haunting it, pretty obviously, is Vincent himself. All of these paintings are done in his style, to illustrate his life. It does not get much clearer than that.

Another medium jumping project is the Misty Copeland photo shoot from a while ago where she poses as dancers from Degas' paintings. (Find it here) Background on Misty Copeland: she's the first African-American principal ballet dancer and she is incredible!

Here's also some background on Degas' works. Degas painted dancers at a time when the ballet world was pretty gross, to put it mildly. Dancers were worked ridiculously hard, and often were made to have sex with the men running the show. Degas worked to show the reality behind the glittering ballerinas by painting dancers aching or holding their backs, or with these dark men backstage. It was pretty groundbreaking for its time, much more so than we give it credit for.

Having said that, the Misty shoot picked pretty sanitized photos. There is one where you can get a glimpse of one of the dark men in the background, and one where a dancer is holding her back, but other than that they are pretty standard. Seeing as how one purpose of this shoot was to illustrate how the dance world has changed (all of Degas' models are white) you would think they would go for a more risque painting. But the shoot does do what it set out to, you can visibly tell how much the ballet world has changed through these photos.

Now clearly the ghost of Degas is present here, there's no question about that. But Misty herself ends up looking like a ghost in this process. Since the photos are edited to look like paintings, she ends up being the one figure in focus, and in her fancy dress in such iconic poses, she looks like a woman out of her time. As though she just stepped out of it. As the subject of these photos, Misty is turned into a ghost and immortalized through the action of taking a photo. Which is essentially what everyone is when you snap a selfie, your mark is physically placed down for however long the snapchat lasts for.

This just touches on the nature of ghosts through painting and photography with a few examples, there are many more out there. And even more ghosts. Photography seems like such a straightforward genre, but as a method of art between science and aesthetics, it really could not be more complicated philosophically.