For over 200 years artists have used a variety of optical devices to produce designs for paintings and cameras, as we know them, have been used extensively by graphic and fine artists as design tools since they were first produced. The camera is clearly a very convenient way of capturing images for paintings in busy situations like streets and bars, yet the taint of using photographs as reference lingers.
We think that the camera cannot lie, but in reality how a camera ‘sees’is totally different from the way we humans see, and copying a photograph with all the skill in the world can only produce a painting that looks just like a photograph! The key to using photos as reference is to allow them as a visual prompt, to take you back to the time and place when they were taken, so you recall that actual experience.
Every photograph records, in a fraction of a second, the scene in front of the camera in complete detail. Our eyes cannot do that. We have to scan the area around us, taking in small areas at a time and assembling them mentally to create a general impression of where we are and what might be of interest. David Hockney experimented with this ‘assembled snap-shot’effect in the Polaroid photograph collages he made in the 1980s.