paintings

Henri Cartier-Bresson Photos Reimagined as Satirical Paintings

In this article, I am going to share a huge project in which Henri Cartier-Bresson’s black and white photos are reimagined into satirical paintings. What would Bresson see if he were still shooting today? The colorful paintings will definitely give you a glimpse!

5 Things Photographers Can Learn From the Old Masters of Painting

Art has arguably been around almost as long as humans have. The moment we learned to mark something for others to see and interpret, the moment art was born. Thankfully for us photographers, we needn’t go quite that far back to begin learning from the history of art. In fact, we only need to go as far as the "Old Masters."

How My Photography is Inspired by Great Paintings

The kind of photography I do begins as a moment of theft. Finding the scene, finding your angle, and stealing the moment for yourself. Some photographers are creators. They build a scene, a still life, or arrange their models and angle their lights and create an image from nothing. I’m not one of those photographers. I’m a thief.

4 Lost Masterpieces Recreated Using Only Stock Photos

In a bid to show off the potential behind their stock photography collection, Adobe asked four digital artists to do something pretty incredible. They were asked to recreate four lost or stolen art masterpieces... using only Adobe Stock imagery. Ready? GO!

These Portraits of Auto Mechanics Are a Homage to Renaissance Paintings

Photographer Freddy Fabris spent years wanting to pay homage to the legendary artworks of great Renaissance master painters, but figuring out how to do so with his camera was a challenge. Recently, he finally came up with an idea that blends the style of old with ideas that are new: it's a series of portraits of car mechanics in a repair shop, created with the look and feel of Renaissance paintings.

Photo Editor Photoshops Classic Paintings as If They Were in Today’s Magazines

As a the Senior Photo Editor at TakePart, Lauren Wade sees a lot of over-Photoshopped images of impossibly-proportioned models. And being as familiar as she is with the practice, she's surprised at the amount of retouching that people are ignorant of.

So she thought she'd shed some light on the matter by taking classic paintings and applying the same sort of Photoshopping we see done to fashion models today.

Alexa Meade on Why and How She Began Turning People Into Real Life Paintings

Alexa Meade turned her first person into a real life, three-dimensional painting in April of 2009. Now, four years later, she is known the world over as the artist who uses the human body as her canvas, creating photographs you would be hard-pressed to differentiate from two-dimensional paintings.(Note: the video above contains some body-paint nudity)

Photos of Trash Heaps Made to Look Like Chinese Landscape Paintings

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.

The Idealized Landscape Paintings Found in Prison Visiting Rooms

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.

The Photographs Norman Rockwell Used to Create His Famous Paintings

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?

Photogs Find Paintings That Look Just Like Their Photos Hanging in a Gallery

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?

Accurate Photographic Recreations of Old Paintings That Feature Chairs

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.

Underwater Photos That Mimic the Look of Baroque Paintings

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.

Photographs That Resemble Traditional Chinese Paintings

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.

Portraits That Recreate Paintings by the Old Masters

Photographer Josef Fischnaller shoots portraits that recreate famous paintings by the Old Masters, often including some humorous modern day elements in the scene. The photos remind us of the "Remake" contest photos that we shared a couple months ago.

Singer Bob Dylan Accused of Plagiarizing Photographs

Singer Bob Dylan is being accused of plagiarism after several paintings in his recent art show were found to have "striking resemblances" to works by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy. An example is Dylan's painting titled Opium (above left), which appears to be directly copied from Busy's Vietnam (above right). A Flickr user also found that Dylan had copied six photographs -- one of which an artificial Photoshop edit -- from his Flickr stream.

Invisible Paintings That Can Only Be Seen by Cameras

Toronto-based artists Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements have an exhibition titled "Take a Picture" which features paintings that are invisible to the human eye but visible to cameras. To do this, they use a frequency of light that is outside the visible spectrum but visible to the CCD and CMOS sensors found in digital cameras.

Gigapixel Photos of Famous Paintings

We've featured quite a few gigapixel photo projects here on PetaPixel, but this one's a bit different. HAL9000 is a project out of Italy that takes famous paintings and shoots gigapixel photographs of them, allowing you to get up close and personal with the masterpieces through a special online viewer.

Tilt Shift Effect Added to Famous Van Gogh Paintings

Here's a fun idea: take famous landscape paintings and add a tilt-shift effect to them! This series of images was created by Artcyclopedia using famous Van Gogh paintings. We love how the selective focus gives the paintings a new dimension.