Shared vision: masterpieces on show alongside photographs they inspired

Shared vision: masterpieces on show alongside photographs they inspired "Photography as a narrative tool is a comparative newcomer," he wrote in 2007. We are simply drawing upon a centuries-old skill of reading pictures that our predecessors initially learnt from the excellent painters. "In the first few decades of the new technology of photography there was real interest from painters too, so there was an entire nexus between the two art forms. In a series of "exceptional interventions", contemporary photographs by Richard Billingham, Craigie Horsfield and Richard Learoyd will be displayed in the gallery's permanent collection, alongside great 19th-century paintings by Constable, Degas and Ingres. It was unconscious mimicry but showed just how long the rules about images have been laid down. It is more of a polemic. We also wanted to look at the use contemporary photographic artists have made of this notion. "It is a pictorial language that audiences have learnt to read over the centuries," Wiggins wrote in 2007. For Wiggins, it was Raphael, more than any other artist, who drew up the template for captured images, shaping the gestures and patterns for later narrative painters, including Caravaggio, Goya and Manet. He added: "We can see that the earliest photographers were looking closely at paintings and modifying these compositional ideas while they worked. "We had been thinking about doing this type of photographic exhibition, which puts forward an argument, for some time," said Christopher Riopelle, the gallery's expert in post-1800 paintings and co-curator of the show with Hope Kingsley from the Wilson Centre of Photography. " To prove his theory, Wiggins compared the composition of a news shot of Lady Thatcher sharing the frame with a gorilla during a visit to London Zoo to old masters that show the Virgin Mary adored by surrounding saints. The exhibition, which will travel to Spain in early 2013, will incorporate just under 90 photographs displayed alongside chosen paintings from the gallery's collection. Shared vision: masterpieces on show alongside photographs they inspired Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 15/05/2012