I am a photographer and not at all a painter in terms of my skills and probably in terms of my outlook. However we photographers have been boxed in and have chosen to box ourselves in the often dolled up realistic world.

In the late 19th century painters were nudged out of their comfort of delivering realistic paintings to rich clients as the photography proved to be faster and cheaper. They embarked on incredible journey of discovery which in my mind started in the late 19th century (somewhere around Turner's time?) and spent itself (by my reckoning) with pop art. The mainstream photography as represented by "the giants" pretty much remained realistic (with the exception of a few pictorialists early on). Now photographers face a challenge of billions of photos snapped by the generation of clever smartphones. If we want to preserve some degree of uniqueness of our work, we too now have to explore outside of representational depiction of our surroundings. I do welcome the shove.

We have a lot to learn from painters, that have gone on this road more than a century ago and from their revolutions of aesthetics, thought, manifestos and artwork that represent our cultural heritage. In turn I think that we photographers have through our work provided ideas and tools that could be handy for painters.

The digital world now can unite painters and photographers into a single medium of zeros and ones, giving us an opportunity to work together and learn from each other.

I am looking for painters and digital artists that would be interested in learning and collaborating with photographers. Please contact me if any of you is interested.

Pavel

you may check a more organised presentation of my work at pavelmuller.com