Paintings and Photographs Greg Currie October 2016

Pictures made by nature “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.” William Fox Talbot, 1846-8

The idea that there is something special about photographs Photography is not a new way of making paintings It produces something quite different Different in what way? Talbot: Paintings are made by artists, photographs are made by nature If that is right, what comes of the idea that photography is an art? The aesthetics of phottography would be part of the aesthetics of nature!

Some differences between painting/drawing and photography There can be paintings of things that don’t exist, things that are not present to the artist.

The hallucinating artist

The subject and the sitter

Some claims about photography Scruton: the interest of a photograph is exclusively the interest of what it is a photograph of Walton: Photographs are transparent: we see through them to their subjects I am not proposing to accept either view But I think there is something in both The idea that photographs lack what we might call surface interest, while surface interest is what is really valuable when we consider painting as an art

Clarifying this idea Of course in a sense both paintings and photographs are surfaces The question is whether they are surfaces of the same kind No!

Brushwork The Renaissance Titian: Tarquin and Lucretia The seventeenth century struggled with the problem of brushwork. The view from earlier times: a painter should be “a master of his medium and display that mastery by subduing it”, rendering invisible the physical act of painting, at least at ordinary viewing distances. Brushwork had some interest as the record of creativity, but “as form, it was considered to be unfinished or chaotic, acceptable if concealed in a sketchbook or muted by distance”. Philip Sohm, Pittoresco, p.27.

The next phase: Neoclassicism and Romanticism Ingres Delacroix

From a modern perspective Ingres’ pictures look “photographic” while Delacroix’s look “painterly” Delacroix’s pictures provide a “twofold experience” (Wollheim) We are aware of what is represented At the same time we are aware of the painter’s marks on the surface The interest of pictures like these is largely to do with our delight in seeing how the marks are arranged so as to provide for that awareness of what is represented.

AWARENESS OF THE MARKS, CONTACT WITH THE MAKER… The affective dimension of visible marks Traces of activity Children’s doodles Footprints Something from which behaviour is reconstructible Not by inference but by feeling

A new set of categories? Should we put Ingres pictures together with photographs as “photograph like” pictures? And have as a separate class of “painterly pictures?

No! Even though Ingres-pictures and Delacroix-pictures are very different they all have a kind of surface interest that all photographs lack The art of making a painting is the art of constructing a surface The art of making a photograph is the art of composing a view of certain objects in the environment so that, as a result a surface is created. With painting, painters make the surface With photographs, the surface gets made!

The interest of surface With a painting one may admire the way the marks are visible and in some tension with what is represented (Titian, Delacroix) And also admire the way the marks have been effaced so as to bring them into harmony with what is represented (Ingres, “Photorealism”) Neither is a kind of interest that photographs have The interest of a photograph is in the way the artist has made the objects photographed look, by means of choice of lens, film, lighting, point of view, etc

An objection The Big Combo (1955) What about cases where we have co-incidence yet certain patches on the image are seen to form, and seem intended to form, abstract patterns, as often occurs with expressionist film-making? Are these cases where we are encouraged to attend to the marks on the surface as marks on the surface rather than as transparent to the scene?

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