The finished artwork (right) is a pretty accurate likeness to the original photo, with some details softened and others refined.
Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces
4. Lori Fogarty, foreword to Douglas R. Nickel, Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life 1888 to the Present (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 7. S. The complex role of MoMA in defining and promoting photography as a fine art has been definitively chronicled and critiqued in Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 : 27-63. 6. The SFMoMA exhibition overview calls the images in the show “untutored, unintended ‘mas terpieces”‘ and, according to the Son Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker. “Snapshots shows how small a part conscious intention may play in what makes art fascinating.” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, exhibition overview, online at www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib detail/98 exhib snapshots.html; Kenneth Baker, “Found Photographic Art Captured in SFMoMA’s ‘Snapshots,”‘ Son Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 1998, El. development print. With their wealth of particular visual detail, the images selected for the.
See Full PDF
See Full PDF
Related Papers
Download Free PDF View PDF
Interfaces – Image Text Language
With a focus on the dispersed corpus of an American photographic society – the California Camera Club – this article proposes new methods to examine photographic objects produced around 1900. In a period commonly defined by Pictorialism and the New York Photo-Secession, the works of San Franciscan photographers stand out as extremely versatile. The Club corpus, which has withstood the earthquake and fire of 1906, and decade-long oblivion on the part of scholars and curators, is dispersed over numerous Californian institutions. As such, it represents an important contribution to American photographic history that demands us to rethink the categories generally ascribed to camera clubs. To grasp how the works of the more than 400-member-strong organization can be partly reassembled, this article proposes a survey of the Club’s primary sources with a special focus on their material supports and their storage locations, accompanied by a historiographical discussion. By looking first at the productions of the members in their most active period, and, as a second step, examining the processes of canonization which led to their oblivion, this article provides new tools for photo-historical research around 1900.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Journal of American Culture
Download Free PDF View PDF
In response to scholars’ recent preoccupation with the circulation of photographs, this article advocates greater attention to instances in which they have been withdrawn from circulation or reserved for future use. The focus here is on the most extreme of these closed collections, namely the time capsule, which was conceived in Philadelphia in 1876. The article shows how photography played a crucial role in the earliest time capsules – not just as their principal content, but also as a medium associated with fantasies of time travel, conceptions of posterity, and practices of storage. It then recovers the complex and contradictory political meanings of these photographic collections, thereby challenging the rhetoric of altruism and neutrality that has accompanied so many efforts to preserve photo- graphs for future viewers and historians.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
For a long time, the study of photography has been a part of Art studies or a mere object of philosophical investigations. Yet, after the advent of digital technologies it progressively became central in Media and Communication studies. From the 2000s onwards, various social and technological events made photography more accessible, ubiquitous, public, cheap, democratic, immediate and shared than ever before, paving the way to a renewal of photographic experience. New objects, formats, devices, practices and uses emerged as specific traits of a ‘performative’ photographic agency. This emergence is allowed by the fact that photography, despite being one of the most ancient media, still shapes our lives, empowers our biological vision, and enhances our imaginative visual practices. The editors of this issue, Adriano D’Aloia and Francesco Parisi, propose the term ‘snapshot culture’ to refer to the combination of technological, aesthetic and practical shifts in contemporary photographic experience. Snapshot culture is characterized by a twofold dynamic: the persistence of the original traits of the photographic experience as it emerged and developed, coupled with the modulation of new opportunities offered by technological improvements and social changes. Indeed, the digitalization of photographic aesthetics and related media practices provides an ideal case for studying some of the most challenging developments in visual media aesthetics within the broader landscape of the post-medium condition and for reflecting on how photography theory has responded to such challenges in the post-theory era. This special issue offers a critical investigation of photography’s ‘persistence’ in the media experience through both an analysis of concrete objects and phenomena (e.g. selfies, animated GIFs, social networking, computational photography) and the refinement of theoretical approaches to photography.
Download Free PDF View PDF
What is Paint Your Life?
The Paint Your Life website is well organized, with plenty of galleries showcasing the work of its portrait artists.
A California-based service, Paint Your Life employs portrait artists to paint or draw custom art from photos, making it easy to connect those who want a painting created with people who can make that happen. The completely online ordering process guides you through selecting a reference photo, the finished art size, the medium (oil, acrylic, water color, charcoal, or pencil), and the framing, with plenty of visual examples and transparent pricing of what you can expect. Possible subjects aren’t only limited to pets—Paint Your Life offers portraiture services for humans, too, as well as renderings of a favorite landscape or family home.
The site claims a turnaround time is as fast as 15 days from order to artwork at your door, based mainly on how many revisions you request to the work—one of Paint Your Life’s points of pride is that there are several check-ins along the way to ensure that your artwork comes out exactly as you envision it. You may request “unlimited revisions” (included in the cost) based on the images emailed your way, up until you sign off on the final art. Even then, the company promises a “100% money-back guarantee” if you’re not satisfied once the painting arrives.
How much does a Paint Your Life portrait cost?
It’s not cheap to have a custom portrait done by Paint Your Life.
This is not some CGI-based operation. These pieces are created by brush-wielding artists, who are “paid above-average wages” for their efforts, as well as for their patience, should a client desire multiple changes to the work. I have to assume the service itself makes a profit as well, bringing the cost of the smallest option, an 8-inch-by-10-inch portrait of a single subject, to just under $200 before you add a frame for $49.
For Gus’s masterpiece, I opted for what the site identified as “popular”: an oil painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches. That cost $389, plus $79 for the frame. Apart from once hiring a Central Park artist to sketch a photo as a wedding gift for $100, I have no real context as to what custom art should cost, nor can I really put a price on a tribute to a beloved family member. But it does make you wonder: What do you get for that $468?
What’s the process of ordering from Paint Your Life like?
Paint Your Life shared with me via email the process of turning my photo (far left) into a painted portrait.
The ordering process hand-holds you through every decision, from choosing the medium and finished size, as well as what makes a good reference photo for the artist to use. Each step has written explanations and visual examples. For several of the options, you may elect to let the service make decisions for you, which is what I did whenever asked.
Selecting the subject
The first step is selecting the subject of your image. There are several options to choose from such as Child, Parent and Child, Person and Pet for example.
Selecting a medium
The next step is deciding how you would like your image rendered by the artist. Once again there are several options to choose from including charcoal, pastel, and oils.
Selecting an artist
Next, I let the site assign my artist. I could’ve scroll through galleries of example art to see whose style I liked best, but it seems to me that most Paint Your Life artists employ a fairly realistic perspective, and any nuances among them would be beyond my amateur eye.
Selecting the photo the artist will work from
I couldn’t decide which photo of several favorites I wanted painted, so I opted to let the artist pick that as well as whether the background would be painted in detail or rendered a solid color.
In total, I offered up four photos (two shown) for the Paint Your Life artist to select among.
Details, feedback, and customizations
The order form also has a spot to include any notes you’d like to share with the artist. I noted that I would like them to “edit out any clutter” if they elected to retain the background, and that I didn’t want his harness included in the painting, if they chose this one photo of Gus poised on a stool, belly-up to a local dog-friendly bar.
Within just one day, I received an email indicating that my photo had been “edited” for my approval, with a note explaining that this was not my painting, but just a cleaned-up version of the reference photo the artist would use. It was an iteration of the bar photo … with the background removed—I mean, a dog in a bar was kinda the point!—and the undesired harness still very much in place. Disappointed, I replied that I didn’t care for this image and requested they try again with one of a couple of new photos.
The first photo that Paint Your Life chose for my dog portrait was this shot. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the preview image, which took Gus out of the bar.
Success! The new “edited” photo, delivered about two days later, looked remarkably similar to the photo I’d uploaded of Gus sitting solo on a sidewalk, which I’d chosen expressly because it had no significant background or a harness to gum up the works. I “accepted” and the painting commenced.
At each step in the process, Paint Your Life kept me posted, with clear expectations for the timing of the delivery of my artwork, as long as I held up my end of the bargain to watch for emails that requested my approval. I was sent an email with an image of my painting in process just a day after OK’ing the reference photo. And within seven days of placing my order, I was sent a photo of the finished artwork to approve. The painting then had to finish drying (it’s oil paint) and be framed, which took a few more days. It was shipped via FedEx 16 days after I placed my order.
Quarantined Couple Builds Art Museum to Entertain Pet Gerbils
Amid a spate of museum closures due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, one London couple has found solace in a new institution that opened its doors earlier this month. But these two aren’t your typical duo: Instead, they’re a pair of gerbils whose very bored owners meticulously cobbled together a gallery of rodent-themed artworks to quell the quarantine blues.
Pets Pandoro and Tiramisù were met with a special surprise on April 5, when Filippo Lorenzin, an independent curator who works at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and his girlfriend, artist Marianna Benetti, unveiled a DIY miniature museum—the product of four hours of labor during the couple’s 14th day of quarantine in the United Kingdom.
The little gallery features four exquisite paintings modeled on famous masterpieces. Versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, all rendered in Benetti’s expert hand, grace the museum’s walls. Each, of course, comes with its own animalistic twist, subbing in a rodent where a human might otherwise feature—tailored, perhaps, to the VIP pint-sized patrons. Johannes Vermeer’s The Girl With the Pearl Earring, for instance, is reimagined as The Gerbil With the Pearl Earring. Each parody is finished off with a clean cardboard frame and a wall label featuring a QR code.
As Lorenzin and Benetti tell Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, the two gerbils—9-month-old brothers—were art virgins prior to the gallery premiere. But by all accounts, their first museum sojourn was a positive experience: “They much enjoyed the display and paid close attention to the quality of the gallery’s props,” the couple explains.
Some of the museum’s props, however, sustained some damage. Cultured yet illiterate, the gerbils didn’t heed “the sign to advise the visitors to not chew” on the institution’s furniture.
The architects seem to have shrugged off the offense. “It was fun to play around with the white cube aesthetics and the raw energy of our gerbils,” Lorenzin tells the Art Newspaper.
Luckily for the hungry rodents, all of the museum’s building materials—a mash-up of cardboard, paper and wood—were gerbil-friendly, reports Sarah Cascone for artnet News.
After dreaming up the museum, Lorenzin and Benetti created a rough sketch of the dimensions. They posted a photo of the plan on social media on April 5 and followed it up with images of the pets’ tour. Unsurprisingly, the snapshots—as well as a subsequent video outlining the visit—went viral, quickly attracting thousands of fans.
One enthusiastic user, SchnoodleDoodleDo, even posted a homespun poem on Reddit that reads:
we gerbil frens, so richly blessed –
this gallery we love the Best!
our wonderment it never ceases
surrounded here by mouseterpieces!
famouse paintings grace the wall –
we scoot around n have a ball.
The gerbil gallery is, of course, a bit too petite to accommodate in-person human visitors. (Such cramped quarters would probably violate distancing guidelines anyway.) But as Lorenzin tells the Art Newspaper , “We hope this will make people who are stuck at home recall good memories in museums and encourage them to support institutions in such uncertain times.”
Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
Katherine J. Wu is a Boston-based science journalist and Story Collider senior producer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Undark magazine, Popular Science and more. She holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard University, and was Smithsonian magazine’s 2018 AAAS Mass Media Fellow.
