I apologize but I need to digress.  Last Wednesday I posted a self portrait taken in the window of the 1912 Cafe.  When I was sitting and contemplating taking that photograph the light reminded me of a favorite painting; but my brain and Google failed me.  I have finally remembered that it is the amazing painting by American Realist Painter Scott Prior entitled “Nanny and Rose” (1983)  in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  Nanny is the beautiful woman, Rose the dog.  Prior says of his work: “Nanny and Rose and the subsequent paintings… are very personal. To me they are like large snapshot photos, and as a collection they have become a memory album of my life. It has been my belief that the painted intimacies of ordinary life must be recorded and celebrated.”  This is really the appeal simple, compelling beauty in everyday things and events. That was what I was thinking about when I took that selfie.

Whenever I marvel at Prior’s work my brain hurts.  I wonder about technique, how painstaking it must be to create a painting so like a photograph.  I have come to realize that I may have it backwards.  First, there were paintings not the other way around. Maybe the first were cave paintings.  And paintings ran, and still run, the gamut from pure abstraction to absolute realism.  In some sense photography emerged as an attempt to paint in an absolutely realistic way with light.  But oil and tempera were its predecessors.

Photography is a combination of chemistry and physics.  It emerged with the limits and virtues of its science.  It was Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature.”  Early photographers sought to emulate painters.  They pushed the new medium to sharp realism.

You look at a painting like “Nanny and Rose” and you realize that nobody could have posed long enough for that to be painted in such stunning and precise detail.  In some sense it had to be posed and constructed, even perhaps aided by a camera.  But the same is true of the photograph.  Many are spontaneous and candid. Others extensively set up and posed.  But as in all art there is inevitably a significant component of artist construction.  For the photograph this occurs first at conception and then the image is born again in the dark or light room.