Drawn from life

Drawn from photograph

Drawings (c)2006 Danny Gregory, used with permission

Danny over at By Danny Gregory is thinking about the relationship between drawing and photography, particularly the act of drawing from photography and its implications. His ultimate take? It's a bad idea, and produces flat results, because the artist making the drawing is too far removed from the original source. His conclusions make sense. Especially when looking a a photograph of a complicated scene, we've all had moments of "what the heck is that, anyway?" Drawing the unidentifiable object magnifies that sense of unfamiliarity and alienation.

Of course, it depends on your school of drawing, and what you're seeking to accomplish. I've known drawing teachers who recommend taking a photo of a something you're having trouble drawing and turning it upside down or sideways so that it doesn't look familiar any more and you can focus on the lines, angles, and shadows more completely. Then again, maybe that focus on particulars rather than the feel of the entire composition is exactly what Danny is arguing against.

Some people, too, may actually prefer the effect Danny's drawings from photographs produce, the flattened perspective and focus on fetishized formal elements. Defamiliarization has been a favorite trick of Avant Garde artists and photographers for a century. You can decide from yourself.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his conclusion about the the type of drawing produced from photographs and its artistic value, Danny raises some interesting questions about the nature of photography. Before you go over and flame him, though, please keep in mind that he's engaging with this issue as a mental exercise for himself. He's a photographer, too, and some of his anti-photography statements are playing devil's advocate. In any case, he's questioning the relationship between photography and drawing, not thinking directly about the act of photography itself.

He does, though, make some interesting points about photography as a visual medium that can be summed up in this question: is photography, ultimately, a less realistic medium that drawing?

For most people, the question itself is a little counterintuitive but Danny's point is this: when we look at something, we don't see large portions of the scene in focus at the same time. The human eye has an incredibly narrow depth of field. Drawing mimics that by subjectively drawing our attention to certain things by rendering them in sharper focus or emphasizing them in some way. Conversely, the artist can demphasize objects by drawing them in less than perfect detail, shadowing them, etc., or, if he or she chooses, altering the scene to omit them entirely. This may not reproduce a scene as it actually was, but it faithfully reproduces one person's subjective impression of it.

In contrast, photography doesn't reproduce the photographer's actual impression of the scene. We're constantly finding thing in pictures we didn't even know were there. We also take pictures that don't recreate what we actually saw, where the depth of field is deep, or just inaccurate. We might, for instance take a picture at the zoo where both a fence and the monkey behind it are are in crystal clear focus even though when we were there, we couldn't possibly have noticed both at the exact same time. Viewing the photograph then requires reenacting the scene, scanning it for ourselves and focusing on different elements in turn, not view the scene as the photographer saw it, be recreating the process of viewing it.

Of course, we do have a whole host of tricks up our sleeves to compensate for this when we want to. We can shorten DOF to almost the range of the human eye. We can add some impression of time by adjusting the exposure. We can vignette to direct the gaze away from the corners or zoom in with a macro lens to reproduce the detail of a single feature for the instant that the eye focuses on it. And that's just the the beginning.

Edit: corrected link to flickr group macro page.