[lit-ideas] Re: Wide-angled impressions after a storm
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 10:52:50 +0900
In regard to the question "can photographic efforts be 'art'," I have
noticed that many photographers (in the photographic forums I frequent) seem
to consider their efforts more artistic if they are in black and white.
The late 19th and early 20th century debates over whether and how
photography could be art might be an interesting topic to explore here. As I
understand it, and this is only the roughest of sketches, it involves a
complex interaction between developments in photography and developments in
art. In brief, the usual story is that the invention of photography
threatened painters traditional monopoly on mimesis, the accurate
reproduction of nature. The painters responded with various avant-garde
movements that shifted their "art" from accurate reproduction to expression
of subjective vision and feeling. Art photographers initial response was to
produce photographs that emulated contemporary trends in painting, as these
evolved from staged tableaux to landscapes and portraits, that early on
tended to be heavily touched-up at the printing stage. These Pictorialist
approaches provoked a Modernist response that demanded "straight," i.e., not
touched-up, black and white (no pigments allowed) approach in which
gradation and contrast in light and rhythm in form were held up as
epitomizing artistic vision.
A whole lot in these debates concerns questions of interest to the
philosophers among us: Is the ideal an eye so clear that it faithfully
reproduces the world around us, an eye with a vision of its own that it
projects onto reality, or a complex mixture of reproduction, modification
and manipulation whose mechanisms are still not very well understood but
increasingly the subject of, in particular, neurological research.
All sorts of cool stuff to look at, too.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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