Challenges to the Ubiquity of Perspective Since the Photograph: An Essay on Alternatives and Alterations

Abstract

The perspective image, first formularized in the fourteenth century Italian Renaissance, was chemically automated by the photograph in the mid-nineteenth century. While at its zenith, the Dutch realists had achieved astonishingly mimetic reproduction of the visual world in their paintings, the photograph threatened to automate and commodify their work. The unerring catch-all monotony of the scenes depicted in early photography also questioned the value artists invested in what they included in their paintings. As such, many artists rejected the photograph, and perspective realisms more generally. From the mid-nineteen century to the late twentieth century, many challenges to the verisimilitudinal nature of the photograph and perspective image were mounted. These ranged from impressionist patches of light and dark, patches of colour, compression of space to the surface of the painting, layering of multiple temporal images in a single frame, to the complete voiding of spatial references altogether. Their campaigns waged across the twentieth century, computer graphics (CG) has since reestablished the perspective image as a dominant media. However, CGs too has its alternatives and alterations which generate new effects, both extending and challenging its presumed norms. This paper is a brief essay about the cycle that has been the dominance, decline and reemergence of the perspective image since the Renaissance.