-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: What photography does, was Pulitzers From: "Brian van den Broek" <bvande@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, April 17, 2004 10:54 pm To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students" <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
John Mason said unto the world upon 17/04/2004 23:58:
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.
<SNIP>
--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
Guys,
I believe Bosch (or any other artist) is a more reliable witnesses to his
times than photographs could be. Photographs provide mostly data about
the material world. The other arts provide a picture of the minds that were living in it. We could know relatively little about 15th C. Holland
or anywhere else or time looking at photographs. At any given time in
human history artists have depicted the world with great naturalism but
only when it was thought important to the message. Photography has been
given way too much credibility. We need to be reminded about conflating
medium and message
Darn, just when we get a really interesting topic going my "Garden of Weedy Delights" demands attention!
AZ
Build a Lookaround! The Lookaround Book, 2nd ed. NOW SHIPPING http://www.panoramacamera.us
Hi AZ and all,
AZ, you are certainly right that Bosch's paintings tell us (if only we know how to listen) more about what was going on in his head than would a photograph of Bosch. But:
1) that is distinct from saying his style was in any way a version of "realism" (note the shudder-quotes -- I intend to leave myself plenty of wiggle room ;-) )
2) The claim that photographs "provide mostly data about the material world" overlooks, I think, that the same sort of inquiry as to what was going on in the head of someone who painted this or that can be done for photographs as well. The dangerous seduction of photography (even pre-photoshop) is to overstate the sense in which is an objective record. Even forgetting the choices of f-stop, focal length, etc. etc., just in virtue of what they choose to point the camera at, photographers photograph themselves, too. (To hit an easy target, surely I am not the only one discomforted by Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) photographic interests. :-) ) Perhaps photographs *by* Bosch (where'd I put my time machine?!?) would tell us rather a lot about him, too.
3) I'm not sure that naturalism was part of visual art only when it was thought important to the message. At least with some aspects of naturalism, it was at least partly a question of knowledge (or lack of same) of technique as much as desire that enabled or prevented naturalism. I am thinking of European painting's discovery of perspective here. You certainly can see what looks for all the world like painters striving to depict perspective naturalistically, but not quite knowing how. It seems that the medievals simply had no idea how to do it. I admit though that these questions are hard -- it isn't so clear to me that their not knowing is entirely distinct from their not caring.
Best to all,
Brian vdB
