Take a quick look at Chinese photographer Yao Lu’s “New Landscapes” photos, and they may look to you like old Chinese paintings of misty mountains, green hills, and choppy brown rivers. Each one even bears a red seal stamp that artists use as signatures on finished works.
Look a little closer, however, and it becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right. “Those are some strange looking mountains, you think to yourself.” Well, they aren’t actually mountains, but rather mounds of garbage covered with green construction netting.
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Prison visiting rooms are often home to large-scale paintings that are enjoyed by only a few. Often created by the inmates themselves, the artworks serve as the photographic backdrops of a portrait studio as inmates pose in front of them for pictures that are given to loved ones as mementos.
Since these intricate drawings are generally only seen by inmates, visitors, and employees, photographer Alyse Emdur decided that she wanted to document them for a wider audience. She spent years creating a project titled Prison Landscapes, featuring photos of these idealized backdrops that, for a moment, transport the inmates to faraway places.
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Photographer Bill Gekas of Melbourne, Australia has been creating portraits of his young daughter in the style of master European painters of old.
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Painter Norman Rockwell‘s illustrations graced the covers of countless magazines over the course of the 20th century, becoming a much-loved piece of American culture for their simple snapshots of life. You might recognize many of the works, and even the name behind the paintings, but did you know that virtually all of the images started out as photographs?
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For their project “Museum Anatomy,” Chiang Mai, Thailand-based artists Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector recreated and photographed old paintings from around the world on a human body instead of a canvas.
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Getting your work copied, ripped off and/or stolen is a sad reality in the digital age. In fact, earlier this year we shared a website dedicated to ousting copycats and were shocked at how much copyright infringement was really out there. But where finding your work on another “photographer’s” website would be startling enough, how would you feel if you found it while browsing a major art show?
That’s exactly what happened to artist Jason Levesque this last weekend. While walking around Art Basel in Miami Beach, Levesque noticed that three of the pieces presented by the Robert Fontaine Gallery looked a bit more than familiar.
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We’ve featured photographic recreations of old master paintings before, but usually they’ve focused on simple portraits rather than elaborate scenes. London-based photographer Maisie Broadhead went with the latter when doing her recent project “Taking the Chair.” Working with her mother Caroline, Broadhead selected seven fine art paintings that prominently feature a chair. The duo then tried to accurately recreate the details of the scene for photographs.
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Hawaii-based photographer Christy Lee Rogers specializes in creating dreamlike photos of people underwater. Her project Reckless Unbound shows people swirling around one another while wearing colorful outfits. The photos are reminiscent of the paintings of old Baroque masters, who would often paint people floating around in heavenly realms.
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Don Hong-Oai was a San Francisco-based Chinese photographer who created beautiful images that resembled traditional Chinese paintings.
The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San (who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.
Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to use this technique, and was also arguably the best.
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Did you know that you can use Photoshop’s Match Color feature to turn old paintings into “filters” for your images? James Delaney of Unfocused Brain explains,
Adjusting your photographs to get the color ‘just right’ can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?
Simply load both your photo and the painting (or whatever image you’d like) into Photoshop. Make sure your photos is the active window, and then go to Image->Adjustments->Match Color. Select the painting as your source, and tweak the sliders to suit your taste. Whenever you find a painting you like, keep them in a directory to slowly build up a collection of “filters”. You can also mimic the look of different films by using film photos as the source!
Improve your photography with classical art [Unfocused Brain]
