photo realism – Oberg PhotoGraphics Blog

No other art form is going through so big and fast changes as is photography. We are witnesses to a photographic revolution, a “photolution”.

What is it?

It has many element coming together in synergy. Here are some:

• The smartphones, their ever smaller and lighter equipment with ever more imprssive camera performance. It belongs to the past that, say, iPhone photos had to be low quality. True you can’t do with them what you can with a ‘real’ camera, a digital SLR, but you get super quality pictures with which you can do other things such as using:

• Apps small and cheap tools helping you to do hitherto unimaginable things when taking and processing a shot. That you can’t do – yet – with a digital SLR, although I guess we shall soon get apps for them too – like you can now get extensions and accessories including lenses for the iPhone that make it come even closer to the DSLR.

• We can carry them with us permanently – “the best camera is the one you carry with you” and not the one you left at home, too bulky, heavy, expensive and thus risky to take along.

But of course the smartphone revolution is only one sub-revolution of the larger photolusion. Whether you use this or that type of digital camera, you become part of the very dynamic changes caused by:

• Digitalisation – the end of expensive films and darkroom processing. Digital formats are free and can be processed in millions of ways – even to the point where the original shot is hard to identify.

• Photoshopping – the immense possibilities embedded in that super complex software that makes your old darkroom look like a thing of the stone-age. While you can’t make a bad image better in Photoshop you can certain make a good one better – or turn it into something completely different such as a piece of abstract art, but still photography- based.

• We increasingly live in an age of images and communicate through images. still or video. It is very true that one image can say more than a thousand words – not because texts are not important or effective as means of communication or because they can not give more vivid information and details but because people, grosso modo and sadly so – don’t seem to think that they have the time to read but do take time to see.

The latter is often quite superficial, however, as any gallery owner or museum guard will tell you. Research done at art museums reveals that the average time people spend in front of an art work is 15-30 seconds.

• Social media and globalisation and Continue reading It’s a photolution…

Joel Meyerowitz's photo of Cézanne's studio — Joel Meyerowitz’s photo of Cézanne’s studio

You may have guessed that I am looking for art photography in particular here in Basel? You are right! And I am happy to report that there is so much of it; photography is as accepted as an art form as, say, painting, film, sculpture, prints and multiples. Secondly, there are interesting “dialogues” between photo and painting.

Gerhard Richter – whose exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation outside Basel I shall return to – comes to mind. Many of his paintings appear as photography (until you get closer). But there are also many other examples of how the two art forms speak with each other.

One such example is Joel Meyerowitz and here in Basel he shows a kind of photo narrative at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. A couple of years ago he visited Paul Cézanne’s (1839-1906) studio in Aix-en-Provence. He managed to get the permission to take pictures there and was drawn to the grey colours of the studio in which various of Cézanne’s objects and belongings were exhibited.

Next he took pictures of these objects – as if de-coding Cézanne’s paintings and seeing each object in them as a piece of art, a motif for another sort of painting – created with his camera.

Cézanne's studioexhibit to the left and the single objects in it to the right. By Joel Meyerowitz. — Cézanne’s studio exhibit to the left and the single objects in it to the right. Photographed by Joel Meyerowitz.

I found that interesting, explorative and brilliantly beautiful. Could be done with many other artists – illustrating both time and space in the art and how high quality work may always be seen in its company and add something new. Continue reading Art Basel 2014 (5) Photography and painting dialogue…