ingres vs. manet - any thoughts?

[robertwright]

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Maybe this is a well-known idea in photography, or in Photoshop -- I don't know -- but it certainly is in painting. Take a painting (photo) with any arrangement of colors at all, and then cover it with a clear varnish just *slightly* tinted with a hue that you wish to emphasize -- for example, blue. Doing that instantly pulls the composition together. It also dulls the complementary colors; it's really better to have composed with a coordinated set of colors to begin with, but if you have not, coating it with a very light transparent tint will have an amazing unifying effect.

 

In photography, I think you could do the same thing with color temp. If you have "as shot" color that are close to the actual scene, but you find that the colors you were given don't work together as well as you like, you can give the whole thing a slight color cast and the colors will snap together. And you will dull some of the colors; but purely from a color point of view, you may find that you can save some shots that you otherwise may have doubts about. I'm not referring to "correct" white balance here; I'm talking about imposing a deliberate but essentially undetectable cast.

 

JC

 

or make c-prints-?

 

one of the "problems" with inkjet is the lack of homogeneity of color, of course, it can be anything you want it to be, and therein lies the problem. C-prints always had a veneer either of yellow in the paper base or cyan in the shadows, a certain "look" that is similar to what you are describing.

With digital the wb eyedropper is a judicious tool, too "neutral" a rendering and you lose all impact, sometimes--- but sometimes a very neutral rendering allows the color "chord" to sing more clearly. But neutral for neutral sake is not effective usually.

 

I like what Ben says about the musicality of color in photography, and even if you don't work this way I think unconsciously if you are attendant to light you may find this occuring spontaneously-there are times of the year when the light is predominantly good or not so good, also times of the day, and I think nature shows us how to look at her if we are sensitive, the right light allows the color harmony to happen.

 

"Musical" color is a challenge in street photography, so much is on the edge of your awareness, changing instantly. I wonder what everyone thinks of the color work of Jeff Mermelstein for example?

 

thanks to Ben for coming in to this thread! I know what I'll be looking for out on the street tomorrow...

[Ben Lifson]

it was Delacroix v. Ingres

 

Close examination of both men's paintings reveals, however, that their respective handlings of the surface had more in common than not.

 

Ingres surfaces and Manet's are closer to each other than is either's to Delacroix.

 

Around 1848 Delacroix began complaining about having to find subject matter, which to him was increasingly just an excuse for putting paint on canvas.

 

It was in the 1860s, I think, that Manet went a step farther and said that subject matter was just an excuse for putting "patches of color" (taches de couleur) on canvas

 

In response to these paintings, Courbet said that Manet's pictures were "as flat as playing cards." or something very much like that.

 

Which comment spotlights not the differences but the similarities between Manet's and Ingres' work.

 

"Just like photographs" say viewers when they first enter a gallery containing many Ingres canvases.

[smokysun]

thanks, ben, for weighing in. it surpised me people thought color easy! personally, i think the great photographer of color has yet to be born.

 

your juxtaposition of a painting and a photograph reminded me i'm almost always let down when i turn from a book of paintings to one of photographs. mostly it must come from what sean said about the painter having so much control over color (and detail) compared to the photographer.

 

i decided to try a little experiment. here's a photograph taken last thurs at a dance dress rehearsal. obviously the colors (costumes created by the dancers themselves) carefully chosen, though the lighting instruments and situation very, very limited. i took the photo and used a paint program to turn it into a painting. any coments on the differences by anyone would be interesting.

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[Guest malland]

Using a paint program to transform a photograph doesn't highllght anything for me except that this type of mechanical and arbitrary transformation is meaningless, like the idea of 10,000 monekys typing at keyboards may result in one King Lear.

 

On the other hand, Ben Lifson's idea of making a color photograph as a composition of chords of color with dissonances is an interesting analytical approach. And looking at paintings from this point must be a useful way of internalizing an approach to color. However, making pictures — let's stick with street photography rather than studio photography — requires grasping all this in a zen-like moment and hence the need for this kind of internalization. But, to develop this kind of internalization, my feeling is that a photographer would do best to look at and study paintings, the way Ben has in his online series of articles, rather than looking only at photographs: of course you can learm a lot about color from Eggleston, but studying Cezanne and Gauguin may take you a lot further to internalize the idea of color.

 

In refering to the zen-like aspect of making a photograph, where everyting that one wants in it comes together, makes me always think that photography is an art of selection: selection at two levels, first in what one frames with the camera, and, second, in what one prints — on the second level, whether looking at a contact sheet or a set of slides or equivalent digital sets of pictures in a program like Lightroom, the selection of what one prints. Usually, when I click the shutter for what I feel is a really good photograph the results are what I felt they will be and I can remember that moment of what I saw when I clicked the shutter even years later. But for most photographs, in looking at contact sheets (or the digital eauivalent), it isn't always easy to see which of the frames will make a good print. Sometimes one sees that a particular frame is a good photograph only years later. All this is a long-winded way to say that, photography being an art of selection, can also mean delayed selection.

 

I attach two pictures where I felt I was driven by the color in the sense that Ben writes, and hope that they are not too small to show what I mean.

 

—Mitch/Paris

Flickr: Photos from Mitch Alland

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[Ben Lifson]

Mr Alland is absolutely right on the money!

 

"Internalization" -- the exactly right word.

 

Unless we naturally see in terms of color contrasts, color complements, color chords, color scales, color compositions, we must study color and these various aspects of it before we can even hope to make good color photographs.

 

Young painters setting out in life with a BFA from their 4-year college and an MFA from their graduate school have had, on the average, six full semesters' study of color, color theory, color practice, etc.

 

One of the first things 16th, 17th and 18thC master painters had their apprentices learn to do was to grind pigment and mix it with oil to make the right color paint.

 

In most painters' studios today you will see many sheets of Color Aid paper pinned up on the walls, near or far from the works in progress.

 

Do we as color photographers claim to know more about color than painters? So that we do not have to study it as painters do/did? That we can make color compositions just like that: pick up a camera, point, shoot and Hey! Presto! A color composition.

 

Is that what we think? That we can master in a second what it took Leonardo da Vinci years to master? That we arre as good at color as was Matisse when, after working hard for 30 years, he said he finally thought he was getting some control over color and could begin to make it work the way he wanted, or envisioned?

 

I don't know how many times I've heard a painter friend say of one of my pictures, "It's a nice idea, you know, but the color sucks."

 

I found out what "color sucks" means when, after making a few hundred family pictures in color (grandmothers like to see their grandchildren in color) I forgot to re-set my Epson R-D1 to monochrome.

 

Ten days later I had 10 days' worth of horrible color pictures.

 

But when I viewed them in black and white via Breeze Browser's Contro. + W toggle, I had 10 days' passable black and white work with a few interesting pictures.

 

Mr Alland points to the only course possible if one is to make good color photographs. STUDY. Study great color compositions -- in the original, if possible...

 

For example, 30 minutes from my parking spot is the Yale Art Gallery with a small painting by Veronese and another by Titian that can teach one volumes about color.

 

Also, study your own color for its failures until you come to see them not only immediately but with a sense of great pain, a wince, an "Oh, d--n! Not again???!!!"

 

In this way we can internalize color chords, color scales, color compositions to such a point that we see and photograph them, Zen-like (again, Mr Alland is right on) in the twinkling, so to speak, of an eye (although not yours, which must be open all the time).

 

Andre Kertesz, the first great Leica photographer, said of the process by which he made so many of those great photographs that distinuished him and the Leica camera above the rest of the workers and instruments of his time...

 

"Nature begins the thing, I complete the thing. That's all."

 

The "thing", in Kertesz dictionary, almost always meant "the picture".

 

Translating Kertesz into Mr Alland's thought, we get "I see nature, the world, the street, whatever, beginning a color picture by setting forth its elements, including color chords etc., before me. All I do, really, is to complete the color picture nature begins."

 

Zen indeed.,

 

A good painter to start studying is Fernand Leger, who built so many great paintings on pure red, blue, yellow, black, white and occasionally green -- as though all his studio containt were the counterpart, in buckets of paint, of the Craylo Crayon 8-color starter set for children.

[smokysun]

(i absolutely agree about the selection process. that's where the photographer reveals/chooses his/her vision of the world. my favorite example is diane arbus picture of the boy in a park with a toy handgrenade. she took probably a half a dozen shots. the boy looks like a normal kid except in the one she chose to print and which has become famous. the best pictures don't often pop out immediately. and when they do, they seem to confirm a particular world view. (diane started out as a commercial portrait/fashion photographer and i'm pretty sure she coaxed a certain look out of her subjects.)

 

i disagree that comparing a photo and a paint rendition have nothing to teach (the very crudeness of the example may help). this morning it hit me (it's too obvious) that in paintings form is much more pronounced. the cezanne is as solid as his mountain. photos have to be reduced to very broad shadows, etc., to achieve this particular kind of immediacy. (the famous photo of the girl kneeling over the body and blood of the student at kent state would be an example). otherwise photos show form in a generally much more subdued manner. and this seems to me particularly true of street photography.

 

also, it becomes obvious that the color variation in a painting on the micro level incredibly varied with a great colorist (monet and bonnard come to mind). a lot of little touches create the larger effects. in photos the colors come in much broader swathes with generally delicate gradations. .

[robertwright]

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another part of the selection process is to get the pictures "out" of the computer. Almost every teacher I have had has said something about getting a wall to pin work up on, so that you can live with it. Even small 4x6 prints, I remember a photo of Eggleston's desk with piles of drugstore prints on it-

 

seeing work on the screen is no replacement for living with the prints on the wall and reacting to them.

 

Re the M8-I have to say I have made more prints since getting the M8 than in a long time, mainly because it is such a joy. Lightroom has also been great, printing from it is fun.

[sean_reid]

.

 

In refering to the zen-like aspect of making a photograph, where everyting that one wants in it comes together, makes me always think that photography is an art of selection: selection at two levels, first in what one frames with the camera, and, second, in what one prints — on the second level, whether looking at a contact sheet or a set of slides or equivalent digital sets of pictures in a program like Lightroom, the selection of what one prints. Usually, when I click the shutter for what I feel is a really good photograph the results are what I felt they will be and I can remember that moment of what I saw when I clicked the shutter even years later. But for most photographs, in looking at contact sheets (or the digital eauivalent), it isn't always easy to see which of the frames will make a good print. Sometimes one sees that a particular frame is a good photograph only years later. All this is a long-winded way to say that, photography being an art of selection...]

 

Hi Mitch,

 

I remember you and I discussing these aspects of working in color some months ago.

 

About selection... John Szarkowski, former head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, put a great deal of emphasis on this idea of "selection" in (among other places) his book "The Photographer's Eye". It's an important idea but I think the idea of "selection" is over-emphasized in many discussions of photography. There is a transformation of the subject that is made by the camera (as it is controlled by the photographer) and that transformation involves much more than just selection. Photography makes new things. So, selection is important to think about, from my perspective, but its just one of many things that we do in order to make pictures.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[sean_reid]

i decided to try a little experiment. here's a photograph taken last thurs at a dance dress rehearsal. obviously the colors (costumes created by the dancers themselves) carefully chosen, though the lighting instruments and situation very, very limited. i took the photo and used a paint program to turn it into a painting. any coments on the differences by anyone would be interesting.

 

Wayne,

 

The first thing that struck me when I looked the "painted" version of your picture is how much variation the software had added to things such as the blue dress. I can't say that I like what the computer did with the picture but one thing that I've learned looking at paintings is how common it is for the painter to create small variations in color within areas of seemingly uniform color. That variation can be important to the surface of the picture.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[smokysun]

i've just taken a renewed look at the david hockney book that started this discussion:

 

Amazon.com: Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters: Books: David Hockney

 

i still think this an extremely valuable book for photographers as it is an examination of the way lenses see vs. the naked eye.

 

also he has plenty of close-up details of paintings in a book with high-level printing. plus, as with a still life on page 105, he often compares a photo with a painting of the same subject.

 

looking at mitch's photos you can see how important the touches of red are to the photograph on the right. (also look at the red accents in imants' photos.) at the same time the delicate glass reflections on the left show how subtle photography itself (especially in found color) tends to be compared to painting. in the end all painting seems to me like studio photography, even when done in plein aire. that control over form and color. painting usually or often has a much bonier, evident form than photography, and much more surface variation in color, as sean says.

 

and as a side note, there's a reason for that red dot!

 

ps. okay, i do have to admit there's something to studying the effects of color. and for photographers there's only one book:

 

Amazon.com: Mastering Color Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book): Books: Michael Freeman

 

imants pooh-poohed michael freeman so badly, i put it back on the shelf. but look in the back at the acknowlegments. the guy had a tremendous amount of help from the experts and surely a raft of researchers. he discusses everything mentioned and more, with lots of examples.

[Guest stnami]

Once we pass by the reality/photograph thing we can start looking at photographs and colour.

With the younger kids(6-12) we do a painting and a photograph of each element/principle and discuss what are the differences, the similiarities seem to come naturally to the tin lids.

Try this.......go to an art gallery and look around, then take some photos, don't view them, go back to the gallery the next day.......... go home and look at your images. Works better with film than digital(too much temptation there).

[jrc]

If anyone would like an interesting and fairly easy-to-read non-technical book on color, check "Color in Art" by John Gage, one of the Thames & Hudson "World of Art" series. It was $18.95 (paper) at Borders. ($14.21 new from Amazon, not including shipping) Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Color-Art-World-John-Gage/dp/0500203946/ref=sr_1_1/103-4265722-0497444?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177545307&sr=8-1

 

 

 

 

JC

[smokysun]

thanks for the tip on the john gage book. looks interesting. ordered one!

[Ben Lifson]

A recent film that uses color in an interesting way and which deserves study is the thriller FRACTURE w/ Anthony Hopkins. Scene after scene is shot in that dark greenish-blue that Hollywood seems to equate with low light interiors, streets at night, offices, etc. But when you look closely, especially toward the screen's edges or into the scene's background you see a small yellowish or golden-ish or orange-ish detail holding the whole image securely across the screen and throughout the image's represented space.

 

Attached below, Ghirlandaio's famous Adoration of the Shepherds, 1485, panel painting (oil on wood), 62.25 inches square.

 

The chord, if you will, of red, purple and orange in central group of Joseph, Mary and the Infant Jesus is obvious. The red cuff on St Joseph's binds him and the plane he's in BOTH to the Virgin Mary and the plane she's in AND to the procession of the Three Magi and their retainers etc in the distance, bringing the two events, so distant in time from each other in the Gospels, into the same moment -- compresses time as it compresses space. Looking more carefully, you will find many background colors to be echoes of colors in the two foreground figure groups. This, together with the foreground and background arches, further serves to unite the background and foreground on THE PICTURE PLANE, so that the picture is AT ONCE a representation of solid bodies (volumes) in deep space AND a play of lines, shapes, forms and patterns across the surface of the object.

 

From studying paintings this distinuished for their use of color one can indeed absorb something of the nature of color compositions and recognize their elements when they are before one's eyes.

 

Always remember what Kertesz said: "Nature begins the thing, I complete it. That's all."

 

And remember that by "nature" Kertesz didn't mean the countryside or the wilderness but all that is not man--the world, in other words, including streets, buildings, etc etc

 

HOWEVER In order to see "the thing", i.e. the picture, being begun before one's eyes in nature one must know what a picture is.

 

One can't know what a picture is without studying many pictures.

 

And the right ones--which is why it's a good idea to start not with photographs, which are a recent invention and which have thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of uninteresting art-photographrs and photojournalists for every good one -- but with paintings, especially paintings first from about 1830 backwards in time to Giotto.

 

Why?

 

Because the lenses that were ground for the camera obscura in the 16th Century were ground in order to produce perspectival images equivalent to the perspectival images of Renaissance painting, which began around 1430.

 

In other words, the lenses in our cameras are ground in order to produce a perspectival image, a handling of space, a layering of space and images, an underlying grid and geometry, exactly like those of 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and up to mid-19th century.

 

The model, then, of the pictures we make, is not earlier photography but earlier painting.

 

So for color.

 

Best to start where the lenses start, learn the terms of the pictures the lenses were ground to create.

 

So that we can indeed say with Kertesz -- and I put his statement, now, in slightly different words:

 

"I see the elements of a color picture either there before my eyes or forming before my eyes and all I do is take those elements and work them into a color picture that is latent within them."

 

Kertesz was modest. His "That's all" means a big thing.

 

But then, by the time Kertesz was 12 or 13 he was playing hookey a lot in order to go to the Budapest Museum to study paintings and folk art, in the study rooms, not in the galleries. The museum workers, charmed by this young boy and his passion for art, let him come whenever he wanted and would bring him paintings or drawings or fabrics or folk art from the archives so that he could hold them in his hands and study them.

 

By the age of 16 or 17 he was knowledgeable in, and kept abreast of, all major European modernist art movements.

 

So he knew what he was seeing when he saw "nature begin the thing."

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[smokysun]

can everything be planned in a photograph? isn't it often a matter of lucky accidents? shooting a lot? trying half a dozen shots until something gels (and often finding the first one you took the best)?

 

also i'm wondering if an unmanipulated color photo can be a work of art. this is blashemy, of course, but i just posted a few re-worked photos:

 

waterdance 2 Photo Gallery by wayne pease at pbase.com

 

and it seems to me a straight color photo just can't compete. (that may be my limitation, hard as i try. however, with these it wasn't the matter of simply pushing the button but a lot of work.) the information in a straight photo seems to me too direct, too quickly grasped, and holds no mystery, unless it's the mystery of subject. a b&w photo is an automatic transformation in a way a color photo is not. (frankly, for me shore and eggleston are a stretch and the work cold. again, blasphemy.)

 

every winter i see hundreds of student works outside the color theory lab. alas, the study doesn't necessarily lead to art. yet i agree with ben: all study increases your chances.

[jrc]

<<can everything be planned in a photograph?>>

 

Have you looked at or read about Jeff Wall's photography?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wall

 

JC

[Ben Lifson]

can everything be planned in a photograph?

Yes.

 

isn't it often a matter of lucky accidents?

 

This too. But just as fortune favors the brave luck favors those photographers who put themselves in the way of it day after day after day.

 

i'm wondering if an unmanipulated color photo can be a work of art.

 

Any photograph can be a work of art if it is a work of art.

 

We don't talk about straight or manipulated or documentary painting.

 

Was Canaletto a documentary painter? Guardi? John Constable?

 

Which reminds me of a story.

 

The young Constable was sketching on Hampstead Heath when the old William Blake walked by. Blake looked over Constable's shoulder at the sketch and said, "It's a vision." Constable replied, "I was hoping it would be a landscape."

 

The terms "documentary," "straight," "unmanipulated," "manipulated" have nothing to do with, absolutely do not bear on the art of photography.

 

Anyone who uses them is confusing the issue.

 

Also, it depends on what you mean by "unmanipulated." Unless we have stood by the color processor or in the professional color lab with Stephen Shore and Bill Eggleston we have no right to say that their pictures are either straight or manipulated.

 

the information in a straight photo seems to me too direct, too quickly grasped, and holds no mystery,

 

You are talking about photographs in which information overwhelms form, i.e. failed art.

 

But Stephen Shore's early work does not imitate nature. It transforms nature into a color composition. His suburban streets, for example. are a crazy color of blue gray with some green in there; they only represent the color of suburban asphalt streets. But they chime well with the colors of the suburban houses along them. So for Eggleston, Shore's and Eggleston's colors do not pretend to imitate nature. They create a new world of their own where streets, trees, people, the color of people's skin, houses, automobiles, plates of food have colors that are specific to the picture, not to life.

 

Art does not imitate nature or life.

 

If you find a picture too boring etc. because the information seems to me too direct, too quickly grasped, and holds no mystery, you are right in thinking the picture to be a failed one. Shore's and Eggleston's early works, however, are not failures.

 

To make a picture look "straight" takes a great deal of artistry. It is said that Paul Strand would often reject 100 prints before he got to the one that looked right.

 

It is also said that before he began to photograph for his book on Italy, Un Paese, he went all around Europe looking at every Piero della Francesca painting he could find in public collections and get access to in private ones.

 

Was he making straight photographs to document the Italian face and figure? Or re-doing Piero in black and white? Both and more.

 

Attached, below, two of Walker Evans' most famous 1930s group portraits.

 

They look straight, unmanipulated, just a picture of what was there--"Just a photograph," in Alfred Stieglitz' words, describing how he wanted his pictures to seem to appear to viewers.

 

A closer look reveals that both are virtuosic figure groups founded on a large set of variations on, and innumerable relationships between and among the human head, face, hand, arm, leg, foot, body, and, also, of clothes and, also, of the relation of clothes to the human figure.

 

In each picture, each foot is drawn as a unique object, specific unto itself and similar to no other foot in the pictures.

 

So for the heads, the hands, etc.

 

Yet a closer look reveals that these figure groups -- compositions within themselves -- work perfectly with the shapes and forms and tones of their surroundings and so at once determine the area of the picture available for the depiction of those surroundings -- determines the composition -- and yet takes its place seamlessly with the other details in order to give the impression of reality, on the one hand, and, on the other, a perfect composition.

 

Now in order for all these variations and compositions to hit the eye at once the gray tones, from black to white, had to be printed with such clarity and distinctiveness with respect to the objects they represent, on the one hand, and, on the other, with respect to the over-all composition of whites, grays and blacks.

 

Making prints that succeeds like these is no easy matter. It often requires a lot of burning, dodging, maybe even a pre-fogging of the paper... In other words, manipulation.

 

Evans' art in this picture is the art of realism, which conceals its artistry in order to give the subject greatest impact...

 

But unless that impact is not also the impact of a work of art, hitting simulateneously as the information, but in a way that the viewer isn't aware of it, the picture fails.

 

We must be very careful in calling a picture either straight or manipulated.

 

It is time, I think, that we abandon the false terminology of photography -- straight, documentary, manipulated, street photography, environmental portrait, etc etc etc -- and adopt the terminology of painting, drawing, watercolor...

 

After all,

 

THE DEFINING TERM IS NOT "PHOTOGRAPH"

THE DEFINING TERM IS "PICTURE".

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[smokysun]

i've really been enjoying michael freeman's

 

Amazon.com: Mastering Color Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book): Books: Michael Freeman

 

toward the end he says b&w has been controllable to a large degree (as evidenced in ben's examples) but color not. he speaks of the big change with digital:

 

"...with digital capure and digital image editing there is suddenly a spectacular expansion in control and discrimination."

 

that's the relevance of digital to color in a nutshell.

 

and because of that i think ben & sean are right in saying photographers must now study painters (not just for composition) because they have tools to do what painters have always done. it is a real revolution.

 

on the question of terminology i guess the problem comes from the history of photography. stieglitz and others wanted to define it as an art form distinct from painting and said it needed to be seen differently. so the terms street photography, straight photography, etc came up. if they worked for b&w they don't for the new age of digital color.

 

on the other hand will the language of drawing & painting suffice to distinguish photography itself, or is this no longer necessary, considering how easily photos can now be turned into paintings (not great ones necessarily, but paintings nonetheless)? i've no answer.

 

however i have started doing the recommended research and am finding the way color works and the history of it absolutely fascinating. just checked out

 

Amazon.com: Color by Betty Edwards: A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing Colors: Books: Betty Edwards

 

Amazon.com: The Acrylics Book: Materials and Techniques for Today's Artist: Books: Barclay Sheaks

 

and i've received the recommended

 

Amazon.com: Color in Art (World of Art): Books: John Gage

 

in the mail. hopefully this interest will hold thru the summer. already understanding the difference between projected light and reflected light helps.

 

many thanks,

 

wayne

 

"All art is transformation."

 

ps. and despite imants i think this is the guy to look at

 

Photographer

[smokysun]

a garish example from an international festival

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[Guest stnami]

Hey Wayne I never said tthat I didn't like his work....... just his recent work seems a bit formula based and that's how a lot of people prefer to work. The early stuff is fantastic and so much better than Steve McCurry's colour work, now that is organised