Exercise 1.4: What is a photographer?

Exercise 1.4: What is a photographer?

De Zayas sees art and photography as separate ways of viewing the world.  He claims art to be the scene as seen and interpreted by the artist.  The artist interprets the scene, and it is through his eyes that the image, the form, must be viewed.  This leads to an emotional response, not to the scene, but to the painters interpretation of it.  He sees photography as breaking with this tradition and allowing a new way of viewing form.

The claim is made that when art turned away from the religious towards the secular it lost its way and dealt only with form.  This new art instead of concentrating on ideas dealt only with form and excluded mystery.  

Art has changed through history as form is interpreted and reinterpreted by people through the ages.  The more imaginative interpretations of form that are often represented in native or naive art became standardised into shapes and forms that we can all recognise.  In recent times modernist painters have turned their backs on this standardised way of viewing form and returned to earlier ways of interpreting it.  They seek inspiration in museums and the collections of native art.  This he sees as art feeding on art and producing nothing new.  He sees Picasso only as an “analyst”, a destroyer not an innovator. 

The claim is made that people in less developed parts of the world have a serious problem with the difference between reality and imagination.  When asked to draw real objects they will seek inspiration from their imagination and draw a fantastic image rather than an accurate one.  

Modern man, on the other hand, now records what is in front of him without recourse to imagination or embellishment.  The claim is made that despite these changes, and the suppression of imagination, art is still alive.

The work of the modernists is dismissed as merely a return the art of the savage.

Art is described as a mix of what we see and what we think we see: how we see things and how we remember them, allowing false beliefs to taint the truth.  This has led to a false truth about form and leads to painters representing form in the way they feel rather than what they see.

Imagination clouds the memory and leads to a false recollection of the past,  mixing ideas and images and creating new ones.  One must have a clear head to see true form.

Only one process can truly record form accurately and that is through the camera.  The trained photographer with a clear eye for detail is in a position to not only record true form but understand it and comprehend its beauty.

Photography cuts away the mystery and influence of imagination and allows the form to be displayed without the interference of interpretation.  The photograph allows the viewer to see the scene as it really was at the time of taking, and not as recorded according to the preferences and prejudices of the painter.  The viewer of the image can thus make up his own mind about what is in front of him.

De Zayas postulates that man’s thought processes change and move on but he predicts neither direction nor end.  

He believes in art’s influence on man, leading him into realms of fantasy and imagination and back again to rationality.  In photography man found the perfect vehicle for representing truth: the photograph.

He sees photography as a way of recording true form and cannot see any future in it as an expression of imagination.

According to De Zayas the true photographer should not allow anything to cloud the truth of the image he is about to record.  Photography is about truth and reality.  Rather than have the mind see a scene through the artist’s eyes photography captures the image that made the artist want to pick up his brush: to interpret the scene for him self.  A photograph is an image of what was in front of the camera at the taking of the image and a painting is recording of what the painter felt about what was in front when he put paint to paper.

As man becomes more objective in his quest for knowledge he has had to stand further back from that which he wishes to understand.  To stand behind a camera and view form is to be objective.  To get close to something and know how it feels before painting it is subjective.  

Reference is made to the mainly studio based Steichen and the more experimental Stieglitz.

Steichen in his studio work combines both art and truth bringing about an artistic reality. Stieglitz in his focus on object rather that subject gets closer to the truth that most modern artist try to achieve with their analytic approach.

Which is more important?  Is it better to understand and comprehend the meaning of form or bend the understanding of form to make it comprehensible?

Response.

My first response must be that this piece was written in very different political times; a time when other races could be described openly in derogatory and demeaning terms.  I will not comment on De Zayas’s description of other cultures or races other than to say he would find it difficult to find a sympathetic audience today.

What we see as art from other cultures is often not produced as art.

Ask an Australian aboriginal to draw a map and he will produce, if he wishes to, an article that we can only see as art.  To him it is a map full of dream time legends and the location of water.  With his map he would never be lost or want for water or food, we can only hang it on the wall and admire it. 

Early Western paintings and were produced to glorify God and to act as instruction for the uneducated masses.  These representations were full of symbolism and mystery depicting the myths and stories of the Bible.  It was only later that these instructional works came to be seen as art.  

De Zayas is very dismissive of the Modernists and seems to predict their early demise.  What he seems to miss was that by tapping into the this vein of early art the Modernists were able to view form in a new way; to add extra dimensions to the way we view it.  Seeing an object from more than one direction at a time, seeing something for its purpose rather than its shape, or viewing it through time.  This re-viewing of form has opened up abstract channels that are difficult for the photographer to follow.  This position could not have been arrived at by the linear progression of art before Modernism.  It took a leap back to the primitive to move art on.

De Zayas’s view of the painter versus the photographer was a valid one in its day, but is it today?  True, the artist still sees the scene, interprets it and commits that interpretation to the canvas.  Can the photographer only record faithfully the form in front of him?  

The modern photographer has choices.  He can take a straight shot of the scene and produce that image as the final act.  He can, as he takes the shot, change the scene’s colours, add tones and filters, he can distort the image or produce a panorama.  Back at the laptop, with the help of a number of programs, manipulate the image in even more ways.  He can do what the artist could always do; add that missing tree, remove the intrusive person or building, straighten out parallels or add a stormy sky.  A quick look in any fashion magazine will reveal a number of faces and bodies that are impossibly perfect or impossibly grotesque.  Photoshop has given the modern photographer the choices and opportunities for manipulation that were once the preserve of the painter.  

What he cannot do is photograph what is not there; what is only in his head.  The photographer requires an object in front of his lens while the painter requires only the image in his imagination.  

Steichen worked on making the form look perfect within a bland scene while in the work of Stieglitz we see exciting scenes full of imperfect forms.  

Do I like studio work with planned shoots, ideal lighting and lots of post production retouching, or do I like working in the street and shooting from the hip?  

Where’s the door?  I’m going out.