In this research I explore the relationship between painting and photography, focusing on the
natures of both mediums and how they are questioned when creating a painting from a
photographic source. I have selected works by contemporary painters Peter Doig and Luc
Tuymans for analysis, examining the ways in which their images force us to question the
assumed ‘truth value’ attached to photographic images. I also explore the potential for both
painting and photography as mediums to portray the internal or the imagined, as well as
painting’s link to the concepts of artifice and construction throughout history, especially when
compared to photography.
In this research I examine the early development of photography, as well as the
development of ‘photographic’ or perspectival language in painting, both separate from and
in relation to advancements in photographic technologies in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. I then look at 20th Century painters and photographers and their
engagement with and criticism of photography through their work, while examining the
continuing debate around the associations linked with both mediums. This leads into the
examination of selected works by Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans, exploring how their use of a
photographic source to create their images raises questions of representation and if these
representations can be classified as truthful or imagined, transparency or construction,
human or mechanical. Finally in the discussion of my own work I deal with painting’s link to
the internal or imagined, photography’s indexical link to reality, and how through the
combination of these mediums these links are challenged. This research also looks at the
nature of my subject matter; the city of Johannesburg, as a site of contradiction, existing in a
space that is at once real and somehow otherworldly or imagined
