An ambitious, magnificent collaborative project employs exciting ways like getting a human model to represent the stamen or resemble stone to recreate paintings as studio photographs.
"Can we pull this off?" Quizzed eyebrows. Silence. Three of them look at each other intently. They are seated at
lunch, talking about how to recreate paintings as studio photographs from the Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida.
One of them suggests an idea to recreate Red Poppy by Georgia O'Keefe (1927) and design a red dress to resemble the flower and use a human model to represent the stamen.
They mark four more paintings that could be recreated from the Museum's catalogue.
For Torso of Aphrodite, Roman (2nd century) a human model has to depict stone. For Reading by Berthe Morisot (1888) a model has to be painted as part of the canvas. They also have to decide on ways to recreate Woman in White by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (19th century) and Julie Lebrun as Flora by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1799).
These quixotically optimistic ideas led to "a sound understanding of what we were going to create", recalls John Pendygraft, photojournalist, St Petersburg Times, Tampa Bay, Florida.
It was last December that Pendygraft lunched at an Italian restaurant with freelance costume designer Rogerio Martins and art director Suzette Moyer of Bay, St Petersburg Times magazine.
He had approached Moyer about an interest to recreate scenes from works of Metamorphoses by Ovid, the Roman poet. At the time, Moyer and Mary Jane Park, editor of Bay, were juggling a few concepts to mark the opening of the Museum's new wing.
The collaboration "just happened", says Pendygraft. "The project to recreate paintings from the Museum was Bay magazine's approach to support art without being literal. Though the Museum didn't commission us, we worked closely with their public relations," he says.
It was professional pride that precluded Pendygraft from using Adobe Photoshop. He created the images with a digital camera; each photograph had less than 100 frames.
"The result you see is what we saw in the studio," says Pendygraft, whose passion is documentary-style photojournalism. One of his recent series titled Paycheck to Paycheck, a business photo column, won first place in US-based National Headliner Awards for writing, Green Eyeshade Awards for photography and an award at the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) for Pictures of the Year.
The final recreated images feature an item of jewellery based on Bay magazine's theme 'desire'. (Bay magazine is distributed six times a year and is geared towards lifestyle, fashion and homes.)
Photos bring paintings to life
The idea of employing live models to recreate paintings dates back to the 19th century. The art form is referred to as tableau vivant (plural tableaux) in French and means living picture.
In the traditional sense, models and artists in maquillage and thematic costume pose in theatrically-lit settings.
Tableaux vivant-style productions are primarily part of theatre and continue to be popular. The Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, California, recreates famous works of art on stage and attracts thousands every year. In the Victorian era, this mimetic art was part of a parlour game where guests were required to guess the title of the recreated painting.
In comparison, tableau vivant in photography isn't as popular.
In his career of more than 15 years (12 with St Petersburg Times) and having worked in Colombia, Africa, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and Pakistan, Pendygraft
has seen very few photographers dapple in the genre.
Tableau vivant in photography is often called staged photography or imitation art. Yet for Pendygraft it is about paying his devoirs to art.
He says, "If life imitates art and art imitates life then art can imitate art too!"
On a recent trip to Spain, he and his wife visited the exhibition Forgetting Velázquez Las Meninas at the Picasso Museum of Barcelona that showcased works by Picasso and other artists like Manet, Courbet, Poussin, Delacroix, El Greco and Cranach that interpreted one painting – Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas.
"We think Velázquez would have loved the fact he has inspired so many people. I don't think art inspiring art is a rip-off. The key is to be honest about what you are doing and respect the original work," says Pendygraft.
Thus the studio photographs had to be true to the original paintings. They had to delineate the mood, context and intricacy. By his own admittance, "The concept was easy and fun. It was the preparation that took a while."
Six weeks to completion
Moyer worked with modelling agencies to cast models to match the artwork and talked to jewellers to loan diamond pieces. Pendygraft worked with the art department of St Petersburg Times to create the canvases and set design, including lighting.
On some nights he worked late to set the lighting so he could shoot at 7am. "There were one-day shoots, staggered across six weeks. They were quick since the real work of structuring and conceptual direction was done beforehand," he says.
Each member had a specific task.
"It was divide [the tasks] and conquer. Our stylist Suzin Moon is one of those people you rely on without question to safely strike a few items off your worry list," he says.
But like any project they were stymied by a few problems. Pendygraft had production issues. Moyer faced last-minute back out by jewellers and Martins ran out of chiffon an hour before a shoot. "Looking back, it was fun. But the day things were falling apart, it was so stressful," he says.
On the sets
To help the models pose correctly, 2,4mx3m prints of the original painting were placed on the studio walls.
The first image created was Woman in White. It was also the one they fussed over the most. They used a muslin cloth background, gelled to match the painting. "In the original, the hand position is awkward therefore uncomfortable for a human to imitate," says Pendygraft.
(For Reading and Julie Lebrun as Flora, Pendygraft photographed the original paintings using really large files and had backdrops made from the painting's background and lit them and the subject to match.)
When Pendygraft worked with Reading, he had to decide how much paint to add and at what point to
stop. In the first few frames, the wig was unpainted.
"We painted the model, photographing as we went along. The idea was to find the balance where the subject looked real and blended into the background. When we started it just looked like a woman in a chair in front of a painted background. When we finished she looked too much like a painting. The frames that worked were about three-fourths through the shoot," he says.
For Torso of Aphrodite, the team tried body stockings and net fabric to imitate stone. "It didn't look like a statue. So we used duotene (a black fabric that soaks up light) behind her and over her arms and neck.
Then the three spot grid lights brought out the curves.
The most elaborate set was for Flora, Pendygraft's favourite. Martins designed the dress, wreath, basket and scarf. They decided to do a literal version of Flora where a posse of about six people was asked to hold a wire to ensure the scarf was placed exactly and direct the fan.
Poppy is Moyer's favourite and the most creative. Pendygraft says everything was well thought through and ready to go. "We started at 7am and by 10am had what we wanted. We shot from the top."
Pleased with the delightful denouement of their work, Pendygraft recalls the time they were sitting around the table saying, "we're going to make a dress look like a flower and a human a stamen". He says, "We were excited about it, but everybody was thinking, 'Can we pull that off'?"
The studio photograph of Red Poppy went on the cover of Bay magazine's February issue this year.
