This should have perhaps been called 'The role of photography in painting".

Edgar Degas got hold of a copy of a book by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge had invented a way of taking still photos in very quick succession. He had a reputation as a photographer and had been asked to prove that all four legs of a horse are off the ground at the same time. Muybridge set up a system using twenty four cameras with a faster than normal shutter speed in order to get his results. 

The results were a huge number of paintings of  horses by Degas. This had not really been possible before Muybridge's work.

​We know that Freud claimed to never use photographs. We also know that many so called artists project an image onto a canvas and trace it. For me, this is not what painting is about.

Then there were the photorealists.

I would question the authority of any photograph in modern times. Digital photography allows total manipulation of the image or images. I think that things have gone full circle and that digital photography is far closer to painting than we may want to admit. In the photograph below, the trees in the middle distance could have as easily been painted by John Cotman as they could have been photographed on a mobile phone.

I would suggest that we are in good company if we use photographs but maybe not if we overuse them.

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