I used to think “painting is obsolete since we have photographs”. I later came to realize that paintings can show things photographs can’t, often much more. E

I used to think “painting is obsolete since we have photographs”. I later came to realize that paintings can show things photographs can’t, often much more. Every time you “say” (express) something you are making choices: emphasizing some things and glossing over others. Something strange happens to you but when you tell me about it you skip the extraneous details and focus on what reinforces your point. Taking a photograph, even if not edited (cropped, lighting changed, etc), and even if spontaneous or lucky, is as much about what is not in the frame as what is. In a good movie, we don’t have to wait while the character goes to the bathroom, or while they drive to the store. We just get the part of the story that matters (this is Chekhov’s gun). All that is true of a painting, but like a story you can make lots of edits, pulling things literally into the frame that are metasyntactic, that a camera would never see. In a way the sharp literalism of a photo is much too limiting, as it tunes your visual system to focus on the image itself more than what might be expressed.