January 22, 2025 - Working from photos comes up every semester I teach. The students are always concerned that it’s cheating. Ridiculous. If you know how to train yourself to draw, then photography is not an issue. It can help you see. Here’s why… The camera does not capture the reality we experience. A photograph is a representation of reality, not a copy of it. A painting doesn’t copy reality either. It doesn’t come close. It is a representation, an impression, a suggestion, a feeling, an abstraction, and all the other descriptions of a painting, but it doesn’t capture reality like reality itself. No matter how good the quality of the representation is, it’s still flat. The camera reduces three dimensional objects to a two dimensional plane. A painting does as well. Both represent an illusion of reality. The…