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Over at Gizmodo, Wilson Rothman has a great post up about a new book on the photography and the creative process of Norman Rockwell. Ron Schick edited and compiled the collection.

Gizmodo's Wilson calls Rockwell "the original king of Photoshop," despite the obvious fact that Rockwell reigned on those corny Saturday Evening Post covers long before Adobe (or image editing software of any kind) emerged. Snip:

The book is not about painting. Rockwell's oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell's photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It's almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country's collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.
The Gizmodo post has more amazing side-by-side photos.

Here's an Amazon link for the book: Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.

  • the Other michael

    How retronymical.

  • Anonymous

    Normal Rockwell. lol!

  • Anonymous

    Actually, this raises the opinion I have of Rockwell. He knew what he wanted and did what he had to to achieve the results he wanted. That is what a true artist will do! Morandi used binoculars to paint his landscapes and painted his objects with house paint the colors he liked and wanted in his paintings.

  • eviladrian

    So that’s how they faked the moon landings!

  • BobbyMike

    If you’re in driving distance of the Norman Rockwell museum in Stockbridge, MA ( http://www.nrm.org ) you can view a wonderful exhibit, “Behind The Camera”, that dovetails with this book from Nov. 7th 2009 – May 31st, 2010.

    One of my friends works at Chicago Albumen Works
    ( http://www.albumenworks.com ), which handled all the prints for the exhibit. He gave myfamily and me a tour of their facility in Lee, MA and we were able to view quite a few of the prints in person.

  • Anonymous

    That pic was edited AMAZINGLY!!!

  • timothy

    I think that Gizmodo Wilson is wrong to feel sad to have learned the truth about how the Rockwell images were made. He should feel very happy to have had in illusion shattered. His eyes were opened. Consider it to be something of a Zen moment, like when the master strikes the aspirant with his swatter to bring enlightenment, or “awakens” the student to reality with an unexpected “kwatz!” Consider the truth about the Rockwell images to have given one new eyes and feelings for examining other of the emotionally laden images to which one clings. See how we are constantly manipulated by images, slogans, and our deeper animal selves to serve the needs and desires of the greedy and powerful. Or consider consciously creating images that resonate deeply with the feelings, ideas and associations that you consider important, and offer them to the world.

  • Church

    This is just odd. He used photos of models. Sometimes more than one. Did anyone besides Wilson think he just constructed the entire tableau and painted it?

    I’m reminded of that scene from Airplane.

  • freshacconci

    There’s nothing unusual about this. Artists have used photography since the beginning (of photography) to essentially stage their scenes. Before that, it was the camera obscura. What I don’t understand is why people get upset when hearing about this. I guess the “magic” is ruined. People who can’t draw want to believe it’s all done free-hand, no tricks or tools – because that would be cheating.

  • takeshi

    Rockwell wasn’t the first artist to use this technique. I think calling him “the original King of Photoshop” is a bit absurd.

    Is Alexander Graham Bell the King of Cellular Phones? Is Orson Welles the King of Digital Video? Is the creator of chess the King of Strategic RPGs? I understand why Photoshop is namedropped. Famous artist + anachronistic reference = nifty tagline for book review.

    Rockwell used pictures and models as references. To paint pictures. By hand. He wasn’t retouching photos, or anything approximating it. And if we’re merely talking about using different models to create a unique work of art, we’d probably have to look at cave paintings.

  • Andrea James

    I was always more of a Chest Rockwell fan.

  • dimestore1

    freshacconci is so right. What is the big surprise here. I don’t think there’s been a painter of realism in more than a century that didn’t work this way. From Alphonse Mucha to Chuck Close, this is how it’s frickin’ done!

  • jaytkay

    Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country’s collective consciousness, may never have taken place.

    Umm. Ummm, ummmm…

  • Anonymous

    To other Michael
    What is “retronymical”? dictionary

  • Anonymous

    “It’s almost sad” — I agree. Reminds me of movies, Shakespeare, etc.: “Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country’s collective consciousness, may never have taken place.”

  • benher

    It’s puzzling to me why so many people describe Norman Rockwell’s work as “corny.” Most often singled out are the covers of the SEP.

    I always find it a bit heartbreaking when such a derisive term is on such finely executed work. I assume that when people refer to Rockwell in this way they are addressing the over-idealized myth of the American Family – a criticism I don’t necessarily disagree with… But the way Rockwell imbibes it with life with his oils only later to be referred to as corny…

    Corny is about the farthest word from my mind when I look at “The Problem We All Live With” or some of his other LOOK covers.

    But hey, I’m a sensitive whiney artist, so there you go.

    Obviously, the spirit of Xeni’s post is to praise Rockwell and we’re all entitled to our opinions but I would encourage anyone with only a cursory knowledge of Rockwell’s work to re-visit some of his work and hopefully come away some of the valuable insights this great American master had to offer.

    (Re: photo reference as cheating, wiki-up “camera obscura.” We humans are clever!)

  • Kyle Armbruster

    Yeah, I don’t really think it’s fair to dismiss Rockwell as “corny” either. It’s just the amount of time that has passed since those covers is just the right amount for us to find the values celebrated in them to be quaint and… corny. But the work itself is wonderful and incredibly emotive. And I don’t find that opinion at odds with my love of more “difficult” art, either. He was very gifted and gave us some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

  • Antinous / Moderator

    I’m sure that by the 1490s people were already making fun of the Arnolfini portrait for its homespun use of cryptic iconography.

  • theawesomerobot

    I feel like the Photoshop comparison here is just taking a huge part of artistic history and shitting all over it in an attempt to jam it into something to catch the passing eye of someone surfing the internet. That almost makes me sad, but hey – I guess a gadget blog is a gadget blog, what can you do.

    It’s a nice article, but the headline is completely off-putting to me, sometimes a rose is a rose.

  • skeletoncityrepeater

    This looks shopped
    I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time…

  • Anonymous

    So, he photographed things to use as models for his paintings?
    You mean those things in his paintings didn’t actually occur as he was painting them?

    Mighty fine police work, there, Lou.

  • the Other michael

    a retronym is “A new word or phrase coined for an old object or concept whose original name has become used for something else”.

    So, “retronymical” would be the adjectified (?) form? Or has it also been adverbed? Crap. And to think I was an English major….. There’s a difference between walking, and being able to explain how you walk.

  • nic

    Despite hysteria over photography being ‘the death of painting’, artists (particularly landscape artists) were early adopters of photography. A few minutes to capture a scene could mean months NOT sitting on some foreign mountainside, waiting for the sun to shine.

    Contemporary painters use photography and photoshop extensively too. Mark Ryden scans his sketchbook, then recomposes in photoshop before printing out a template to paint from.

  • Anonymous

    I’m sorry but once again I can only re-iterate the absurdity of his ‘surprise.’ If you go back to 1827 when Niepce created the first permanent photograph he was really searching for a tool to help make drawing easier since he wasn’t able to deal with the Camera Obscura. Albrecht Durer was an infamous user of the Camera Lucida. Arists have been drawing from ‘reference’ since 1807 and have used cameras to create amalgamations for reference in images for at least a century.

    There’s a relatively famous mural by David Octavius Hill ‘The Disruption of 1843′ that used hundreds of photographs to record the faces of the men present without having to have them ever at a single sitting. If anyone was ‘the king of photoshop’ (whatever that even means in this context – almost certainly nothing) then it was Hill and perhaps his partner-in-photography Robert Adamson.