Rethinking photorealism: Vermeer, Randy Dudley, and the optical history of descriptive seeing

Abstract

This study problematizes the structural affinity between seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting and contemporary American Photorealism—two traditions often treated in the art-historical canon as chronologically isolated periods—from a transhistorical genealogical perspective centered on optical mediation and descriptive vision. Rather than claiming a direct historical influence or a one-to-one technical continuity, the study discusses this relationship through the methodological and ontological affinities that emerge in the selection, control, and transfer of visual data onto the pictorial surface through technological mediations such as the camera obscura, the lens, the photographic camera, and projection. The central thesis of the article is that both traditions display a structural kinship insofar as they push narrative and iconographic hierarchies of representation into the background and position objects, surfaces, light, and spatial details within a field of equal visual attention. Drawing on Svetlana Alpers’s theory of the art of describing, Martin Jay’s discussion of scopic regimes, the Hockney–Falco thesis’s emphasis on optical mediation, and Grootenboer’s conceptualization of the pensive image, the study proposes reading realist representation not as a linear narrative of progress, but as a transhistorical regime of description and vision that is reorganized across different periods. The comparative analysis of Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century View of Delft and Randy Dudley’s twentieth-century Lift Bridge demonstrates how urban space is constructed as a field of visual inventory in which narrative action recedes, visual space is optically controlled, and surface detail is elaborated. Consequently, the study proposes that the logic of descriptive vision and optical recording, which became prominent within early modern Dutch empiricism, may be understood as a mode of representation that is transformed and made newly visible under modern conditions in which photographic mediation becomes decisive.