The camera is seen as a clever way to mirror the world. The mechanical process of the camera worked with the realism it portrayed whereas we think of paintings as constructed from the artists’ imagination, we think of photographs as instantly created and accurately recording the subject shot. Susan Sontag questions this view, that photographs are always an accurate record: ‘Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.’ Photographs can be thought of as a trace of a reality, that is simply an interpretation, a composition like any painting, not an uncomplicated mirror of the world.

Before photography was invented, painting had developed its own notions of realistic depiction that differed from age to age, region to region. Realism was able to take many painterly forms, but the intrusion of photography has changed all that. Our confidence in the documentary nature of photography has made it difficult, if not impossible to see painting as realistic on its own terms. However, with the development of digital photography and the manipulation this makes possible, our confidence in photography has also been shaken.
The relations between these two media have undergone important changes, from the time of photography’s first struggle to define itself against painting, to the present time, when with the help of digital photography, photography again finds itself moving closer to painting.

Photographic paintings and painterly photographs complicate the image; art work produced in this way creates a different set of conventions. This is because of the way in which they are made; the mechanical production and the ‘sensitive’ hands on approach, when combined, often do not look typically related to the painterly format.

I am interested in the relationship between photography and painting and have sought to combine them in my studio practice. Throughout my own experiments in the techniques of silk screen printing I have been keen to discover how other artists have interacted with both mechanical and hand manipulating processes within both painting and photography. The potential that photography has to influence traditional painting methods is vast and has been greatly exploited. Digital photography has further opened opportunities for artists to manipulate imagery. Artists seem to be swapping the tool of the paint brush to the tool of the digital camera to organise and arrange potential paintings.

The dot pixels that make up a photographic/digital image stay as a witness to the mechanically produced procedure in which reality has been captured. I am interested in the way artists have used dot pixels in their work to portray a reality we find unnerving, perhaps because we still associate this pixillated grain with a kind of realism that painting cannot portray. We associate these pixels with television, newspaper imagery and other photographically generated procedures. We recognise ‘dots’ and they hold connotations of many mechanical methods. Mechanical technology contains a ‘realism’ within its structure and method that artists can exploit to create artworks which borrow from the conventions of the ‘digital’.

Photographic images and by this I mean those found across both still and moving images, affect how we perceive the world. Our knowledge and experience of the world heavily relies on or is formed by exposure to television, film, magazine photographs e.t.c.. Photographic images, therefore, also affect our notions of reality. Artists have, for a long time, responded to this and many still continue to explore ‘how to remain directly involved with, even in control of, the image of the real that our technology advanced media generate.’

The aim of this paper is to investigate different ways that photographic media have interacted with and changed painting. By focusing on artists who directly use or reference the photographic ‘dot’ in their work I hope to explore some of the changing concerns of twentieth century artists. For example, can we still continue to believe that photographic media are ‘mechanical’ and their process one of ‘copying’, while painting is ‘artistic’ and ‘creative’? And what happens when a painting mimics or copies a photograph? The issues I will be analysing also are how does the content work in tune with the form. Has experimentation with mechanical processes altered the balance of form and content? I shall focus on the works of four artists: Georges Seurat, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke and Chuck Close. I have selected these particular artists because they span a period which starts soon after the invention of the camera to the present day which will enable a historical perspective. All four artists adopt the mechanics of the photographic technique and incorporate this into their art works. Through an examination of their work I therefore hope to show how each artist also attempted to question the painting conventions of his time through engagement with the questions raised by the photographic media of that time.

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Seurat began exploring the mechanical, impersonal application by creating a painting made up of dots of colour (Pointillism.) ‘Seurat’s modernity consists in his acting machine-like.’ Seurat’s ‘dot’ technique was quite varied but attempted to imitate the photographs pixilated surface and challenged the idea that the artist’s hand could reveal the artist’s mood, feelings or personality. Questions were raised as to whether Seurat used a mechanical device to achieve this painstaking technique. ‘I cannot believe that an observer who finds Seurat’s touch mechanical has looked closely at the pictures,’ wrote Meyer Schapiro in 1958. In fact, the result seems to expose the viewer to the aesthetic materiality of the paint and gestures of the pixillated format. On the other hand, when the painting is viewed from a distance the dots of colour merge together.

Seurat’s Pointillist technique gives the appearance of grainy photographs. Each ‘dot’ with a photograph represents part of a whole. A ‘dot’ taken out of context wouldn’t mean anything. Seurat’s ‘dots’ create an impact on viewers by having so many grouped together in colour and shape to represent a grainy photograph setting. You look at these ‘dots’ as a whole, like you would on a television screen. Marsham McLuhan, theorist of media working in the 1960’s, believed that it was the photograph’s surface appearance produced by chemical emulsions that inspired Seurat’s dots. Seurat’s paintings are constructed by hand making thousands of dots to make the picture. By the application of different colours of paint the result appeared to McLuhan to be mechanical, almost machine-made, closer to the television screen in its continuous half-tone surface than to traditional academic painting. Not everybody agreed with this. For Clement Greenburg what is important is the form and the medium rather than the content of the painting.
Seurat’s paintings vibrate outward as if to spring towards the spectator and every brush stroke harked back to the physical fact of the medium.
The medium, i.e. the dabs and dots draws attention to itself. The content or image of Seurat’s art work ‘appeared through (the surface of) the paintings.’ Seurat’s technique allows more light to shine through. The surface appears to throb with colour and the image presented seems to hover over the picture. Roger Fry said that, ‘his pictures are alive, but not with the life of nature’. Perhaps, Richard Shiff replies ‘they are alive like photography and video – animated by the soul of the medium.’

Today media images surround and bombard us and advertising is a big part of our lives. Much of our visual knowledge of the world is derived from photographic media. Many of our desires and expectations are shaped by such imagery; they construct our reality. Photographic media presents us with things we may never experience with our own eyes, yet we believe to be true; they are also used to record our lives and thus play a part in shaping our memories. The development of screen printing emerged in the 1930’s. It seemed to be a half way point between mechanically producing and hand making something. This technique became of great interest to Pop artists whose content of artworks was based on the commercial print process.

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the Pop Artists to produce art work inspired by popular culture, such as animation and commercial art. Lichtenstein’s paintings were bold and simple, reacting against the emphasis, at that time, on artistic, self expression. He produced graphic-like paintings by projecting and enlarging found comic images and then copying them by hand onto canvas. His strong black outlines, bold use of primary colours and flat surfaces have a strong presence and almost became symbols. Subjects are taken back to their simplest form, reduced to just surface. When looked at close up all one can see are lines and dots arranged to make up the subject. Dots grouped together, when viewed from a distance make up a colour, much the same as a photograph when enlarged becomes a series of pixillated dots. Lichtenstein would use this ‘dot’ technique when revealing colour.
Lichtenstein’s technique involved an array of ‘mechanical’ marks of equal size and spacing – a hand stencilled imitation of a printer’s screen of benday dots (coupled with broad outlines and areas of ‘commercial’ flat colour).
Lichtenstein appears to borrow from the animator whose job it is to produce comic strips and put them in a narrative order. When Lichtenstein isolates a picture out of its comic strip context and alters it slightly, it gains an importance and status by being blown up to mass proportions. Lichtenstein said in an interview with David Sylvester in 1966 that he felt that in many ways he does not do as well as the original cartoons. By the time the painting is put together, a lot of the impact of the original cartoon is lost. Lichtenstein went on to discuss how he distances himself from the original cartoon to work on the painting. From the cartoon or comic strip he makes a drawing and uses this as a source to create the painting. A series of paintings of interiors made in 1997 used the aid of collaged drawing. He used sheets of varied dots of size and colour to form a composition. He re-arranged them so that the interior looks like a commercial product. Lichtenstein tried to ‘strengthen and redraw and do all sorts of things to the painting, so it isn’t just a copy of the collage.’ At the same time, Lichtenstein contradicts this by going on to say that often his paintings are a complete copy of the drawing or collage.

The colours often embark upon an area that isn’t associated with that particular colour. He prefers a colour to flow, say from floor to ceiling creating a locality for a colour. The tonal dot patterns of colour do not stick to one object; they stray into the rest of the interior and meet with other tonal areas. Lichtenstein’s interiors are very interesting in that a simple space will appear full of imagery and pattern; a jungle of lines and dots of colour.

Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963), a cartoon like painting of a huge colourful explosion, shows the ‘pure pleasure of hitting the target right between the eyes.’ Though it shows war and violence the painting doesn’t represent violence. ‘No one had ever seen the modern world as flatly as Lichtenstein.’ Pop art was made powerful by the raw life it celebrated. The aesthetics of consumer media and products of the 60s were used as art forms in themselves. The simplified enlargement process of representing to us everyday objects and imagery makes us aware of the commercial, material world we live in. When the process makes the art, does it really matter what the subject is? The dot may represent anything at all.

Like Seurat, Lichtenstein’s technique involved the use of the dot to refer to the grain of the photograph when enlarged. Whereas Seurat used the small, varied marks of a brush, Lichtenstein’s dots were of equal size and spacing. The Pop art images he created, inspired by images from popular culture, were formed by the techniques employed by commercial artists of that time, using air-brushes to create smooth finishes of flat colour. The artist’s hand and involvement in the image is hidden – the mechanical devise used to make it is not. Lichtenstein ‘copies’ directly from existing graphic images. His aim was to challenge painting conventions of his time that centered around the individuality of the artist (as in abstract expressionism). In an interview in 1963 he comments:
The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content.

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Sigmar Polke is a German artist who has similarities with Pop artists like Litchenstein and Andy Warhol. Like them, he borrows photographic images from popular culture and uses graphic techniques. He also draws attention to the surface of the painting. Polke’s surfaces, however, are much more complex. While Lichtenstein ‘revelled in the surface beauty of an image,’ Polke dissects and dissolves images using experiments with fixers, developers, light, bleaching, e.t.c. He often uses printed or man-made fabrics and sometimes transparent materials which reveal the stretcher bars of the picture. The resulting collaged artwork draws attention both to its materiality and its construction. Polke’s art work is about impact and vision. The work is multilayered and each resource works in tune with the other; each revealing information to the viewer. He seems intrigued by photography and its chemical processes. Thousands of photos were taken and printed by him, and accidents in the process are as important as anything else. For example, one of his cameras had a faulty shutter which caused a double exposure leading to the finished photo having almost dreamlike effects. To Polke, ‘the negative is a matrix of possibilities, (‘you can do anything you want’), much like a script for an actor.’

Throughout his career Polke has borrowed photographic media images. The newspaper has provided him with ‘both subject matter and technique, that is, images made with the half-tone ‘dot’ process of newspaper illustration.’ He collects both images and text from newspapers, often looking for misprints. In his series of work I live in my own world, but its ok, they know me here, the photographic image is enlarged until the faults in the print, possible slippages or mishaps, become visible. The result is of abstract dot patterns encased within resin on polyester. These strangely beautiful, organic looking paintings appear abstract but seem to struggle against their original form. They have many layers and contain a depth of information which the viewer tries to decode. As part of the same series in which Polke produced in 2001, he created abstract dot paintings on paper. He applied white dots over dark startling colours of metallic paint. The colours really shine through in similar ways to a Pointillist painting. The paintings seemed optical and almost three dimensional, urging one to touch them.

Polke is interested in both the mechanics and the meanings of our world; drawing from the images that surround us, their beauty and their horror. He questions our preconceptions. Often in his work the image is camouflaged within its background. Approaching it initially as though it were an abstract piece. Further engagement with it often leaves the viewer baffled:
As with nearly all his work, what at first appears straight forward here takes a profound turn the more one looks at and thinks about what the artist has presented to us.

For example, in his recent Tate Modern Exhibition History of Everything, guns appear throughout and are presented as though they were ordinary and not in the expected context. They are shown as related to sport, not to crime, pointing to the everydayness of gun culture in America. It is an ‘everydayness’, however, that we cannot take for granted. These pieces were produced for an earlier exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, using material taken from Texas newspapers. Polke takes images taken by others and transforms them. He raises serious philosophical questions from ordinary and low culture images to challenge our perceptions of the contemporary world and its values. For example, he draws attention to the place of the gun in masculine Texan culture, a perception which is useful to interpret today’s projection of what it is to be an American by the current president, George Bush. For example, I don’t really think about too much, shows a man at target practice. The benday dots which make up the photo-representation appear to splash across the image as if they were shooting bullets. Polke seems to strive towards detachment. The paintings are often ambiguous, with multi-layered references from both high and popular culture and much irony. He appears to battle with form and abstraction, with aesthetics and politics, but none take the upper hand.

In recent works Polke uses cheep patterned fabrics, collaging them together
to form a surface to paint onto. Sometimes the print on the fabric relates to the image Polke has chosen to paint. For example, Me and my buddies would vote for you, shows a group of men surrounding a stripper table dancer, ‘who is in fact a target, her large anchor like boots pathetically signalling her plight.’ The image is surrounded by fabric printed with beer drinking scenes, hunting scenes with horses, all stereotypical references to macho male behaviour.

My favourite piece from the show at Tate Modern, shows a kind of reversal of the above. Cook up art with a culinary flair, seems to have a surface that is made up of three vertical bands of patterned fabrics. With lines, spots and swirls; these make up the floor, wall and ceiling. Polke used a white wash over the ceiling fabric to, perhaps, tone down vibrant colours. The painting is startling and its pictorial atmosphere very intense. It is of two large girls, positioned to the left. In between them is a very small man who, at first glance, I mistook for a child. It doesn’t appear to be a happy scene. The focus is aimed at the small man who appears to be in some sort of trouble. The image is superimposed on the patterned background, the figures appearing through painted benday dots. It has a hallucinatory quality to it, like a bad dream. According to Sarah Kent, what is implied here that is ‘images (including our ideas of ourselves and others) are mental as well as physical constructs.’ Polke’s artwork makes me feel as though I am trespassing into issues that have no reference to my life, yet which make me feel strongly about the moral context associated with their subject matter. The dots indicate a kind of documentary truth which society as a whole would recognise.

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Painting was considered for a long time to explore an artist’s creative vision, whereas photography was seen as a more mechanical and thus factual representation. Digital photography changed this as it allows a seamless manipulation so that the image can have a documentary feel.
While the technologies of digital imagery are expanding certain resources of photography, they are also bringing with them an altered attitude that may ultimately diminish some of the powers to which photography traditionally laid claim.
Photography is loosing its traditional links to reality and becoming for some artists another creative tool.

For the artist Chuck Close, the use of photographs as source material allowed him to liberate his work ‘from the conventions and traditions of the past.’ He was able to ‘hide the record of his hand’ and to distance himself from ‘habits that were associated with other people’s work.’ His early works of black and white portrait heads were made with acrylic paint.
He then experimented with the three colour process which was taken from colour printing and using an airbrush. He often copied photographs directly and actively tried to make the result look like a photograph: ‘They look out at us as we stare back at them.’ Close also tried finger painting, making impressions onto canvas or paper. These were followed by a series of pulp-paper collage portraits. The pulp paintings had a texture and grain to them, where each large blob of pulp resembled a pixel indicating a blown up photograph. The colours used for the pulp paintings resemble black and white photographs, that in particular the many shades of grey which make up a black and white photograph.

I think Close’s most recent works are the most successful in terms of combining portraiture and surface decoration. They are applied in a grid format, often leaving the grid visible. Close ‘reproduced by hand an image that had originated in a mechanism, one he himself operated.’ The photograph is divided into a grid, so that every one square of the photograph equals to four squares on the canvas. Within each square Close paints swirls, circles and blobs of colour. These abstract squares fall into place next to one another and make up the representation, like the pixels within a photograph. The shear size of Close’s paintings create a huge impact. Like an enlarged photograph, the whole comes together when viewed from far away. Up close, the artist’s hand in the making of the piece becomes clear. On the other hand, the painted ‘pixels’ denote a detached, mechanical process. Coming closer, the viewer is made aware of the sheer painstaking craftsmanship of the artist’s hand. The paintings have a digital quality to them; they are bit by bit paintings. Close’s ‘hand-made photographs’ have as much detail and pattern in the background as they do in the squares of the eyes for example. Each square is treated with the same care. Close works on the canvas in sections, which are then fitted together at the end. He often works on the squares upside down so that the whole picture is lost. Close works directly from the photograph as his only source. He studies a particular square on the photograph then recreates it in abstract form. Close achieves, through paint, a result which mimics the structural qualities of a digital photograph. At the same time, it is very unlike a photograph in that its almost instant image is reproduced in paint over a long period of time.

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When Matisse was asked why he painted, he replied: ‘To translate my emotions, my feelings and the reaction of my sensibility into colour and design, something that neither the perfect camera, even in colour, nor the cinema can do.’ For Matisse therefore, it would appear that the categories of painting and photography are clear-cut. The art works discussed in this paper, however, question such a clear division between the two media. They illustrate that the boundaries are not so defined, therefore, how can photographs be mechanical and just a process of copying? Photographs can be as carefully composed and creative as a painting even though they rely on a mechanical and instant process. I believe I have shown that it is not just conventional painting that is artistic and creative but through the actual material of photographic media (newspapers, prints, negatives, chemicals), artists like Polke are translating their emotions and feelings into a range of paintings, photographs and other forms.

Another of the issues I wanted to examine was the way in which artists incorporate photographs in their work to portray a reality we find unnerving because we look at a painting which represents the documentary style of photography. Pixels denote detached and remote transmission of information from say computer screens and television sets. They do not suggest human involvement but of course somebody has control over the framing, lighting and other options available. Chuck Close has engaged with the concept of the pixel to attempt to get away from being associated with other artists influences and styles. He found conventions and traditions of the past limiting and wished to explore new technologies that has no historic link. Chuck Close seems to play on the digital media of today by recreating a photograph and manipulating each pixel in ways similar to tools available in Photoshop. The ‘digital’ cannot reveal extra information whereas if a photograph was to be blown up, more detail would be revealed, with ‘digital’ what you see is what you get and only the same pixels would increase in size. Close reinvents each pixel by revealing extra information to the viewer which denotes a photographic quality.

What does this mimicking/copying of the photographic effect do to the meaning? By using photographic images to make paintings artists like Polke rely on the documentary nature of photography to make the works have an importance or realism it otherwise would never portray. When artists, like Sigmar Polke that use newspaper imagery as a source and subject for art works, play on the pixel quality of photography, it changes our interpretation of the work. Questions crop up like; who is the person represented? Why has Polke chosen to use this image? What response is Polke looking for when he displays to us such imagery? In knowing that such images used in Polke’s canvas’s came from a newspaper, you take the people to be real, he has used them to represent issues such as Texas’s blasé attitude to guns or the British ‘uptight’ attitudes to sex.

Viewers expectations are altered slightly and one begins to see the work for the political issues in which reasons for displaying a particular image is necessary. The viewer is also pushed to look at the work for the aesthetic qualities they would expect to see and are made to realise the methods and mimicking involved in creating the work because people are familiar with the place of pixels in our visual culture. However, an audience finds it important to be assured that the artists are involved in the creation of the work. Seurat’s ‘painted pixels’ were criticised for being impersonal and machine-like. People wanted to know that the dots were produced by his hand and were spontaneous and artistically arranged in line with the expectations of an artist.

Examples of Seurat’s work will also enables an analysis of the issue of the balance between form and content.
Seurat is a predecessor for artists who self-consciously link the character of their imagery to the medium that generates it.
For him as well as Polke, Lichtenstein and Close the mechanical processes become a tool like any of their brushes and paints. However, what determines the result – the technology or the artist? Most of the time it is a successful synthesis of chosen method with subject matter. For example, for Lichtenstein the comic strip content seems apparent to be displayed as bright, bold colours and outlines on a flat surface. Polke’s newspaper sources painted onto fabric backgrounds which correspond with issues raised within the work. Seurat too achieved an aesthetic balance in his landscape paintings, even though he was painting the same subject matter of fellow Impressionist painters. However, when he strayed to other subject matter like The Circus the form i.e. the dots did not compliment the content. This was because critics argued, that he was trying to portray movement but achieved a ‘stiff’ quality instead.

Trying to make the form work in balance with the content has been a main concern within my own studio practice. My work largely consists of screen prints which seem to be a halfway point between something mechanically produced and something which is handmade. Many Pop artists try this technique to achieve a likeness to the commercial print process. Lichtenstein and Polke work both seem to confront the fact that we are bombarded with images. It seems to be a response to the meaning of being an artist working in an age of visual culture and that no image is able to hide from reproduction and manipulation. Sigmar Polke has particularly influenced how I treat the surface of my work, so that it works in synthesis with the subject matter. For example I have been recently been working with MDF by creating a rough surface, masking over the picture then repainting it so that colours and layers shine through the surface. The images I choose to represent are discarded interiors, in which I create a confusion of perspective or add an unnerving element by placing a child into the unsafe/alienated scene. The textured wood seems to work well with the visual content.

In trying to assess the different ways that photographic media have interacted with and changed painting I hope I have shown that we should not be concerned or fear the consequences for the fine arts by the use of mechanical processes and new communication and information technologies like the digital cameras and computers. Machines do not reduce the creative drive of an artist. The artists hand is always there – we can easily differentiate between the work of Seurat, Lichtenstein, Polke and Close. Artists are in control of mechanically generated media.