But is it Art?

During my recent winter of photographic discontent, I roamed around the internet looking at pictures of naked women. Which is pretty much all I saw, pictures. There wasn’t much art being committed. Which led me to the question of what exactly do I mean when I say “art” and how does it apply to photography of landscapes and nudes.

George Orwell laid out the first, and maybe only, test. He said, “For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival.”

Orwell didn’t prescribe a survival time frame, but a century seems about right to me. If people are still looking at a photograph 100 years after it was made, we can safely call it art, even if it is something we personally don’t like.

For most photography then, it is too early to tell what is art and what isn’t. Photography was invented about 1822 and the first surviving print is from 1826. Here it is.

And although photography’s inventors were artists, the technology to produce fine art prints took time to develop. There is a still life by Daguerre dated 1837 and Henry Fox Talbot made some photographs in the 1840’s that qualify, but it isn’t until the 1860’s that we began to see photographs that manifestly qualify as art under the test of survival. (Although we should note here the photographs that the Frenchman Nadar made of Sarah Bernhardt, especially this one from 1859.

There you have the beginning of modern glamour photography. Note the romantic pose, the wistful expression, the lighting and the drapery.

And, of course, documentary photography can be art and many photographs of the Civil War are, but they are beyond the scope of this modest blog which limits itself to landscapes and nudes.)

Although she didn’t do either landscapes or nudes we must pause to note Julia Margaret Cameron who may be the first true artist who worked in the photographic medium. She spent the last eleven years, from 1868 to 1879 of her life making photographic portraits which are undoubtedly art. Here are a couple of examples. The first is of a 16 year old girl photographed in 1864.

This one is a photograph Cameron made in 1867 of her niece, Julia Jackson, who was the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Jackson was Cameron’s favorite photographic subject.

The first landscape artist to use photography was Timothy O’Sullivan. (1841-1882) About 160 years have passed since his photograph of Canyon de Chelly was made and no one can mistake it for anything other than art. It has survived. No wonder. Look at it. Note the composition. The tones. No modern photograph of the scene has ever come close to its aesthetic perfection.

He made many other photographs which are art. We’ll say more about him in a later post but we’ll leave you today with one more, taken in Vermillion Canyon in 1870.

In our next post in this series we’ll make some educated guesses about the work of Stiechen, Stieglitz, Weston, Adams, Bernhardt, Cunningham and a few others from the early 20th Century and how it fares under Orwell’s test.

Top 10 List

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.  Here is a list of 10 things we are thankful for here at this blog.  These are in addition to the most obvious and most important: family, friends, good health, shelter, pets etc.

10.  Women unwilling to take off their clothes for my camera.

9.    Hahnemühle Paper

8.    Adobe

7.    Ansel Adams’ Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.

6.    Silver Halides

5.    MOMA

4.    My Cameras – Hasselblad for film; Nikon for digital.

3.     Readers of this blog

2.     Women willing to take off their clothes for my camera.

1.     A land of clear light

Picasso and Shamanism

The third volume of John Richardson’s biography of Picasso is out. 900 or so pages covering the years 1917 through 1932. Here is the New York Times review. Having not finished the second volume yet, I did not rush out and buy volume 3. But I did pick it up and rummage around in it a bit over the weekend. I learned that Picasso was intrigued by shamanism. And the Marquis de Sade. But more about those later. Reading around in it for a few minutes indicates that it is a good read, notwithstanding all those words. And, as in the earlier volumes, lots of pictures which should make Jon Stewart of The Daily Show happy. [1]

____________________
[1] Some months ago he interviewed John Kerry about the environmental book he and his wife have written. Stewart said some nice things about the book, then looked Kerry in the eye and deadpanned, “No pictures though.”

The Limits of Landscape Art

There is a new and fairly silly article about “landscape” in the current edition of Orion Magazine. You can read it here. It is by retired art critic Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including: As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2006) and many columns for Orion.

Her “landscape” article is proof that just because you are published, doesn’t mean you are always right.

As I understand her, she finds traditional landscape painting and photography lacking because it does not incorporate enough of reality. She also doesn’t like it because it portrays the earth as feminine and; therefore, passive. Finally she doesn’t like the fact that it “de-emphasizes” the energies which pulse through the landscape and the universe.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Of course landscapes leave out stuff. One of the first and most important compositional decisions an artist makes is what to leave out; what to ignore. That is just like survival; to live we must decide what to ignore. Even if it were possible to depict all of reality in a photograph or on a canvas, no artist would want to. Art is about discrimination. Whatever an artist’s vision is; to convey it to the rest of us compels omission.

Moreover, even though she may like the requirement, “traditional” landscapes do reduce a multi-dimensional reality – probably many more than the three Ms. Solnit recognizes – into two. Photographers must learn to see in at least three dimensions but reduce to two. Another way of counting – and viewing landscapes – is that they reduce four dimensions to three: A good landscape includes time. The eye is drawn into the photograph and then through it, thus incorporating at least one concept of time. But the fundamental point is that the artwork requires imagination from both the artist and the viewer. The limits Ms. Solnit finds in landscapes may well be the limits of her imagination, not the artistic imagination that created the work.

Next she faults landscapes for coming out of a tradition of seeing land, “. . . as feminine and the feminine as passive—as something you act upon rather than an actor.” No doubt many artists may have thought that about land as feminine. The earth is our mother in most traditions, after all. But it is much less certain that landscapes all come from a tradition of viewing the feminine as passive. Inanna, Lilith, Hera, Artemis, Durga and uncounted other women from mythology were anything but passive. I doubt that Ms. Solnit herself is passive. Gender does not determine activity; that is done by genetics and culture.

Comparing landscapes to real estate for sale, she says, “It is easier to dump nuclear waste, for example, into a place you imagine as inert than one you understand to be constantly moving, changing, and connecting to everywhere else.” That too seems wrong. If Ansel Adams had made a photograph of the moon rising over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, I doubt the nation would be contemplating storing our nuclear waste there. No one is suggesting we should store it in Yosemite, thanks in part to Adam’s landscapes.

Finally, she decries landscape art’s inability to portray the energies pulsing through the place. It is true that we humans have a very limited ability to detect energy. We have only five senses which we tap into most of the time. And even those are limited. Most of the reflected light illuminating those landscapes is invisible to our eyes; most of the sound, inaudible to our poor ears; unsmelled by pathetic noses; untasted and mostly untouched. But does that mean I can’t feel the energy pulsing through a Turner landscape or a Picasso representation of a landscape?

What Ms. Solnit worries about isn’t the art form, it is the viewers. But don’t take my word for it. Here is Thoreau on the point: “The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see.”

_________________________

The photo was made by Laura Gilpin. Passive? I don’t think so.

Still Waiting

Will that train never get here?

Slow Trains

When you are waiting for one, all trains are slow trains. Might as well read a good book while you wait.

Terrorist Art Critic

History’s first, and probably only, terrorist who was also an art critic was Felix Fénéon. It was he who discovered and promoted the art of Seurat, an example of which I post here. The woman is not nude but she is certainly beautiful and mysterious and makes you want to see the rest of her. Is that a veil or is it a mask?

Fénéon really was a terrorist. He was once caught with bomb detonators on his person in the streets of Paris, although he was acquitted on those charges. The jury accepted his defense that his father had simply found them on the street. Juries don’t always get it right, although mostly they do. The Fénéon and O.J. Simpson verdicts were aberrations.

Anyway, Fénéon was a perceptive art critic. At the end of one of his essays about Seurat he wrote words that photographers would do well to remember:

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning.

Buttocks?

My reader recently pointed out that I’ve yet to post one of my own photographs on this blog. (Except for the header.) She knows that I am resisting the blogger’s fatal flaw: Narcissism, but she thinks I may be over-reacting.

So, without further ado. . . .

Snapshots and Art

Snapshots as Art

In addition to an Edward Hopper show and the J.M.W. Turner show, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has a show of anonymous snapshots taken in the United States from 1888 to 1978. Sadly, the National Gallery still maintains one of the most boring websites you’ll attend this year and they hardly ever post more but a few of the works of art on show. The Gallery should do better. It is the National Gallery after all. It would be nice for those of us who live in the hinterlands to see a few more samples.

Typically, for their web page, I could find exactly one of the snapshots which I took the liberty of posting. But you can read about the show here. It is up from October 7 through December 31, 2007.

Fortunately the Washington Post does a better job and it has a small gallery of some of the snapshots here. It also has an excellent critical review of the show by Paul Richard which you can and should read here. If you lack the time to read the article at least take a look at the WP gallery. Following Richard’s notes, look in the photographs for the blurred motorcycle, the gun, the unexplained puff of smoke, the Mom hiding behind the chair and the red cup.

Now, just for a moment, I am turning the blog over to Mr. Richard who makes several interesting points in his review:

Art implies an artist. Great art implies a great one.

So what are we to make of anonymous photos? Do they fail the “art” test because we do not know who the artist was? Or was the photographer even an artist?

Photography was once dismissed as overly mechanical, as not quite real art, but those days have long passed. Just pick up any standard history of photography and riffle through its pictures. The aesthetic of the snapshot — its suddenness, its artlessness — is part of what you’ll see. It’s there in Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Gary Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange. It’s key to street photography.

Yes, but does street photography become art only if we know who the artist was and can therefore judge the artist’s intent? What if the photographer was just lucky? Had no idea what he was doing?

But when it comes to gauging snapshots, how does one decide? What makes a snapshot good? What makes a snapshot bad? Selecting good Vermeers is not much of a problem. It’s a lot harder with photographs that are anonymous and common. By 1977, Americans were snapping nearly 9 billion pictures a year. And this exhibition surveys not just one year, but 90.

These are good questions, especially for an art form for which the mechanical tools are available to anyone. Give me paint, brushes and canvas and I’ll produce something that is highly unlikely to be art. Give me a camera and I at least have a chance at art. I suppose that you could put a set of paints, brushes and a canvas before a monkey and it would paint something but it would not be art. Give the monkey a camera and it will probably learn to work the thing. And what if a beautiful photograph accidentally results. Is it art?

Ruth Bernhard Photos in Art Show

Faithful readers — there is at least one, I think — will know that I am a great admirer of the work of Ruth Bernhard. Here is my earlier post about her. I am always casting about, looking for a reason to post another of her photos. I found an excuse just today when I discovered a show of modern photography at the Harn Museum at the University of Florida. According to the museum’s website, they are showing:

215 works by 77 international 20th century Modernist photographers including multiple works by masters such as Ansel Adams, Weegee, Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ruth Bernhard, as well as less familiar innovators Jan Saudek, James Nachtwey and Marion Post-Wolcott.

The show is on now and runs until January 6, 2008. I am certain it will be worth the time to see if you live in the vicinity or will be traveling there.

Good. Now that the excuse is out of the way. . .

That is enough for one day. Stay tuned. I am certain to find more reasons for more of her photographs.