ABSTRACT
Have you ever seen a painting you identifi ed as “Photorealistic?” What was the primary quality of that painting that made it most like a photograph? e answer: the quality of` focus it depicts. What sets Photorealistic paintings apart is that they depict a scene the way a camera would see it, and photographs, no matter how closely they seem to approximate human sight, never depict the world as we see it. Photorealism looks photographic primarily because it reproduces a sense of the camera’s monocular vision, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, diff ers from our binocular vision in the way it fl attens depth perspective onto a two-dimensional plane. e physical characteristics of the camera’s aperture and lens, that camera vision allows variable depth of focus, along with the ways in which framing operates, create an image that is altogether diff erent than the one our eyes and brain create. It is those physical characteristics that impose themselves upon the focus (or sharpness) of the images they apprehend, and it is those characteristics that Photorealism explicitly acknowledges in its creations. Our visual memory enables us as viewers to recognize the diff erences in quality of focus as uniquely photographic, and in so doing requires us to relate to the subject and content of Photorealistic paintings in a specifi c
way. I use the example of Photorealism to begin this discussion because through painting, quality of focus is called to our attention in a way that is so implicit, so transparent, that it is often lost when we view photographs.
