4 Photographic Conventions that Originated in Paintings

Artists famous for painting and drawing portraits figured out a ton about composition, form, shape, shadow, and framing well before the camera ever made it big. The conventions they originated, back when spending months on a single portrait was the most efficient way to capture someone in the flesh, are conventions that still surface in photography today, many of which initially originated in paintings.

1. Aerial landscapes in Portraiture

The Mona Lisa was one of the first portraits to depict a subject appearing before an imagined landscape using aerial perspective, a technique in which the artist creates depth in a piece, typically by making the subject appear clear and crisp with warm colors in contrast to a blurry background composed mostly of cooler colors. Now, it’s a fairly common convention to have a subject appear clear and crisp in a photo surrounded by a blurred, aerial landscape.

The Mona Lisa

Landscape Portrait

2. Hyper-realism

Artistic realism was a movement that began in France in the 1850’s in which artists portrayed scenes from everyday life as realistically as possible. Oil paint, mixing, and application techniques allowed particularly skilled artists to achieve a level of photo-realism similar to how a camera would depict an image, and modern artists like Chuck Close have continued to explore the convention.

Courbet

Close

3. Surrealism

The surrealist movement combined objects and life forms in the three-dimensional world with fantastical images to communicate unconscious thoughts and dreams. One of the best examples of this is Dali’s famous painting, The Persistence of Memory. Similarly, Surrealist photography combines realistic elements in strange, surprising, and beautiful ways, particularly with the technique of double-exposure photography.

Dali

Surreal photo

4. Landscape framing

Capturing a few indicators of human life situated within vast expanses of natural scenery has long-been a fascination of both landscape painting and photography, as the appearance of even just one small human form, building, or sign of human life has the capability to immediately transform itself into a focal point.

Landscape painting

Landscape photo

 

Author Bio:

This is a guest post provided by Jorie Jacobi, a writer and blogger for the St. Louis Curator and WhoopTee custom t shirts.