“And the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting goes to… a photographer!” Yep, Cindy Sherman has won the Imperial Japanese gong for mastery of greasepaint for that interminable string of selfies in fancy dress we all wearied of circa 1980. If not for greasepaint, it would have to be for psychological insight – and despite her readiness to raid the dressing-up box and make her ageing self look ridiculous in the name of art, Rembrandt she ain’t.
Sherman is the least qualified non-painter to win the award so far, but she’s not the first. Bill Viola won it in 2011 and Japan’s own Hiroshi Sugimoto in 2009 – both non-painters who piggyback on the history of painting. But no hard feelings; it’s all water under the interdisciplinary bridge. As Frances Morris established at the opening of Tate Modern’s Switch House: “We don’t any longer have a hierarchy where painting is at the top.”
As if to settle the point beyond dispute, last year the Tate awarded its annual IK Prize for creative talent in the digital industry to a team from Treviso for an experimental project using artificial intelligence to compare news photographs with works in the collection. Titled Re][cognition – potty punctuation is de rigeur in the digi-world – it set out to answer the question: “Can a machine make us look afresh at great art through the lens of today’s world?”
The way it worked was this. Every day, a crop of current news photos shot by Reuters’ photographers were shown to the machine, which then scanned the collection at the rate of thousands of images a minute and spat out matches based on object, facial, compositional and context recognition.
Now this is an area I’ve long been interested in, so I went along to Tate Britain to have a look. For years I’ve been collecting news photographs that echo the compositions of old master paintings. Some subjects are naturally fertile territory – almost every refugee mother and baby is a Madonna and Child, every grieving mother a Mater Dolorosa – but the parallels go further. I was particularly pleased to find a photo of Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead at a press conference following the self-started house fire that killed their six children in 2014 doing a perfect impersonation of Adam and Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden.
Are these coincidences? I don’t think the borrowings are deliberate; it’s more that the educated eye of the photographer, making a snap decision in the heat of the moment, matches the scene with a meaningful image in the memory, and frames it. Photographers, being blessed with human brains – and emotional intelligence – can make split-second calculations machines can’t. (If they could, CCTV would produce prize-winning photographs of people breaking open cash points or mugging old ladies.)
Of course the matches in Recognition were nonsensical. The machine was reliable enough (though not 100%) at identifying ‘a man wearing a white shirt’ or ‘a woman with dark hair’, but despite its programmers’ claims that it could determine “the age, gender and emotional state of each subject it finds”, it was defeated by the most basic of facial expressions. It saw smiles on the faces of Matteo Renzi at a press conference and Francis Bacon in a portrait by Lucian link
Laura Gascoigne: Photography, Wrong Sort Of – January 2017
“And the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting goes to… a photographer!” Yep, Cindy Sherman has won the Imperial Japanese gong for mastery of greasepaint for that interminable string of selfies in fancy dress we all wearied of circa 1980. If not for greasepaint, it would have to be for psychological insight – and despite her readiness to raid the dressing-up box and make her ageing self look ridiculous in the name of art, Rembrandt she ain’t.
Sherman is the least qualified non-painter to win the award so far, but she’s not the first. Bill Viola won it in 2011 and Japan’s own Hiroshi Sugimoto in 2009 – both non-painters who piggyback on the history of painting. But no hard feelings; it’s all water under the interdisciplinary bridge. As Frances Morris established at the opening of Tate Modern’s Switch House: “We don’t any longer have a hierarchy where painting is at the top.”
As if to settle the point beyond dispute, last year the Tate awarded its annual IK Prize for creative talent in the digital industry to a team from Treviso for an experimental project using artificial intelligence to compare news photographs with works in the collection. Titled Re][cognition – potty punctuation is de rigeur in the digi-world – it set out to answer the question: “Can a machine make us look afresh at great art through the lens of today’s world?”
The way it worked was this. Every day, a crop of current news photos shot by Reuters’ photographers were shown to the machine, which then scanned the collection at the rate of thousands of images a minute and spat out matches based on object, facial, compositional and context recognition.
Now this is an area I’ve long been interested in, so I went along to Tate Britain to have a look. For years I’ve been collecting news photographs that echo the compositions of old master paintings. Some subjects are naturally fertile territory – almost every refugee mother and baby is a Madonna and Child, every grieving mother a Mater Dolorosa – but the parallels go further. I was particularly pleased to find a photo of Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead at a press conference following the self-started house fire that killed their six children in 2014 doing a perfect impersonation of Adam and Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden.
Are these coincidences? I don’t think the borrowings are deliberate; it’s more that the educated eye of the photographer, making a snap decision in the heat of the moment, matches the scene with a meaningful image in the memory, and frames it. Photographers, being blessed with human brains – and emotional intelligence – can make split-second calculations machines can’t. (If they could, CCTV would produce prize-winning photographs of people breaking open cash points or mugging old ladies.)
Of course the matches in Recognition were nonsensical. The machine was reliable enough (though not 100%) at identifying ‘a man wearing a white shirt’ or ‘a woman with dark hair’, but despite its programmers’ claims that it could determine “the age, gender and emotional state of each subject it finds”, it was defeated by the most basic of facial expressions. It saw smiles on the faces of Matteo Renzi at a press conference and Francis Bacon in a portrait by Lucian link