Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting

A little-recognized aspect of the work of Winslow Homer—one of America’s most iconic artists—is the relationship between his painting and photography, and the role of the relatively new medium on his approach to image making. [....]

Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting will examine the roles photography played in Homer’s evolving artistic practice. As a young artist for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War, Homer utilized photographs as source material for some of his drawings. [....] For his Civil War paintings, such as Sharpshooter (oil on canvas, 1863), graphic war photography helped him to think more deeply about what he’d seen, and about how to combine personal sight and engagement with a wide range of sources for composition development.

After the Civil War, Homer traveled to locations in the eastern United States that were becoming popular as tourist destinations[....]. He was introduced to a new type of photography—imagery to promote tourism. These images captured a moment in time and effects like glare, blur and shadow that the eye might not perceive. [....]

During the last three decades of his life, he often created compositions of the same subject in different mediums including printmaking and photography, a cross-fertilization that came from his long interest in probing the way things look and the challenge of portraying them realistically. [....] 

Throughout his career, Homer was conscious of the public persona he projected through photographs of himself. The exhibition also considers a series of portrait photographs by Bautain Studio, Napoleon Saroney, Peter Juley and others which served to illustrate the artist’s increasingly growing reputation.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether or not you go, Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting offers a revelatory exploration of Winslow Homer’s engagement with photography, shedding new light on his celebrated paintings and works on paper.

Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.

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