On Photography
Photography's Brutal Realism
Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes
are growing used to considering the results of a material science as
though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course
of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of
feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of
creation? -Charles Baudelaire The Salon of 1859
Early photography was especially known for its brutal realism. Talbot called his invention in 1837: "The Pencil of Nature." But nature for many in the era of dainty idealism was like a medieval nun tansversing the swiss landscape: a spell for fainting, or worse.
The early photographer-artists were realists practicing their craft in the aesthetic shadow of the contemporary Courbet, and photographic interpretation followed swift suit. The pictorialists were impressionists with plates, the straight photographers modernists with film, and war era documentary propagandists defending personal freedom. In each a quest to photographically interpret and understand the real world in all its many and glorious facets. Each view was consciously practiced as art, to be understood as art, under the reigning domination of changing aesthetic interpretation and fashion.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the language of realist painting with the same obsessive character. Each trying to find his Muse looked to the flesh and blood woman before him-flesh and blood the stuff of real light. Some of Hill's photographs for the Free Church of Scotland are conscious studies in feminine beauty. What is surprising is not a few were quick to seize and champion this fact even as others exploited it. Surprisingly despite its realism, something never before seen, in its glaring unsparing eye a new, more real beauty as discovered. And in this perception seeing itself changed. Photos realism was seen to augment perceptions of actual and universal beauty.
In addition to portraiture the early photographer-artists turned the unjaundiced eye of the camera and burgeoning technique to the beauty of woman and glamour photography was born. By the close of the decade following its invention figurative photography was prominently practiced and exhibited by a large number of artists not surprisingly following the convention of Western painting but developing its own unique character and quality.
A study of this period is fascinating for the art student. From the daguerreotypists the rich albumen's to Demachy the master of gum, a definitive record of photography's artistic capacities, and a legacy of true masterpieces followed as inspiring as beautiful.
As with anything the good and bad, pure and obscene, and everything in between appeared on early plates. More importantly however, by the turn of the century: "Nudity was all the rage" and its real photo postcards, publications, and camera clubs, and exhibited space, not to mention wartime's taste for "provocative" nudity as seen in the calendars and endless pinups, photography in these publications photography accepted and interpreted as art. Exhibited nudity was soon ubiquitous, and so rich a tradition allied the nature of photographic imagery itself.
By the time of the photo secessionists all the way through the camera clubs and endless numbers of photo-art publications, nudity and art in photography would be synonymous, so that as late as 1969 one writer lamenting its waning under modern sensibilities calls photographic nudity a euphemism for "art photography."
Despite the unsettled world in which we now place the art of photography, as indeed any realist art itself, and additionally the many modern threats that make aesthetic engagement impossible, and most importantly a professedly realist culture that precludes a realist art, this much is certain; that as much as art is appreciated, the art of photography, despite all obstacles will flourish.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
