David Hockney wrote an entire book about this subject. He had pretty compelling evidence that Vermeer and other artists used the camera obscura to project images on to their canvases. Thomas Eakins is alleged to have relied heavily on photographs for his works. It’s interesting how people act as if using this tool somehow invalidates what the artists accomplished. If you compare the photos with the paintings in posts 14 and 15 the paintings are not slavish copies of the photos and the paintings are far more compelling. You can’t simply project a photo onto a canvas and come up with something remotely comparable to Rockwell’s and others’ achievements.
The art begins with the conceptual idea. The figures’ positioning, the choice of lighting, everything else.
Neither Magritte nor Rockwell nor many others were merely taking random snapshots on the street and making paintings from them (as the “big name” sports artists ARE doing).