This site illustrates my current research into the relationships between painting and photographs.

Alun Price

An exploration of the differences and similarities between photography and painting as representational practices

This study will employ extensive image construction in both photographs and paintings to make a contribution to the continuing debate on the nature of visual research. It is intended to draw upon the work of various theorists, such as Pierre Bordieu, Victor Burgin, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Ruth Orkin. These writers and many of their later critics, have helped to establish a language of meaning within the academic study of photography. Painters in the Cubist movement in the early part of the 20th.C were concerned about the tyranny of formal perspective, an artistic legacy of the Italian Renaissance, Contemporary artists such as David Hockney have also dealt with the issue of perspective and its effects. Many of these artists have chosen to either ignore or manipulate perspective conventions.
Whilst drawing extensively on the work of these and other theorists and practitioners it is intended to examine other differences between photography and painting, including their uses by both artists and designers. Factors to be researched will include scale, cropping, colour, texture and the hand crafted nature of painting. A major focus will be to examine the possibilities afforded by the convergence of photography and image making in the realm of digital imagery. There is a danger that without an understanding of the fundamental concepts relating to photography and painting this, new convergence may depend more on technological possibilities than pre-existing conventions. This research will help inform the possible directions of digital media by grounding it in its own visual past, and by exploring the new possibilities within a language of art, design and photography. Action Research