IT TOOK A WHILE for photography in the nineteenth century to be called “art,” putting it in head-to-head competition with painting. But when that moment came, the art world changed. This theme of painting v. photography has a great deal of philosophic reflection and perennial turf wars. I recall one “call for artists” for a 2-D show titled, “American Landscape.” The judge, in this particular case, chose nearly all landscape photographs, despite the great number of paintings submitted.
Surprisingly, when the French Impressionists first challenged the academic painting tradition in Europe in 1874, their rebel exhibit was held in a photography studio. At that time, photos were not seen as alternatives to paintings. Impressionists were mesmerized by the new technology. Many of them—like Pissarro—were pro-technology and pro-science, as in the new scientific study of the effect of colors.
I think of a novel written about Pissarro (Depths of Glory, 1985) in which he said that photography can never replace a real “picture,” that is, a painting. They are two different creatures. In this fictional account, Pissarro says to Vincent Van Gogh: “The reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, would not be a picture at all, it would be no more than a photograph.” A mere photograph!
Still, photos began to spell the doom of much painted portraiture. Later, mass reproduction of artworks changed the very status of “masterpieces.” Today, photos continue to undermine the sale of original art.
The sardonic painter might think something like, “photography claims to reveal truth. But consider how it’s done. A great photographer sets up a camera, lets its motor take hundreds of snapshot, and then goes through them to find the best one.”
Doubtless, the technology has always had a magic of its own. Folk people worried that a photo had captured their spirit. A painting, with a human mediator interpreting, probably wouldn’t have raised a similar alarm (although images have always been given mystical content—think of voodoo dolls).
Art is a commercial commodity, and soon enough the market for photography eclipsed that for fine art original paintings. Today, painters have the wonderful option of producing “gleise” prints, a kind of lithograph reproduction done on quality, matt paper, thus keeping the feel of a painting (perhaps like a gouache painting). Famously, Thomas Kinkade became the first “billion dollar painter” in history when his machine printed paintings—on which his factory workers added a few strokes of real paint—was the first painting studio to enter the Fortune 500 on Wall Street.
When this transition from paint to print began to happen, art critics began to critique. Best known is the ideological interpretation of the German art critic Walter Benjamin, a Marxist thinker. He wrote on how the “fetish” or “magic” or “aura” of a single artwork is changed by being mass produced. On the good side, this reproduction puts a masterpiece in Everyman’s grasp; on the bad, it leads to the further commodification of art, a Marxist no-no. Both these good and the bad outcomes are fairly obvious to common sense. But Benjamin plumbed all the subtle implications. (See his essay, “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936).
Whatever the case, photography has also been a boon and brickbat for painting. For the first, artists can obtain outstanding photo reference material for painting in the studio. As to the latter, the use of such photo reference violates the sacred code of “painting from life.” Both sides concede that a photo reference ruins the true effect of light. For example, shadows lose their variation. Film and digital imagery invariably tint blue, or yellow, or whatever.
Technology to the rescue, however. Art books today have the highest reproduction quality ever known. I grew up seeing great European art from a distance, in art history texts. I think in particular of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Finally, in my old age, I visited the Louvre in Paris, where it hangs, gigantic, taking an entire wall. To be honest, the photo is much better than the now-faded original artwork.
Tactile painting and photographic reproduction have now settled into a truce, or at least both sides have claimed a turf, found enough room to move, and enough public attention to ply their artistic claims. Digital devices now provide buttons to make photos look like sketches, or even brush-stroked paintings, so why bother to do the real thing? Only the painter knows that, and the photographer still has only a clue.