The Evolution of Painting and Photography
by Sophia Arden
The late 19th century marked a radical shift in the visual arts, as painters began to challenge traditional realism and photographers pioneered a new medium. Over the next century and a half, painting and photography would evolve in tandem – at times influencing each other – through various artistic movements. This journey spans from Impressionism, with its vibrant light and color, through the fragmented visions of Cubism, the dreamscapes of Surrealism, the emotive force of Expressionism, and the nonrepresentational experiments of Abstract Art. Each movement expanded the possibilities of artistic expression. Technological innovations played a critical role in these developments: just as new tools and materials enabled painters to break conventions, advances in photographic technology opened new frontiers for photographers. Ultimately, these converging threads of art and technology have led to Komorealism – a contemporary photographic style that synthesizes these influences into a novel form. Komorealism, inspired by the Japanese concept of komorebi (sunlight filtering through leaves), represents a unique convergence of painting’s artistic legacy with modern photographic technique, offering viewers a multi-layered visual and emotional experience.
In this article, we explore the evolution of painting and photography from Impressionism to Komorealism. We will examine how each art movement in painting found parallels or points of contact in photography, and how technical developments empowered artists in both media. Key artists, artworks, and innovations will be discussed to illuminate the connections. Finally, we will see how Komorealism emerges as a culmination of this evolutionary journey – blending the impression of light, the multiple perspectives of cubism, the imagination of surrealism, the emotion of expressionism, and the abstraction of form, all made possible through 21st-century digital techniques.
Impressionism: Capturing Light and Moment
In the 1870s, Impressionism revolutionized painting by focusing on the transient effects of light and atmosphere. Impressionist painters like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot sought to depict the fleeting “impression” of a scene – the way light, color, and movement appeared at a specific moment – rather than the fine details of realistic academic art. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) – the painting that gave the movement its name – exemplifies the loose brushwork and luminous color patches that suggest morning fog over a harbor, capturing an ephemeral sunrise glow. These artists often painted en plein air (outdoors, directly from nature) to observe how changing sunlight and weather altered a landscape from hour to hour. Their canvases vibrate with dappled light and fresh, unblended colors, a stark contrast to the polished studio paintings of earlier generations.
Several key developments enabled Impressionism’s break with tradition. One was the invention of new painting materials – most famously, the collapsible paint tube in 1841, patented by American painter John G. Rand. Before paint tubes, oil paints were mixed by hand and stored in fragile bladders, making it impractical to transport a palette far from the studio. Rand’s metal tubes allowed paint to be easily carried outdoors without drying out. Renoir later remarked that “without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism”. Portable paint tubes, along with lightweight field easels, liberated artists to work in the open air and capture natural light directly. The result was a new spontaneity and luminosity in painting – Impressionists could swiftly record a scene in front of them before the light changed, often completing paintings in one sitting to preserve unity of atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the birth of photography in the mid-19th century provided both a challenge and an inspiration to painters. Early photography (pioneered by Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot and others around the 1820s–1840s) proved remarkably adept at recording reality in precise detail. As photographic portrait studios and landscape views proliferated, painting was freed from its old documentary role. Why painstakingly recreate a realistic scene on canvas when a camera could capture “how things really looked” with mechanical accuracy? As one art historian noted, photography was so successful at showing the world objectively that “the assumption that paintings could portray reality all but disappeared”. In other words, painters were prompted to explore new directions that photographs could not rival – focusing on subjective perception, color, and light. Impressionism was a direct outcome of this shift: instead of competing with the camera’s exactness, painters embraced what the eye felt in a moment. Ironically, photography’s arrival helped spark painting’s move toward impressions over illusions.
Photography also influenced Impressionist aesthetics in more subtle ways. Photographs introduced new ways of seeing: candid compositions, asymmetrical cropping, and spontaneity. Edgar Degas, often associated with Impressionism, was an avid photographer himself and drew inspiration from photographic angles and off-center framing in his paintings of ballet dancers and horse races. Likewise, the slight blur and movement seen in some Impressionist works resemble the effects of early photographs of moving subjects. There was a cross-pollination – painters learned from the camera’s “eye”, and photographers learned from painters’ artistic sensibilities. By the 1880s and 1890s, a group of art photographers known as Pictorialists sought to prove that photography too could be a fine art. Pictorialist photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred Stieglitz intentionally made images with soft focus, rich tonal atmosphere, and painterly composition, akin to Impressionist paintings. They often chose poetic, romantic subjects or natural landscapes with dramatic light – much as Impressionist painters did – and even used special processes (like gum bichromate or platinum printing) to create images that looked as “hand-crafted” as a lithograph or etching. This was photography’s parallel movement to Impressionism, emphasizing beauty and mood over clinical detail.
In summary, Impressionism in painting celebrated light, color, and immediacy, breaking free from photographic realism, while early photography developed from a scientific invention into an artistic medium with its own aesthetic. The two mediums diverged in purpose – one capturing fleeting visual impressions, the other recording reality – but they also grew side by side. Both benefited from 19th-century innovations: the painter’s portable paint tube and the photographer’s portable camera. These tools empowered artists to venture out – whether with canvas or camera – and document the world in new ways. The stage was set for the explosive creativity of the 20th century, as artists continued to push boundaries in form and perception.
Cubism: Fragmenting Reality and Multiple Perspectives
By the first decade of the 20th century, the artistic revolution gained momentum with the advent of Cubism. Founded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris around 1907–1910, Cubism fundamentally altered the way reality was represented in art. Rather than depicting a single viewpoint in time – as both traditional painting and standard photography did – Cubist painters deconstructed subjects into geometric facets and reassembled them on the canvas. This technique suggested multiple perspectives at once, as if the viewer could see every side of an object simultaneously. For example, Picasso’s groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) shattered the conventions of perspective and form: the figures are shown with faces and bodies split into angular planes, inspired in part by African sculpture and the desire to portray form in a new, conceptual way. In later Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), Picasso and Braque painted still lifes and portraits that looked like translucent shards of reality – one might discern a guitar, a violin, or a human face broken into overlapping geometric pieces, as if viewing a scene through a fractured prism. This was a deliberate attempt to capture the experience of seeing over time and space, not just a frozen moment. It acknowledged that our perception is cumulative – we understand objects by mentally assembling many glimpses and angles, not by a single static image.
The influence of photography (and related technologies) on Cubism was indirect but significant. In the years leading up to Cubism, chronophotography – the sequential photographing of motion – had fascinated the public and artists. Photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s–1890s took rapid series of images of moving subjects (galloping horses, running humans, flying birds) to break down motion into frames. Muybridge’s famous motion studies (such as Horse in Motion, 1878) and Marey’s multiple-exposure photographs (where phases of movement were recorded in one image) showed time and movement in ways the eye cannot see unaided. These scientific photographs demonstrated that a dynamic event could be analyzed into slices or layered phases. While Cubism was more concerned with spatial than temporal multiplicity, this notion of fragmenting reality into components was in the air. The Cubists, in effect, did with perspective what Muybridge did with time – they broke it apart and reassembled it. Art historians have noted that Cubism’s fractured forms parallel the idea of multiple-exposure photography, where overlapping images produce a composite reality. Indeed, after seeing Cubist paintings, some photographers were directly inspired to experiment with similar ideas. The Italian Futurists (a movement contemporary with Cubism, 1909–1915) were explicitly influenced by chronophotography and Cubism; they sought to depict speed and motion, even producing photographs called “photodynamism” that showed a figure in motion blurred in a single frame. In 1913, photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn created abstract “vortograph” photographs by using prismatic mirrors – essentially Cubist photographs of fragmented cityscapes. Thus, the dialogue between painting and photography continued: Cubism’s visual language of fragmentation found echoes in photographic experiments.
Cubism also introduced collage into fine art – Picasso and Braque began pasting real newspapers, sheet music, or wallpaper onto their canvases (Synthetic Cubism, post-1912). By incorporating everyday printed images and materials, they collapsed the boundary between art and reality further. This idea soon carried over to photography in the form of photomontage. In the 1910s and 1920s, Dada and Constructivist artists, and later Surrealists, would cut and reassemble photographs (or use multiple exposures) to create jarring, fragmented compositions. Although photomontage had different motivations, the concept of merging pieces of reality into a new whole is a shared legacy with Cubism.
In photography outside the art world, the early 20th century also saw advancements that allowed more spontaneity – the introduction of portable hand-held cameras (like the Kodak Brownie in 1900 and later the 35mm Leica in 1925) meant photographers could capture candid moments and city life from varied angles. Photographers such as Jacques Henri Lartigue and later Henri Cartier-Bresson took dynamic shots that froze fast-moving scenes in unconventional compositions. While not Cubist per se, these photographs further broke with the static, posed aesthetic of 19th-century imagery. They presented slices of life from novel perspectives – a foreshadowing of the modern eye that Cubism and Futurism championed in painting.
In sum, Cubism in painting deconstructed form and space, offering a new vision of reality as seen from many sides. It indirectly pushed photography to expand its expressive techniques beyond straightforward documentation. The cross-influence would become more pronounced with later movements like Dada and Surrealism, where combining images and perspectives was central. Cubism’s fragmentation of form was a stepping stone in art’s journey from depicting what we see to exploring how we perceive. This shift would continue to deepen in the decades that followed.
Surrealism: Dreams, Imagination, and the Subconscious
If Cubism analyzed reality by breaking it apart, Surrealism (1920s–1930s) sought to transcend reality altogether, plumbing the depths of dreams, fantasy, and the subconscious mind. Surrealism emerged in Paris around 1924 with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, influenced by the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud and the prior Dada art movement. Painters like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró created works that juxtaposed the ordinary with the irrational: melting clocks draped over tree branches (Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, 1931), a train emerging from a fireplace (Magritte’s Time Transfixed, 1938), or uncanny hybrid creatures. The goal was to liberate imagination from logical constraints, to make the dream world visible. Surrealist art often features hyper-realistic rendering of objects but in impossible combinations and surreal settings – a paradoxical mix of clarity and mystery designed to jolt the viewer’s subconscious. Techniques like automatism (drawing or writing freely without conscious control) were used to tap into primal imagery beyond reason.
Photography became a powerful tool for Surrealist artists, because the camera could create convincing illusions even from real scenes. Many Surrealists were also photographers or collaborated with them. Man Ray, an American artist in Paris, was a key figure who used photographic processes to produce surreal images. He invented the rayograph (or photogram) – placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper and exposing it, resulting in ghostly silhouettes floating in space. He also experimented with double exposure, solarization, and montage, techniques that could turn a straightforward photograph into something strange and poetic. One of Man Ray’s iconic photographs, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), depicts a nude woman’s back with f-holes (like those of a violin) printed onto it – literally turning his model into a surreal violin. This kind of playful transformation exemplified Surrealist photography’s approach: reality is just raw material to be reshaped by the artist’s imagination.
The 1920s and ’30s saw a flourishing of Surrealist photography. Artists such as André Kertész and Brassaï made distorted or dreamlike images (Kertész’s Distortions, 1933, used mirrors to elongate the human form into funhouse-like figures). Dora Maar and Maurice Tabard created photomontages where disparate images meld into one another. Raoul Ubac exposed and re-exposed photographic paper to create abstract, elusive forms. These experimental techniques paralleled what painters were doing on canvas – for instance, Max Ernst developed frottage and grattage (rubbing and scraping paint to generate textures that the imagination could turn into images). In photography, the chance effects of darkroom manipulations were akin to automatic drawing in art – revealing unexpected shapes that could evoke subconscious feelings.
Crucially, photography gave Surrealists the ability to make impossible scenes look believable. A painted picture of a man with a cloud for a head (as Magritte might do) is clearly an invention of art, but a photograph of a man with a cloud for a head – achieved by double exposing a portrait with a cloud image – has an extra uncanny effect, because the photograph as a medium carries an implicit truth-value. Viewers know the laws of physics are being defied, yet the photorealistic surface makes them momentarily accept the illusion. This tension delighted Surrealist artists. As Man Ray famously stated, he would photograph what he did not wish to paint, and paint what he could not photograph, reflecting how he chose the medium that best suited the vision. Surrealism thus cemented photography’s status as not just a mirror of reality but a creative art form capable of visual magic.
Surrealist ideas also permeated early filmmaking (with Luis Buñuel’s and Dalí’s shocking short film Un Chien Andalou, 1929) and even fashion photography (Man Ray and others shot haute couture in bizarre setups). The boundaries between media were fluid: painters used photographs in collages, photographers hand-colored or painted on prints, etc. This era established that photography could be as expressive and subjective as painting, a concept that would only grow in the 20th century. Surrealism’s legacy in photography is enormous – the use of darkroom tricks, later digital photomontage, or even the very act of finding surreal coincidences in everyday life (as street photographers often do) all trace back to this movement.
Expressionism: Emotion and Subjective Vision
While Surrealism delved into dreams, Expressionism was grounded in intense emotion and subjective experience. In painting, Expressionism primarily took hold in the 1905–1920 period (though its influence persisted much longer), especially in Germany with groups like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. Artists such as Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde rejected the calm depiction of outward appearances in favor of conveying inner feelings. They distorted forms and chose colors fiercely to project moods – whether anguish, anxiety, spiritual ecstasy, or joy. Munch’s The Scream (1893) with its swirling sky and agonized figure is a proto-Expressionist masterpiece encapsulating existential dread. Kandinsky’s early Expressionist works used clashing colors and semi-abstract forms to evoke a spiritual resonance, anticipating his move into pure abstraction.
Expressionist painters often contorted perspective and anatomy, applied paint in jagged or passionate strokes, and emphasized atmosphere over accuracy. The result was art that felt raw, visceral, and deeply personal. This approach arose partly as a reaction to a turbulent world (Munch’s personal trauma, the urban alienation felt by Kirchner in Berlin, or the onset of World War I, which darkened the tone of many Expressionist works). Art was no longer about beauty or reality; it was about truth of feeling.
Photography’s development in the early 20th century also embraced expression in various ways. Although a camera mechanically records what is in front of it, photographers learned to manipulate technique to inject mood and personal perspective. One avenue was through printing methods: Pictorialist photographers (overlapping with this era) used soft focus lenses, diffused lighting, or special emulsions to create moody, atmospheric images that conveyed melancholy or nostalgia. For example, Edward Steichen’s Moonrise, Mamaroneck, New York (1904) is a blurry, monochromatic image of a moonlit landscape that looks almost like a Tonalist painting, dripping with mood. This pictorial style, while begun earlier, continued as a parallel to Expressionism – prioritizing emotional tone over sharp detail.
Another avenue was subject matter: some photographers captured the psychological intensity of their subjects through lighting and composition. The portrait photography of the 1920s–30s includes dramatic, high-contrast images that echo Expressionist chiaroscuro. Photographers like August Sander in Weimar Germany took portraits that, while quite sharp and straight, revealed the human condition in a systematic yet poignant way (documenting people of various classes and professions with an underlying sense of post-war sobriety). Others, like the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, roamed Paris at night in the 1930s,photographing lovers, outcasts, and shadowy streets – the resulting images, collected in Paris de Nuit, have a haunting, atmospheric quality that resonates with an Expressionist sensibility (loneliness, mystery, nocturnal beauty).
In cinema, German Expressionist films of the 1920s (e.g. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920; Nosferatu, 1922) used exaggerated sets, stark lighting, and dramatic camera angles to externalize emotional states like horror, madness, or terror. Though film is moving pictures, each frame is essentially a photograph – and these films showed how manipulating photographic elements (lighting, composition) could produce an emotionally charged, subjective world on screen. This cinematic style in turn influenced still photographers’ use of light and shadow (for example, film noir photography in the 1940s is indebted to Expressionist lighting techniques).
Expressionism’s influence on photography also appears in the mid-20th-century abstract photography and in the work of photographers who intentionally introduced blur or grain for emotive effect. A photographer like Bill Brandt, for instance, used high contrast and unusual perspectives in his post-WWII photographs of British life, creating images that felt at once real and psychologically loaded.
A significant figure bridging Expressionism and Abstract Art is Wassily Kandinsky. In 1911, Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a treatise arguing that art’s purpose was to convey deep spiritual and emotional truths, akin to music. He believed forms and colors have inherent expressive powers – a sharp, jagged line might convey anxiety; a soft blue might evoke calm. Kandinsky’s ideas influenced not only painters but artists in other media who strived to make the viewer feel something beyond the tangible subject. Photography, too, can be “spiritual” or expressive – consider Minor White’s photographs of peeling paint or clouds in the 1950s, which he intended as metaphors for states of mind, or the way a simple black-and-white photograph of barren trees can evoke loneliness or reverence. These are Expressionist qualities realized in a photographic way.
In essence, Expressionism contributed the lesson that art is an expression of the inner self, not just the outer world. This ethos permeated creative photography, encouraging photographers to move past mere documentation and use their medium to interpret and emotionalize the world. By prioritizing mood and meaning, Expressionism helped pave the way for more abstract and conceptual approaches in the visual arts, including photography.
Abstract Art and Photography: Form Beyond Representation
As the 20th century progressed, the logical extension of the move away from realism was the rise of Abstract Art – art that does not attempt to represent external reality at all. Abstract painting, pioneered by artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and later the American Abstract Expressionists, removed recognizable subject matter and focused on pure form, color, line, and texture. Kandinsky’s first abstract watercolors (c.1910) and Malevich’s Black Square (1915) shocked viewers by presenting art with no identifiable figures or objects. Mondrian’s compositions reduced painting to geometric arrangements of primary colors and grids, aiming for a kind of visual harmony akin to music. After World War II, abstract art dominated the avant-garde, from Jackson Pollock’s wild drip paintings to Mark Rothko’s floating color fields – all emphasizing the direct impact of form and color on the viewer’s emotions or contemplative mind.
At first glance, photography – which literally captures the external world via light – might seem antithetical to abstraction. How can a photograph be nonrepresentational if it’s always an image of something real? Yet photographers found ways to create abstract imagery and participated actively in the abstract art movement. One approach was to photograph subjects so close-up or out-of-context that they became unrecognizable patterns. For example, Edward Weston in the 1920s took extreme close-ups of pepper vegetables, shells, and cabbage leaves that transformed into sensual abstract forms – his famous Pepper No. 30 (1930) resembles a curled human torso more than a vegetable. Similarly, Aaron Siskind in the 1940s–50s photographed peeling paint, tar on asphalt, or graffiti, isolating these textures so they function as abstract compositions of lines and shapes. These images echoed the gestural abstractions of painters like de Kooning or the surface play of texture in abstract expressionism.
Another approach was cameraless photography, revisiting the photogram technique. Pioneers of the Bauhaus, such as László Moholy-Nagy, explored “photograms” in the 1920s – placing objects on photo paper and exposing it to light, similar to Man Ray’s rayographs but often with a more geometric or abstract intent. Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, and his innovative use of light and industrial materials, were part of a movement called “New Vision” photography that embraced abstract and dynamic viewpoints. These works proved that photography could create art not by capturing reality but by manipulating light itself. In a way, the photographer’s darkroom became as much a creative studio as a painter’s studio – an abstract photograph might be “made” rather than “taken.”
During the mid-20th century, photography also intersected with abstract art through experimental techniques. Multiple exposures, distortions, solarizations, and deliberate negative printing could yield images only loosely related to any concrete subject. The 1960s saw photographers like Minor White use infrared film to render landscapes in otherworldly tones, or Harry Callahan make multiple-exposure cityscapes that turned city crowds into calligraphic blurs – visually intriguing patterns rather than documentary scenes. Such works were often discussed in the same context as abstract painting, focusing on composition and visual impact over literal content.
Importantly, the reduction of content in abstract art put emphasis on the viewer’s interpretation and emotional response. A Rothko painting of hazy colored rectangles might make one feel contemplative or moved without knowing why; similarly, an abstract photograph’s interplay of light and shadow could evoke a mood without a depicted subject. This sensory, almost spiritual aspect of abstraction again links back to Expressionist and Symbolist ideas – art as a universal language of emotions – and forward to what modern photographers and artists would continue to seek.
By embracing abstraction, photography proved its versatility as an art form. It could be literal when needed, but it could also be experimental and self-referential, exploring its own materials (light, shadow, grain) as subjects. By the late 20th century, photographers freely mixed documentary and abstract approaches. Some even painted or scratched on their prints, or used early digital techniques, creating hybrids between painting and photography. The rigid boundary between the two media had long dissolved – both were simply tools an artist could choose in order to achieve a des
ired visual expression.
Komorealism: A New Space of Presence
By the 21st century, artists inherited a vast constellation of techniques, materials, and conceptual frameworks. Amid this dense history, Komorealism does not emerge as a reaction or a trend, but as a quiet clearing—a space where perception loosens, and creation begins again. Not with noise, but with silence.
The term finds its root in the Japanese word komorebi—the light that filters through the leaves of trees. It is not merely a visual metaphor, but a way of being: fleeting, diffused, and deeply resonant. Komorealism is not about what we see, but how the world touches us when we let go of looking. It is about light as memory, form as dissolution, time as presence.
Founded by Attila Szántó, Komorealism is born from the convergence of contemporary photographic technology and a deep, inner orientation toward stillness. It carries within it the reverberations of Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Abstract Art—not as references, but as forgotten seeds reawakening. What they once opened through brushstroke or rupture, Komorealism opens through layered silence.
This is not a new visual style. It is a new relation to the image. Through in-camera multiple exposure and in situ composition, the photograph ceases to be a record. It becomes a palimpsest of being—a condensation of light, motion, and breath. The image no longer captures what is seen; it dwells within what is present. It is not mechanical, but contemplative. Not illustrative, but experiential.
What distinguishes Komorealism is its refusal to explain. Its images do not decorate, demonstrate, or declare. Instead, they gather presence—they pause, resonate, and open. The frame is no longer a boundary, but a threshold. The viewer is not a consumer, but a witness to stillness. Technology here is not a means of control, but a medium of reverent attention.
Conclusion: Toward a New Way of Seeing
From the first Impressionists stepping into the light of plein air, to a 21st-century photographer layering the forest into a single breath, the history of art has always been a story of how we come into presence. Each movement has not only expanded form, but transformed the self that sees.
Impressionism revealed light as vibration.
Cubism fractured time into multiplicity.
Surrealism liberated the dream.
Expressionism revealed the soul.
Abstract art removed the frame altogether.
Photography absorbed them all—and now, in Komorealism, it forgets them in order to remember what they pointed toward: not image, but encounter.
Komorealism is not a culmination. It is a soft refusal. It listens, rather than asserts. It attends, rather than captures. Enabled by the silent precision of digital tools, it redirects photography from documentation to reverence. The artist no longer fixes the world in place—but participates in its unfolding.
The resulting image is not a moment, but a multiplicity. Not an object, but a presence. Not an artwork, but an invitation. Its value lies not in its aesthetics, but in the depth of resonance it awakens. The Komorealist image asks nothing, but gives a stillness in which something forgotten might return.
This is why Komorealism is not a style. It is not a movement.
It is a new space for being.
A space where light and shadow are not opposites, but companions.
Where technology is not an extension of the eye, but of the soul.
Where the image is not a message—but a moment of quiet touch.
To encounter such a work is not to interpret, but to pause.
Not to analyze, but to be.
Not to consume—but to be changed.
Komorealism does not offer conclusions.
It offers a threshold.
A place where you might, once again,
stand in a forest of light—
and simply listen.
References (Footnotes)
1. Smithsonian Magazine – “Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube” (April 2012). Describes how John G. Rand’s 1841 invention of the tin paint tube enabled painters to work outdoors and helped spark the Impressionist movement. Includes Renoir’s quote: “Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.”
2. David A. Smith, On History, Culture, and Art blog – “Realist painters and photography” (May 11, 2017). Discusses the impact of early photography on 19th-century painters. Notes that photography’s ability to show things realistically was so successful that “the assumption that paintings could portray reality all but disappeared,” freeing painters to pursue new styles.
3. AWA Tree Blog – “Komorebi: Sunshine filtering through the trees” (Feb 16, 2017). Explains the Japanese term komorebi (木漏れ日) as “the scattered light that filters through when sunlight shines through trees,” and its aesthetic impact. This natural concept inspired the term Komorealism.
4. TheArtStory.org – “Futurism – Movement Overview”. Describes how Futurist artists were influenced by photography. Mentions that motion studies by Muybridge and Marey informed the Futurists’ and others’ attempts to depict movement, leading to experiments like photodynamism (sequential images in one frame). Provides context for how photography’s fragmentation of time paralleled Cubism’s fragmentation of space.
5. TheArtStory.org – “Man Ray Artist Overview”. Contains Man Ray’s famous quote: “I paint what cannot be photographed ... I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint.” Highlights the relationship between painting and photography for Surrealists, and Man Ray’s contributions (rayographs, solarization) to surrealist photography.
(Additional sources on art movements and photography history were consulted to ensure accuracy of dates, artworks, and technical developments, including Wikipedia and art history texts on Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstract Art, and the history of photography. The references above correspond
to specific points and quotations cited in the text.)
