Photorealism vs Staged Photography
フォトリアリズム / 演出写真
Photorealism comes from Postwar American Art and Staged Photography from Photographic Genres. One is style and the other technique. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.
Photorealism
A movement that transfers the photograph itself onto the canvas, rebuilding by hand the quantity of information a mechanical eye records. Shop-window reflections, the warp of chrome, diner neon: the subject is fixed on the surface together with the photograph's own focus, grain and chromatic fringing. What is painted is not what was seen but the fact that a camera saw it that way.
Staged Photography
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Composes scene, figure, props and light before the shutter, shaking the very premise that photographs record reality.
| Photorealism | Staged Photography | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1968–1980s | 19th century– / 1970s revival |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Photographic Genres |
| Kind | Style | Technique |
| Cues | Reflections and highlights taken from the photograph / Depth of field painted exactly as the lens gave it / Commercial subjects drawn from the city / A smooth surface with every brushmark erased | Constructed scenes / Props / Cinematic lighting / Deliberate artificiality |
| Best used for | Advertising for cars and watches where the reflections in chrome and glass are the subject · Books and features on the city and consumer culture that keep the information a mechanical eye records | Restaging the conventions of advertising or news images to cast doubt on them · Building a story into one frame meant for exhibition, not for record |
| Type | Let lettering appear inside the frame as signage, never laid over the image from outside | Make the text in the frame as a prop rather than borrowing a typeface |
| Composition | Keep the photograph's own crop and do not recompose the frame | Fix gaze and hand positions in advance and block the frame like a painting |
| Material | Paint grain and fringing into a surface smoothed of every brushmark, letting no substrate texture show | Built sets or models, cinematic lighting, large format shot and printed big |
| Caution | Cleaning up the lens artefacts: polish out the focus fall-off, the grain and the fringing and the picture stops reading as a photograph made by hand, leaving airless illustration. | Staging that only imitates a natural record leaves the assumption that photographs record reality untouched, and the whole reason for constructing the scene disappears. |