Introduction: Looking at Art through the Lens of Science and Technology

The introduction sets the historical and methodological bases that underpins this book’s central question: What becomes of painterly conventional genres – portraiture, history painting, landscape, and ornamental abstraction – when they are mediated, filtered and manipulated at the meeting point of science and technology? This question builds on an existing field of inquiry about technology in its relationship to image production (Bernhard Siegert’s ‘cultural techniques’; Bildwissenschaft) and to art (Walter Benjamin). In the light of Richter’s interest in the epistemic value of photography, this introduction offers firstly to contextualise his photo-painting technique with regards to the 19th century notion of photographic “objectivity” (Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison) and its fraught relation to realism. Secondly, this introduction contextualises Richter’s inaugural interest in photography at the junction of two historically specific factors, firstly, the rising cultural impact of mechanical forms of reproduction in the postwar period in Europe and North America, and, secondly, the concomitant crisis of figurative painting.