Say "Cheese!" This is World Photography Day. Photographers celebrate this day every year on August 19. On this day in 1839, Louis Daguerre introduced the world to the daguerreotype - a method of obtaining an image on a metal plate. Since then, photography has changed a lot: in 1861, color photograph was reproduced for the first time, and the digital camera invented in 1981 partially replaced traditional photographic film. The emergence of photography changed the course of the development of painting: the task of accurately displaying reality disappeared and artists began to look for new languages of expression. These searches gave impetus to the development of impressionism.
With the development of photography, a new direction formed in painting - photorealism. The name was invented by Louis Meisel in 1968 and gave it a definition in five points, almost commandments. This definition is now partly outdated. For example, the requirement “The artist must have exhibited work as a Photo-Realist by 1972 to be considered one of the central Photo-Realists”. Now photorealism, as a genre, is defined on two points: painting is created using photography to study the object and involves increased attention to detail to achieve the maximum degree of realism.
In the first generation of American photorealists, Ralph Goings should be singled out. His paintings are comparable to the best stills of classic American cinema. In their simple plot, the familiar environment is revealed in a new, mysterious and magical way.
Goings' work also influenced the next generation of photorealists. The online art gallery ArtHall features works by the American artist Glennray Tutor. His paintings are permeated with bright colors, subtle metaphors and are completely focused on details. It is noteworthy that the first photorealistic works were written by Tutor in the early 1980s, when the artist did not know about the already established direction of photorealists. And only a few years later, the paintings of the above-mentioned Ralph Goings will make a strong impression on Tutor.
Critics call Tutor a wizard, and the images he creates are supernatural. "Tutor's paintings are so realistic that they are imbued with an atmosphere of hallucinatory unreality," noted The Commercial Appeal. Thanks to this magic, Tutor's photorealistic paintings have taken a place on the covers of books, music albums and magazines.