Photographs made sincerely from paintings are mostly adolescent. There is something surreal that happens when the stoic vision of a painted scene is made with a camera. Immediately, the fantasy of the painting (a prolonged pose, an impossible perspective) is revealed by the clarity of the camera’s depiction of facts. Here’s a painting I’ve been noticing for years, it hangs at the Met.
At breakfast one morning around Christmas, my baby nephew wore a red onesie and a bib that seemed comically linked to this royal boy Goya was commissioned to paint. I searched my parents’ house for props that would mimic the objects in Goya’s staging and cast my sister’s dog in place of the cat. My nephew is unable to stand for any period of time so my dad (wearing black) had to hold him up from behind. My sister (not pictured) holds a softbox behind me in this hallway to the bedrooms at my childhood house.
Painting is full of funny anachronisms that are unjustified and ornate. In taking this photo I realized some of them: really young children do not stand on their own for any amount of time; children do not take directions which is perhaps why Goya’s boy stands as stiffly as the doll which was probably used as stand-in (the body even appears to be leaning back on a stand); people’s faces constantly are alive and shifting——the face that the painter chooses is plucked from idealism more than reality; the requirement to please the client results in farcical scenes full of romanticism and without basis.