1. Paintings and Photographs
Greg Currie
October 2016

2. 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,

3. 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!

4. 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.

5. The hallucinating artist

6. The subject and the sitter

7. 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

8. 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!

9. 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.

10. The next phase: Neoclassicism and Romanticism
Ingres
Delacroix

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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?

14. 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!

15. 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

16. 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?

17. THANK YOU