Is this really believable? On seeing a picture of a person: “It looks like an aeroplane… these [the legs] look like aeroplane wings. This looks like a man’s head. Those look like his legs. It’s a man.”
Mistaking a man for an airplane?
The movie At First Sight starring Val Kilmer is based on actual events.
It’s the story of a man who has been blind from birth and has his sight restored by surgery. He has to learn how to see. How to make sense of all the sudden visual information. This demonstrates that seeing, something we think of as an automatic result of proper eye function, is something we learn. He also had to learn that a picture of an apple and a real apple are not the same thing.
A friend of mine once related some information he discovered that primitive people could not initially see the image on a TV screen. They had to learn that it represented an image. At the time I thought “bullshit”. But now, after encountering other similar accounts, like the one mentioned here, I have to give this notion some credence.
My favorite aspect of this is that in old religious iconography is that “holiness” was indicated by a glow around the head of a person. When perspective was introduced, artists were at a loss as to how to incorporate this obviously-not-realistic convention into a realistic looking painting. They ended up attaching a silly-looking semi-transparent disc onto the heads of saints and deities. Eventually this became the little gold ring that floats above the heads of angels in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Those “photorealistic” artists are also often working at a scale that many of the more realistic painters of yesteryear simply did not. The original of their pictures is not the same size as the photograph they’re drawing from or as the model: they’re as large as a room.
Velázquez’ paintings are close to 1:1 scale (some are that scale, some are larger but not enormously so). If he had worked at a 40:1 as some of those artists do he could have drawn every hair, but why would he have wanted to do that? His paintings were to be hanging on a room’s wall, not on a skyscraper’s side. And he was already accused of being “slow” as things were, imagine if the Meninas had been 1600 times the size it is!
And those artists who worked on large scales (paintings on ceilings for example) were drawing at the level of detail needed by someone looking up from the floor - they hadn’t expected someone to be looking at their St Michaels and God-almighties nose-to-nose.
There are a lot of reasons why artists don’t create like the linked to picture. Some have been touched on above.
The picture isn’t realistic. There is no possible way the subject ever looked like that to the human eye. Perspective is one. The camera was clearly much closer than you would ordinarily stand. There is a significant issue with most reproduced photographs - there is one, and only one, correct viewing distance. Most photographs are not viewed at this distance, and the perspective is actually wrong in a manner that detracts from the result. But we are so used to it that we don’t consciously notice it. But the “look” of a photo remains.
No human would see the water running like that. The original photograph that has been slavishly copied froze the water in a manner that the human eye does not.
The highlights are from the point of view of a single viewpoint - the camera lens. People have two eyes, not one. Again the reflection in the water are frozen in time in a manner the human eye does not see them.
The camera has imaged the brightness range within the capabilities of its sensor, and the final image has no doubt been tweaked digitally, before the artist copied the image to paper. The contrast range of the paper is vastly less than that of the subject, and the transfer function used to create the image on the paper is that of the photographic system.
The result is not realistic, the human eye processes the range of brightness seen very differently. Light and shade are the province of the real artist. An artists ability to convey wide variations of brightness on a canvas make a simple camera look pathetic. An artist does this in a manner that looks realistic. Photographically we do have HDR techniques, but they look contrived. Look at the work of Vermeer to see how he builds a level of realism. Compared to Girl with Pearl Earring I would rate the photorealistic image in the OP’s link as inferior.
Super real and photo-real art have been with us for ages. They do become a little tiresome.
As noted above, the single most important reason artists of old didn’t paint like this is because they looked at the subject with their eyes. The artist in the OP didn’t. He may well have never seen the girl in the picture. What he has drawn is a picture of a photograph, not a picture of a girl. If he was not given the photograph, but was presented with the girl in the flesh, I would bet he would be utterly incapable of producing a picture that anyone would take any notice of.
How about this one?
I would think that’s pretty impressive for 1435.
What does this mean? If I close one eye, the highlights in what I’m seeing still look the same to me..
I agree. I find photorealism quite boring.
By highlights I’m really referring to the specular reflections of light in the water. Bad choice of word on my part.
The effect with two eyes depends upon the reflection and the light source. With differing viewpoints the reflections can move, even if only a little. The stereoscopic processing of the brain will perceive the highlight as located out of the plane of the object, and you get a sense of depth in these highlights that you can’t capture with a single viewpoint. This sense is lost of you are only copying a photograph to a canvas.
The problem remains for the artist to try to convey this sense of depth, it they wish to. But when simply copying a photograph you never get the chance to know they were even there.
Ah, yes, I understand what you mean now.
I’d say you mistake the medium/technique for ability. I find them unmistakably a modern representation of a real person. But as most thing before the invention of photography they are through two eyes rather than a single unroving lens. So one might say they are more human but less mechanical…
The effect still works. When I first saw that Van der Weyden in Madrid, I felt sure it was a polychromed relief until I looked at it from the side and realized it was flat.
The medieval technique, besides being primitive looking, emphasized importance with size, rather than using perspective. So remote cities appear to be sitting on someone’s shoulder, and Jesus is twice as tall as his apostles.
Partly I would say this is a lack of expertise. here were not a lot of artists, talent was harder to find, and there was not as much of the community for learning aspect. Many artists were monks, and the most important thing was not the “quality of realism” of the art. With the renaissance, tehre were communities of artists who could compare and improve technique together (and the rich patrons to support these fulltime artists).
But as mentioned, the photographs are too “mechanical”. Lighting in a lot of art looks flat. By Rembrant’s time, you could get away with painting things so dark (for effect) that a lot of detail was missing. In a professional photo, often much detail is hidden in shadows, lighting is uneven (especially natual light) and dodging and burning during processing used to be a common task before photoshop (which does the same thing digitally).
An old painter would make the lighting more uniform, the contrast less painful, so that the whole panorama is visible. The brain adjusts for so much; you have only to see the effect of say, tungsten light or flourescent light, or the tint from reflected lighting from a brightly colored adjacent object, in a raw photo; our eyes adjust for the hue problems is a way cameras don’t. A painting is aimed to satisfy our brain by doing that “preprocessing”. This is why, for example, we can see line drawing, black and white, or semi-abstract and still interpret what we see.
There’s also the still controversial idea someone put forth that the natives literally couldn’t ‘see’ Columbus’ ships as they appeared on the horizon because huge sailing vessels like those simply made no sense to their reality. Not sure if I totally accept this idea, but I think there’s a kernel of truth to it…
That idea isn’t controversial at all. It’s just wrong, just like pretty much everything else in What the Bleep do we Know?.
And pulykamell, I’m still not sure you get it:
Again, no you don’t. A mirror projects the real world onto a flat surface in exactly the same way as a window does: That is to say, not at all.
Don’t think “they can’t see it.” Think “It takes a little bit to figure out what you are looking at.” I’d picture it like you or I looking at a photo with weird perspective. We’ll figure it out, but it might take a few beats to figure out what these lines and colors mean.
Anyway, the point is that photos only look “realistic” to us because we see them all the time. In reality they are very very different than what we are used to seeing with our eyes, and if you’d never seen a photo before you wouldn’t think to draw like one.
I can accept that. I just thought there was a substantive difference between a window (where you know reality is behind it) and a pool of water (where you know it’s a pool of water and the image you see is a reflection in it, even if it is technically three-dimensional). Maybe psychologically it makes no difference, but with a pane of glass you know the “real” is beyond it, and you can reach it. With a reflection, you learn that the reflection of the apple (or whatever) isn’t real. You can’t reach into the water and grab the apple. It’s not really there. I’m not sure if I’m being clear, but that’s what I’m trying to convey.
Hm. Then why were Europeans able to see corn? Or the giant step pyramids? Or opossums? Or any of the things the New World had that their part of the Old World did not?
Frankly, that little anecdote’s always seemed utterly racist to me.
That kernel may be hard for others to see.
A good reason not to believe this is that babies, who quite regularly encounter things far outside their previous reality, have absolutely no trouble seeing them.
And I would like to re- point this out, these are photo realistic. Not actual realistic. Because we are used to seeing photos we sometimes forget that this is not how our eyes see the universe. Our eyes don’t have that tight of focal length. The background behind the woman simply shouldn’t be that out of focus. We don’t actually see bokah or grain with our eyes. This drawinghas both. Likewise, water just doesn’t look like that without a high speed shutter rate. No one who hasn’t seen a ton of photographs… and sophisticated ones with a century of practice and development behind them would call this drawing “realistic.”
Diego Fazio is a fantastic artist, but he is working in a form that simply wouldn’t be possible without photography.
No, it’s not racist. It isn’t a question of intelligence. Corn is just a stalk, a plant, and a plant is a plant. Same for a pyramid, a big, neat pile of stones is still just a big, neat pile of stones. But imagine natives having looked out at the infinitely vast, unending ocean shore for the span of their entire civilization. This is literally the boundary of their universe. And then, slowly, these ‘things’ appear on the edge of oblivion. They’re bigger & farther away than anything you’ve encountered before, and they’re slowly growing larger and larger. Plus they’re approaching from what can only be outside of your known reality. It’s not that the ships were ‘invisible’ per se, but that they simply couldn’t conceive what they could possibly be, therefore the visual part of their brains could not accurately ‘resolve’ their visage.
At least not at first. Eventually when smaller things that they *would *recognize as boats came from them being rowed by different looking but still clearly human looking people, it would start to become more & more comprehensible and therefore more & more visually ‘see-able’.