<SNIP>Me, talking about what all sorts of visual artists can do:
wonderful nudes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes (lives?), street scenes, charming vistas,
cats,
babies
Howard questioning:
to my mind exceptionally well and I believe we do
need
photography to do them!
Oh, I don't deny that photography can do these things well. But photography has no monopoly on them, and other visual arts do them just as well.
Photography does have a near monopoly on visual journalism and visual documentation.
--John
===== J. Mason Charlottesville, Virginia Cool snaps: http://wtju.radio.virginia.edu/mason/
John,
I find your point of view on these issues interesting, and pushing in the opposite direction of my own.
It seems to me that photography's strength in "realistic" representation, as you quite rightly say, makes it (with video) much better for journalism than other visual art forms. ("Sculpture-journalism" anyone?) But there is a current in your comments that reads like "sure, photography can do those things that the other visual art forms have been doing, but that seems to misuse its strengths". (I do understand that you are not saying portraiture, etc. is somehow illegitimate or wrong in photography.)
I think that photography's strengths in "realistic" depiction in some sense liberates the other visual arts from the business of visual realism. The story is obviously much more complicated than any one explanatory factor, but it also seems no accident that painting and sculpture were much more dominated and driven by the aims of realism before the advent of photography. Sure, one can point to Bosch or almost all medieval painting as examples of pre-photographic painting with less regard for realism than the traditions in painting that emerged from eh Renaissance. But it does seem that the story from Impressionism through the various forms of 20th c. abstraction in painting could more easily get started when the painter was no longer the best, or only, person in town to go see for a realistic depiction of a person or a place.
So, for me, the story runs the opposite way than you seem to see it. I'd be more inclined to ask a painter what was the point of painting realistic scenics than I would a photographer the point of taking scenic photographs. Photography liberated painting from the tyranny of the real. (Of course, none of this is to say that abstraction cannot, or ought not, be done in photography. That is where my own interests lie, so I certainly wouldn't want to say that!)
Anyway, just some thoughts at 2am on a Saturday.
Best to all,
Brian vdB
