Jul 18, 2018 8:00 AM

Photograph or Painting? These Landscapes Are Both

French artist Guillaume Hebert creates hybrid images that blur the differences between media.

This image may contain Shipping Container and Gate — Guillaume Hebert
Guillaume Hebert created this image by combining his photograph of an ordinary city street with Cole Thomas's painting *The Arcadian* (1834).

Image may contain Team Sport Team Sports Sport Basketball and Basketball Court — Guillaume Hebert
Guillaume Hebert created this image by combining his photograph of an ordinary city street with Cole Thomas's painting *The Arcadian* (1834).

As a student at the School of Fine Arts in Caen, France, Guillaume Hebert studied painting. He later transitioned into photography, but rather than leave his first love behind he developed a novel way to combine it with his new passion.

In his 2017 series Rocks of Ludao, Hebert seamlessly combined photographs of the Taiwanese shoreline with classical landscape paintings he found on Google Images, creating hybrid photograph-paintings convincing enough to fool the casual viewer. The experiment proved so successful that Hebert reprised it in another series, Updated Landscape, in which he juxtaposed photographs of banal urban scenery with the lush Baroque and Romantic landscapes of artists like Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Eugène Delacroix, and William Turner.

Hebert took the photographs for the series in China, Indonesia, and Taiwan, then spent days poring over high-resolution digital reproductions of paintings, looking for ones that would match his photographs in lighting and perspective. Since all of the artists were long dead and their paintings the property of public museums, Hebert didn’t encounter any copyright issues.

After pairing up photograph and painting, Hebert used Photoshop to surgically combine them into a single image, carefully adjusting color and tone to ensure a perfectly blended final scene. This post-production process can take anywhere from eight to 20 hours. "I don't want it to look like a collage," Hebert says. "I want people, when they look at my picture, to see just one image and not two."

It takes many viewers a few moments to understand the illusion. "People have to stop in front of the picture to look carefully and figure out what has happened, discover the painting," Herbert says. Out of respect for the painters whose work he's sampling, Hebert includes information about the original work in his captions so that curious viewers can seek it out for themselves.

"For me, photography is just a continuity of painting, so when I mix the two media I'm emphasizing their continuity," Hebert says. "I don’t really care about the traditional way we use photography. I don’t put limits on my pictures."