Week before last, we noticed that most of the trees in the West End were flowering. This goes on for about a month in spring, trees popping into bloom, petals falling everywhere, forming pink and white drifts on the sidewalks and in the gutters, then the last petals drop, leaves bud, and that's that for another year. So we went out wandering in the neighbourhood, and incidently down to Coal Harbour and then back through Lost Lagoon, and I took many pictures of pretty trees.
Got home, pulled them up on the monitor, and was amazed at how boring they were. Nola said it had to do with setting the aperature and stuff, things I'd not yet felt up to messing with. Anyway, the trees had gone all flat.
So I started playing with them in an image editor, as well as a couple others I had. Coincidently, right at this same time was going on, well, sort of a discussion, but more like a harmonic, where several people were all separately writing about the nature of photography and art and if and when retouching a photo, whether in the darkroom or digitally, was a legitimate technique or a crutch. Some that caught my eye at Marja-Leena Rathje:
In the last, she quotes Dave Watson: There seems to be suspicion about new techniques, especially if they appear to be easier than the old methods, like the artist had found a way to cheat on creativity and bypass all the hard work by virtue of a machine's help.
This seems to be the heart of the matter, the concern that the artist has gone for the easy cheesy instead of doing the work to make something lasting, and the newer a technique or instrument is, the greater the concern.
In the comments to this Burningbird followup, Charles touches on this: Early photography was met with derision from "fine artists" like painters and printmakers as "mere reproduction" rather than art. He goes on to say that many photographers, stung by this assessment, concentrated on achieving results through, and only through, their cameras, eschewing any kind of post-shutter manipulation.
Okay, so, that was then and this is now. As it is now, the idea of a painter turning up her nose at a photographer for using a camera rather than pigment, is, um, well… I don't think I'm likely to run into that any time soon, outside of a coffeeshop full of earnest undergraduates, and they'd be as likely to sneer at the painter for using pigments and canvas instead of a camera, or, say, loads of plaster and chocolate flavour sprinkles.
But aside from that, the use of the word pure to denote unaltered photographs kinda works a nerve or two. "Pure" in this sense is not a simple delineation of technique, but a value judgement as well. It's like using the word mere in front of the word reproduction. Its use implies that there exists a right way to approach taking pictures, with all the creative decisions made prior to pressing the shutter release, and that what follows, darkroom time and/or image editing, is technical production.
(Before cameras, realistic reproduction wasn’t considered "mere". Rather the opposite. Funny old world.)
What I'm still not clear on is, when making a distinction between "pure" photography and, I dunno, manipulated images? where should one draw the line? Is it still a "pure" photo if the photographer developed it straight but used a filter on the lens? How pure is the photo if the entire scene was staged? If what is done in the darkroom matters, so far as retaining "purity", how is that affected when the darkroom is actually a computer-driven autoprocessor down at the corner drugstore?
I started thinking about this off and on several days ago. I started writing late last night. It strikes me, after re-reading the Guardian's articles featuring David Hockney, which sparked at least some of the other writing on the matter, that there are few creative media in which the question of purity even arises these days, at least where I’m likely to hear about it. That it comes up now, with photography, may be partly because taking pictures, and manipulating them afterwards, is something a great many people can do now, and jolly few of them think of themselves as artists, or their snaps as art. Hockney spoke of his own sister as one:
"My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she's a retired district nurse, she's just gone mad with the digital camera and computer—move anything about. She doesn't worry about whether it's authentic; she's just making pictures."
He seems to see this as a bad thing, as a sign of the End Times or something. What I think is that his sister has probably been taking snapshots all her life, probably using a full-auto compact, and taken the film to the drugstore for developing and what she got back from them was what she got, period. And now it isn't, and she's found a new interest in exploring what it is, exactly, that makes up an image. Maybe they all look like hell just now. And maybe in a few years she'll have a gallery opening of her own.
6 Comments
Great discussion! Speaking as an artist, I feel that when a photograph is “manipulated” in the darkroom or with PhotoShop or other editing software on your computer, the hand of the photographer/artist is at work, and then it is more truly that person’s work (maybe even art) than if nothing is touched. Think of portrait painting in the days before photography – the artist would usually “beautify” or improve what he sees, and we know that studio portrait photographs are touched up, so is that an “untruth” or “impure”? Follow your instincts, I say!!
When I wrote of derision by artists towards photographers, I mostly meant that artists were emphasizing the “hand of the artist” as the element that made something “fine” art. Kodak said “you push the button, we do the rest.” This attitude persists today towards photography, most people speak of “taking pictures” but photographers often say they “make pictures,” as in your Hockney quote. To the photographic “purists” (or “straight photographers” as I prefer to call them) the key element is “seeing pictures.” Even if one’s photographic choice is only choosing where to point the camera and when to trip the shutter, and all other parts of the process are mechanical, an artist still has the ultimate control, if he can “see” pictures. This philosophy ranges from Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” to Ansel Adams “previsualization,” as well as many others.
Oh.. I forgot to add.. Don’t kid yourself, “fine” artists, especially painters, still sneer at photographers. I got kicked out of Painting 101 back in the late 1970s just for taking polaroids of my unfinished canvases so I could study them between painting sessions. My pedantic painting professors considered it an unforgivable sin to apply photography to painting in any way. Hockney’s work on optics in painting is an attempt to heal the rift, but the war between painters and photographers is still quite intense in some circles.
I remember when I was temping as a grunt in a small natural history museum, the exhibit director’s (for whom I worked) hobby was to paint minute, highly detailed, renderings of birds. He talked to me one afternoon of why he ground his own pigments, of the necessity he felt to be in absolute control of the colour and how he could not get that if he used commercial pigments. I remember wondering at the time if he made his own brushes, too, but I don’t think so. I think he wanted to, though.
The 70′s were a time of extremes in art; of drawing lines in the sand and of trumpeting the existence of the political within all facets of life. I am not surprised your profs at that time took such a blinkered view of using photos as an aid to study. The only reason I can think of for such an attitude would be if the student was a beginning painter and the teacher was wanting to emphasize the importance of studying the work itself, rather than someone else’s (ie, the camera, and the skill level of the photographer) idea of the work. As an ideal when learning technique, this approach has merit, but as a practical matter, less so.
But more to the subject, straight/pure photography appears to hold that the picture as seen is that which is burned onto the film during the time when the shutter is open, and everything done afterward is meant only to bring that out on the prints. So if the artist/photographer then decides to crop the print, that’s an indication that she didn’t do something she should have prior to pressing the shutter release.
It seems to me that there is little about photography more arbitrary than the size and dimensions of the exposure. Aren’t these based on the kind of camera one uses? If one uses a 35mm camera, aren’t the results, uncropped, going to be 4×6 or something? No matter what you’re looking at, or think important? If so, why do uncropped photos get so much street cred? If I matted all my drawings and paintings to a 4×6 ratio, that wouldn’t make them better pictures. They’d be easier to stack, though. I just don’t see how delegating the darkroom to the basement makes one’s pictures better.
I don’t know much about the travails of the fine art world; I studied set design way back when, and have since drawn, painted or snapped pics to suit myself. But an ability to see pictures, however one chose to render them afterward, has always been paramount. My teachers encouraged us all to take photos of our work as it progressed, and took lots of photos of their own. This may a defining difference between designers and artists.
There’s also a question of the difference between the immediate rendering of a picture through photography (one click and there you are) versus the over-time rendering through painting. Painters are constantly altering and improving the picture as they go along; photographers have no choice but to do that altering and improving after the fact, since the rendering was instantaneous. I don’t actually see a difference between the two — in both cases, the artists want to create a picture that satisfies their artistic view, and they make use of the techniques available in their own medium.
the artists want to create a picture that satisfies their artistic view, and they make use of the techniques available in their own medium
In defense of ‘purity’,* there’s a lot to be said for an approach that uses the least amount of “stuff”. The less stuff one brings in, the more room (in theory, anyway) there is for mind, heart and skill.
If you have endless supplies of film (and a 256MB card is durn near endless at lower resolutions) and a technically brilliant camera that can be trusted to focus on something no matter what looney thing you’ve done to the settings, then most of the time you’ll have passably nice results. Every once in a while, you’ll have a stunning picture, and you’ll have done no more for it than you did for the ones you discarded, and with no more understanding of either your tools or your purpose.
It seems to me, though, that post-shutter manipulation (whether digitally or manually) leads to more understanding rather than less.
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* next up: defending chastity