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multiple truths of photography
Cubism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Naturalism, Realism.
By Pinaki
Begin with a dead tree
Like all good, deep thoughts, it started on the side of the mountain. There I was, a couple of thousand metres high, off the curve of a dead-end dirt track. The most magnificent, ancient tree stood nestled in the arc of the road, its wood like a petrified mix of elephant hair and old human skin, its branches convoluted in a last sick dance under an unhelpful sky.
So I was all alone in the middle of nowhere, looking at a near-dead tree, with a Nikon and its 12-24mm over one shoulder, and a Canon and a 50mm over the other. The wide angle made the old tree jump out of lethargy, like a pachyderm with a flame under its posterior. The fixed 50 was classic, and it’s shallow depth of focus saved its careful selections from being boring. Using each produced photographs so different they could have been of different subjects, rather than of the same dead bark. And a city slicker back on a couch in Muscat could have any impression of a tree on a hillside he would never find, any impression at all that I wanted to create.
It was perhaps such power that made Pablo Picasso say, “I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.�Although known most as a painter, he had started experimenting with a camera, and some even say that this process
eventually lead to the most important evolutions in his work. For the lens that he got from a friend was cracked, and it was through its shattered glass that he began to see the world through new eyes. We would later call these dislocated planes that played games with the way we recognised things Cubism, but what we would forget is that it was photography, not painting, that ultimately shattered reality, like Picasso’s cracked lens and the prism that he used over it.
Shattering your vision
Whoever said that photographs never lie was being a tad naive. Photography, as Picasso discovered, is all about multiple realities, even if that truth is surreal. The Surrealists loved Picasso, of course, although he was too big to be contained by them, and they found Cubism too rational and logical.
Once the Cubist takes apart the subject, he puts it back together but in pieces that make sense, perhaps too much sense, for reality. So a side image of a woman might contain two eyes. This seems illogical to us, because if you look at a woman from the side you
see only one of her eyes. But the Cubist painted two because he knew she had one more on the other side, and so what you
initially thought absurd actually had more thought behind it than a traditional painting.
Of course, this seems far away from photography if you do not possess a cracked lens, but is it really? Cubism is about multiple
realities, and so is photography. You might not lie when you make photographs, but you might tell many different truths.
Many mistakenly think that photography with a manual, mechanical camera, developed in the darkroom, recorded on film and then hand printed, is pure, while clicking on a menu in Photoshop is manipulation. But manipulation of reality is at the heart of creating images. You manipulate reality the moment you look through your camera, for the view you see through your choice of lens is at this very initial level a movement away from what the naked eye sees. Everything else is a progression.
To see is to know
During the great renaissance in European art, the version of optical naturalism practised was verisimilitudinous, which was a deliciously complicated way of saying that everything shown was to be depicted as if it were an optical phenomenon, whether or not it actually existed. Angels or monsters, for example, were portrayed as real, as if they
actually existed. By the 19th century, optical naturalism coexisted with a much broader naturalism: everything was to be explained in terms of natural laws, and that which could not was rejected. This was the part of the great Enlightenment, where European scientists had been going out into the unexplored regions of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries to record and to substantiate their beliefs that ‘to see is to know.�
Naturalism, also used interchangeably with ‘Realism� assumes that everything is an event that has come into existence as the
consequence of discoverable natural processes. These processes might be simple or complex, but they do exist. Any event is thus an equilibrium of such forces, all individually measurable, but all working to their own rules. Over this, the overall equilibrium of the sum of the processes has its own rules. This might sound confusing but it is quite simple: there are many processes at work within an
organism, but there is also the larger process of life, under which the organism exists, as an equilibrium of its parts.
It is the same with a photograph, which is a naturalistic double event. A photograph records the result of a natural process, and a photograph is also the result of the first event’s being photographed. A photograph records an event that has come about because of
its natural processes, but this event has also become an event by being photographed.
Our impulse towards realism in the modern world might arise from the conviction that the world is, and can only be represented as, the sum of natural and historical processes, but it might also arise from the need to participate and intervene in those processes. When you make a photograph you are not merely a bystander, telling the truth as it is. You have become part of the process, and photography fits our needs because it is inherently manipulative. If you look at your high school physics notes dealing with light, you will realise that when rays of light enter the eye (and now the camera), they cross each other �top to bottom and bottom to top �and thus must create an upside-down image in the back of our eyes. This proves that the act of seeing is not completed in the eye, because we see things the right way up. This means that it must be our mind that intervenes, corrects the image, and becomes a part of this process: the first step in manipulation.
The wild beasts
The intensely momentary character of a photograph is in complete opposition to the natural process, which is alive and constantly in motion. And even though a camera operates in fractions of seconds, photographs can take on a ‘life�of their own beyond many human generations. The photographic ‘eye�is also different from the human eye in that it represents everything in a scene evenly, while our eyes always focus on one point, and we see the rest of the world in our peripheral vision, ‘out of the corner of the eye� If you point the camera at a street, it will record for you the road, the vegetable seller, the shop windows. If you look through your eye, you will see these individually, even if your eye is constantly, subconsciously flitting among a million different subjects to create a larger field of vision.
Thus a photograph is an act of vision only made possible by
photography itself.
Such self-serving art would have gone down well with modern artists like the Fauves, who saw themselves as autonomous, as
creators of objects that possess their own internal logic and significance. For such artists, a work of art is something new in the world, not a mere copy. They may exploit our knowledge of external
reality, but they realise no obligations towards it. This attitude was summarised by Matisse, who said, “I don’t paint women, I paint pictures.�But even Matisse didn’t understand Picasso’s photographs at the time �perhaps the art was too nascent. Picasso would later write, “Matisse and Apollinaire have paid me a visit but left without understanding a thing. Even less than favourable reactions from Braque as well. Matisse advised me to take up caricature. No one understands a thing and they laugh! Derain has spoken
to me about it as well, adding that one day they would find me hanged behind ‘that painting of mine��Even so, once Cubism was established by 1916, Picasso seemed to lose interest in the camera. His working principle was, “One must do everything on the condition that one never does it again.�
The Fauves (French for ‘wild beasts�as a critic once described them in horror) were a loose group of modern artists who revelled in a deeply saturated use of colour and shape, moving away from the Impressionists, who used colour in a representational manner. One of the fundamentals of Fauvism was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin to Paul Sérusier: “How do you see these trees? They are
yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.�
Terrible passions of humanity
The Impressionists, on the other hand, were a lot closer to photography in the traditional sense, in that they were extremely concerned with the effect of light on surfaces, on the impression it created, rather than forms we take for granted. For example, if you ask a layperson to draw a boat, he might start by drawing its outline, and then filling in the colour. But the Impressionists knew that the line around the boat was something we created, because we know the shape of the boat, even though you don’t see a line when you
actually look at a boat. What you really see is contrast between the colours and textures of the boat and those of the water. Monet would sometimes paint on up to three canvases at a time, changing one for the other as the light changed. Impressionists would work quickly with the light they had, so used quick, light brush strokes, as opposed to heavier, thicker coats of paint like Van Gogh, who was using colour to express himself, rather than represent reality. He thus became the foremost Expressionist (some call him a Post-Impressionist), with an emotionally-laden use of colour, as in his Night Café, of which he wrote: “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.�br>
An everyday art
Is this far away from photography? We might use colour the same way today with a digital SLR as Van Gogh did with oils. We shoot in colour for a reason, because colours are powerful, and we use them to express emotion, whether ours or our subjects. Professional cameras adjust to the existing light, trying to correct it for reality, offering automatic white balance and setting for various lighting conditions, typically sunny, cloudy, tungsten and so on. Top-of-the-line SLRs
let you manually key in a colour temperature. By working with
these tools, we can create a mood, whether we try to make the
light whiter, or try to “express the terrible passions of humanity.�br>
From the concave back of the human eye to the flat plane of the digital sensor, from Monet’s Impressionistic ‘snapshot technique�of painting to Van Gogh’s earthy tones in The Potato Eaters to the 12.8 million pixels of an EOS 5D and what you can do with them, you will find a common thread, of visualisation, of thought, of artistic impressions, success and failure. The camera might be an infinitesimal blip in the progress of expression, but it is part of it nonetheless, and when you pick up a camera today, you become part of it too.
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