Oh, in the spirit of art versus crap humanistic great humble opinion debate, another set of issues that plagues me.
Set of observations:
(warning: beer-enriched thoughts follow)
There seems to a difference between the common perception of the ‘truth values’ of painting and photography. Although any photographer knows that a photo is a highly selected, artificial view which can be manipulated in any number of ways or faked or ‘photoshopped’, etc., there is perhaps some implicit received knowledge that a photo is MECHANICALLY made and dependent on light acting on something REAL IN THE WORLD AT A PARTICULAR moment in time. The scene depicted is understood, at least to some degree, to have existed; Unlike a painting, which (in our post-1830 luxury) is generally understood as more conventional, ‘cooked-up’, and invented and filtered through an artistic consciousness and hand (Impressionism and Dutch 17th c being the main exceptional painting genres that are most commonly trusted as ‘truthfully’ representing optical reality). We’ve all heard the art survey commonplace that photography killed ‘realistic’ painting and thus served as the handmaiden for more abstract or non-objective art.
To what degree can we see photography as necessarily (due to the technology involved? Something else?) more ‘true’ than painting? Is early black and white photography, for example, still more ‘realistic’ than Dutch trompe l’oeil painting? If so, is this truth effect a result of something visually true-to-life-- a mimetic realtionship to the world-- or a result of a conscious or subconscious understanding of the mechanical origins of the photo as an effect of light off an existing situation?
I may have had too much wine to intelligently expound on this topic, but here goes… BTW, my persective is as a well-trainded amatuer photographer and one who in not entirely ignorant of art history.
One argument that I’ve heard is that early photography was so primitive as to show such a distorted world view that it inspired painters to more abstract paintings. Having seem quite a few early photographs, I can see how this would be the case.
My own feeling is that artists had “been there, done that”, just about everything that could have been said via realistic paintings had been said. Soon you get to the point that a still life with fruit, wine and cheese is expected to carry loads of symbolic meaning. See a discussion of Vanitas paintings, a Dutch movement that spoke volumes about the brevity of life in the arangements of these everyday objects. Unfortunately, the movement is so heavily symbloic or “encoded”, that most people, myself included cannot understand it.
David Hockney: It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?
Well, I had a long reply typed out and lost it from the time-out. So I’ll just throw out the some thoughts without attempting to make them cohesive:[ul][li]Photographs render shapes better than most people can draw them, and I think shapes are more important than colors when people evaluate the “realness” of something (in other words, a yellow box is better represented by a pencil sketch of its shape than a swatch of yellow on paper).[/li][li]Once the shutter button has been clicked, photography is a process where images are captured without human intervention. I don’t entirely agree with this point, though I’d guess that non-photoghers think of film and the final print as qualitatively equivalent.[/li][li]Even the earliest art – cave paintings – depend on a person to remember, interpret, and reproduce the scenes depicted.[/li][li]Trompe l’oeil illusions are easily broken by moving to another position. Having said that, anamorphic photographs of Georges Rousse are pretty amazing (examples 1, 2, and 3).[/li][li]Have we come full circle? Don’t photo-realistic paintings try to imitate photographs rather than reality?[/li][/ul]That’s all I can remember. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I don’t even have beer to blame for it.
There’s some commonplace they repeat in anthropology survey, that people in societies without photography, when faced with a photo, will have trouble working out what the thing is and it takes some time to learn how to read it as a representation. . . does anyone have any kind of citation on this, or is this one of those things like the number of Inuit words for snow that anthro survey teachers pull out of their butts (no offense, intro anthro survey teachers. . .)?
I wonder to what extent our understanding of the accuracy of photos has trained us that that is what reality looks like? (like the Hockey quote). We are taught really early that one-point linear perspective is ‘correct’, with the (circular?) argument that that is how a photo looks.