Photographs Don’t Show What Our Eyes See

When I go to an art museum, I like to look at the art. If I am in the right mood,1 I can spend a very long time looking at a single painting, getting close to examine the individual brush marks, walking away to see it from a distance, and going up close again.2 My eyes float around within the painting, and I lose all sense of time and place. This is an extremely pleasurable experience, and it is how I would like others to look at my paintings as well. Indeed, part of my goal as an artist is to create paintings that allow the viewer to have this experience.

Increasingly, it is becoming impossible to look at a painting this way. Often, when I step backwards to see a painting from farther away, I end up walking into someone who was standing right behind me, waiting to take a photograph of the painting. Other times, while viewing a painting, I become aware of someone pacing around me, and it becomes impossible to concentrate. So I step aside and watch as they spend half a minute positioning their camera. They snap the photo and walk away, without having so much as glanced at the painting.

Sometimes, as I look at a painting, someone comes up beside me and positions their camera right in the centre of my field of view. Other times, they elbow me or push me aside with their bag. I once even had someone ask me to hurry up so they could take a photograph. We were the only people in a large room full of beautiful, valuable, historically important paintings. The person had apparently decided that the painting I happened to be looking at must be the only painting in the room worth photographing.

As you must have guessed by now, this behaviour gets on my nerves. It jolts me out of the happy zone I was in. What bothers me is not just how rude people are but their failure to understand that the photographs they are taking look nothing like the paintings they are not viewing. We are incredibly lucky to have access to so many great works of art without having to be billionnaires, and it’s disturbing that so many people miss the opportunity to look at what is in front of them.3

The next time you happen to be in front of a good painting, do the following experiment. Take a photograph of the painting using your phone. Take as good a photograph as you can manage. Then, without changing your position, compare the photograph to the painting. Compare not just the overall effect but the individual colours. You will find that the photograph does not even come close.

This is true of the photographs on this web site as well. They don’t give an accurate impression of what my paintings actually look like. They merely provide a record of the contents of each painting. They don’t indicate the size of a painting, its physicality, or its texture. The colours are always different from the original, and it is impossible to adjust them to make them accurate. Moreover, the photographs, for some reason, lack the liveliness of the actual paintings; my paintings look alive in person, but they look dead in photographs. Initially, I wanted to make this web site a blog only, with no pictures. I didn’t want to give anyone the idea that a photograph is an accurate representation of a painting. The only reason I finally put pictures here is that if I didn’t do so, people would think I couldn’t possibly be any good and wouldn’t bother to read what I wrote.

Try another experiment. When you are outside on a nice day, or indoors in pleasant surroundings, take a photograph with your camera. Then, without changing your position, compare the photograph you just took to the scene in front of you. You will be amazed by how inferior the photograph is to the reality.

What you will conclude from these two experiments is that looking at a photograph is not the same as looking at what was photographed. I have thought a great deal about this phenomenon and still don’t have a satisfying explanation for it. One might propose an easy solution to the puzzle by saying that a photograph is two-dimensional whereas reality is three-dimensional. But this does not explain why a good painting, in spite of its inaccuracies and imprecision, looks more like reality than a photograph. My best guess is that when we look at reality, our eyes don’t take in everything all at once; they flit around, and our brain processes the various images to form a three-dimensional mental image. Similarly, when we look at a painting, we are not given all the information, and our brain is forced to form a three-dimensional image based on the clues in the painting. Whatever the exact reason, what our brain does when we look at a good painting is much closer to what it does when we look at reality than when we look at a photograph.4

Here is an example. Consider this low-quality photograph of one of my paintings.

P26
“Cleveland Tower, June”, 2017, oil on linen panel, 10 x 8″, private collection.

Compare it to the following photograph I took of the scene after completing the painting.

You may say that this is not a good comparison, so let me crop the second photograph.

Taking into account that the colours in the first photograph are duller than in the original painting, would you prefer to have the painting on your wall, or the photograph?5 Note that I unconsciously increased the size of the tower because when one stands where I was standing, one perceives the tower as being larger than it is. I also removed all kinds of details that I didn’t feel were essential.

Here, incidentally, is a photograph of the painting in the scene.

By comparing the first image to the last, you can see that the colours in the painting look different depending on the photograph. This, by itself, should prove to you how unreliable photographs of paintings are.

Our society’s obsession with photographs ultimately stems from our reluctance to accept that we are mortal and that the present moment is fleeting. Whether in front of a great painting or in front of a beautiful scene, a person taking a photograph for future reference is attempting to escape time. In other words, they believe they are recording the moment and will have it for the rest of their lives. In fact, the camera does not record reality. It records something far from it, while giving one a false sense of security that one is not subject to the passage of time. If people realized that photographs are not as accurate as they had assumed, they might let go of their phones and cameras and start to live in the moment. When I see something beautiful, either in a museum or elsewhere, I make a point of not taking a photograph. I find that if I take a photograph, even if I put it away immediately, I am unable to experience the moment fully. Instead, I remind myself of just how valuable that moment is, and I try to make the most of it. I look at the scene around me. I look at the painting in front of me. I look for as long as I want to, or for as long as I can. I can’t describe in words how exciting and fulfilling that feeling is. I suggest you give it a try as well.

  1. On a bad day, I can look at a painting I admired at length on a previous visit and see only flaws. ↩︎
  2. A truly good painting looks good both up close and from a distance. A painting by Monet or Sargent, for example, can look extraordinarily realistic from far away and dissolve into a combination of seemingly random brush marks up close. An excellent example of this is Monet’s “La Grenouillère”, which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ↩︎
  3. What is even more frustrating is that museums are increasingly positioning overhead lights so as to produce glare when one points a camera at a painting straight-on. This means that even if one is not taking a photograph, one cannot view the painting from its ideal viewing position and must instead view it from the side. Paintings are always meant to be viewed straight on; they look distorted when viewed obliquely. In other words, because of some people’s insistence on photographing art in museums, those who want to look at the art are not able to do so properly. ↩︎
  4. None of the statements I am making here should be interpreted to mean that I don’t believe in photography as an art form. I am not a photographer, but I respect photographers. What a photographer does in the course of their work is very different from what a person is doing when they take a photograph of a painting or a scene for future reference. Indeed, the best photographs are those where the photographer has somehow reduced the amount of information in the photograph, either by photographing at night or in fog or by choosing an intrinsically simple scene. ↩︎
  5. If you prefer the photograph, then I suggest you not waste any more time on this site. ↩︎