On Photography
Sun Worshippers
A
revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre
was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself:'Since
Photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire
(they really believe that, the mad fools!), then Photography and Art
are the same thing.' From that moment our squalid society rushed,
Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A
madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new
sun-worshippers. Strange abominations took form. By bringing together a
group of male and female clowns, got up like butchers and laundry-maids
at a carnival, and by begging these heroes to be so kind as to hold
their chance grimaces for the time necessary for the performance, the
operator flattered himself that he was reproducing tragic or elegant
scenes from ancient history. -Charles Baudelaire, The
Salon of 1859
The whole argument against artistic photography might be aptly summed in Baudelare's "wonderful," and inflexible axiom that "art dies not copy reality," a discrimination still very much alive today some 150 years later. (Out surviving Baudelaire himself or anyone else!) This judgement of course colors how we see art, but really, in fact, does little to further define it, or enlighten our experience. Perhaps in a world of impressionist brushstrokes, or a French call to arms, or flirt with the idea of Bohemian abandon, such a phrase holds certain appeal, but today a postmodern world seems no longer a viable container such sloppy thinking, and baseless political rhetoric.
One might simply ask; "What other is there?" Of course art copies reality, it can do nothing else, it is its nature. If art were to copy nothing, it would be nothing, hence not art. Baudelaire thought he got rid of the demon he saw in the mechanical threat of photography supplanting his spiritual sense, and cultured darling of painting, but rather got rid of representation, or art.
In a post-modern world the restoration of art will then be a recovery of not just realism, which must define it and justify its existence, but the reality of creativity, an existence indelibly inscribed on the surface of everything extant, nothing excepted, one defining imagination itself. For if imagination is not real, what then is it, and where might our art derive? But if real, we might see the whole world in the racy color and creative association of the unfettered imagination, inspiring all our painting and photography alike, no, all our writing, experience, all life itself.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
