diptych # 110 ~ Art on a wall

pictures on walls ~ Warhol Museum • Pittsburgh, PA / dining room • Harrington Park, NJ • click to embiggenOn his website, Conscientious Photography Magazine, in a review of the book Tranquility, Jörg M. Colberg wrote:

The problem with photography is that regardless of whether you, the photographer, believe that what you point your camera at to make a picture is actually in it, large parts of your audience will do just that. Photography’s descriptiveness is its strength and its curse. People will see a photograph of a person as that person, or as a photograph of that person, even if what you’re interested in is something a lot more universal than that. In much the same fashion, a photograph of some place becomes that place, resulting in some people actually watching over whether certain places, let’s say Appalachia, is depicted in the proper way.

If photography wants to be a true art form it will have to engage in a world that at least acknowledges the fact that the visual description of whatever was in front of a camera lens .... does not in fact describe the actual topic. In other words, you can engage with Tranquility as photography, or as art that happens to use photography ... That said, if we accept that photography is – or maybe more realistically: can be – art, then we have to treat it as art – and not as merely photography. To somewhat loosely paraphrase David Campany, photography describes what is (or rather what was the moment the picture was taken), art (-photography) alludes to what could be or maybe should be.

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud (or so it is claimed), Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar which implies that at other times a cigar is something more than just a cigar. In essence, and with much fewer words, that just about sums up what Colberg was writing about. And, for the most part, I would agree with his idea that "if we accept that photography is ... art, then we have to treat it as art – and not as merely photography.

I also believe that Colberg is writing about an idea I have written about many times on this blog - that the best pictures are those which are both illustrative (depicting a reality-based referent) and illuminative (implying something - Colberg's topic - beyond that which the pictured referent describes). IMO, when a picture evinces both qualities, what you end up with is art that happens to use photography. That is to write, Fine Art as opposed to Decorative Art.

However, that written, when it comes to grasping the implied in a picture, the door to interpretation / understanding is wide open inasmuch as many, if not most, viewers of a picture take it at face value with little thought given to what else it might be about. And therein lies the dilemma.

Consider this from Ansel Adams:

We don't make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.

Adams, of course, was referring to the making of a picture. However, I would apply the same notion to viewing a picture - when viewing a photograph, we bring to the act of viewing all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.

Or, as has it been suggested (on this blog and elsewhere), the making and the viewing of a picture is a two-way street - traveled on by the maker and the viewer. Unfortunately, no matter how broad and rich / involved the boulevard that the maker may have traveled down, if a viewer has only traveled down a narrow, vapid and one-way alley, there is most likely apt to be a considerable disparity between the grasped and the intended / implied meaning (topic) to be found in a picture ...

.... a cigar will forever be just a cigar and a picture will be just a picture.

Comments

[Eric Fredine]

I think you'd enjoy this conversation between John Gossage and the late Lewis Baltz as they inevitably discuss these themes: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/03/interview-conversation-between-lewiz.html