Skip to main content

Photography as painting

At the BP portrait exhibition held every year at the National Portrait Gallery it's always a bit of disorienting to find that the selected works are predominantly photographic in appearance.  It's not uncommon to see visitors getting up close and inspecting the canvas surface before confirming to their friends 'It's a painting.'  Various key aspects to the 'look' of photography - which is crucially far more 'democratic' to use an expression from Eggleston et al - are appropriated.  It seems faintly odd that to get an image to look like these it would be far easier to actually just use a camera - but then virtuoso technique is required to recreate such effects and the BP show consists mostly of a highly accessible niche of contemporary painting.

It is tempting to use digital photography (particularly those defects due to noise suppression and jpeg artifacting) to step in and start to emulate the 'old' late 19th Century painting style that is now so completely out of fashion.