Dale’s Soapbox Rants

Photographic Licence

The little street, Vermeer.

The dialogue between camera and canvas has more history and complexity than many people realize. Today we associate the word camera with photography, but in fact camera is just the Latin form of the word chamber. Long before the invention of light-sensitive film, artists would sit within a large box called a camera obscura, painting the image projected by a small opening onto paper or canvas tacked to the back wall. Far from being an eclectic curiosity, modern scholars are beginning to uncover evidence that the camera obscura was a significant force in the development of perspective and realism in renaissance art and was quite likely used by such famous artists as Da Vinci and Vermeer.

European painting adopted camera-awakened realism so thoroughly from the renaissance on that virtually no one considered painting in any other fashion for the next several hundred years. Then, around 1830, came the first successful experiments in photography. Few art historians would call it a coincidence that painting moved from realism to impressionism during the same decades that photography became a public phenomenon.

Ironically, in the early days of art photography, especially before the 1920s, the name of the game was imitation painting. If your photograph couldn't be mistaken for a painting done in black-and-white, you just didn't have the right stuff to even dream of holding your head erect in a Paris salon.

Silverton Colorado, Ansel Adams.

Along came folk like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston in the 1920s to sing a new song. They emancipated art photography from "atmosphere" and "mood" and managed to sell the art establishment on their stark new vision in the process.

While photographers were reclaiming unadorned realism, painting was hopscotching from impressionism to expressionism and surrealism to abstract art - each ism seemingly a quantum leap farther from the realism that had once been the sine qua non of fine art. But after abstraction where do you go? Artists simply closed the circle by developing a style called photorealism (and a slide projected onto a canvas replaced the camera obscura as the tool of choice).

So remained the mainstream of art photography right up to 1990 or so. Then came Photoshop (lamentably twenty years too late for the psychedelic art scene). Just now, one hundred years after art photographers fought for the right to hobble themselves with the fetters of strict realsim - Just now, as paint artists are flocking to a similar aesthetic, the technology finally arrives to free photographers from those seemingly intrinsic fetters. So what do art photographers do? You guessed it: they cry out in indignation against their emancipation.

Photography itself is neutral. The technology can be used for purely documentary ends, such as a vacation snap or a forensic exhibit A. At the other extreme it can be used to create fine art, such as a Weston pepper. But the Western tradition of art for art's sake has long been about personal vision. Whether a work is done in realism, impressionism, or any other ism, documentation is normally a minor theme.

Are we to suppose that an eco-artist, painting an endangered-species siberian tiger on a snowy outcrop, considers himself ethically bound to work with a live model on location on a Siberian Steppe? Might he not paint the tiger in the local zoo (or from a photograph taken in the local zoo) and the backdrop from a photograph taken in Siberia? Has he short-changed his audience by so doing? Have you ever looked at a framed print of such a painting and been unsure, even after fairly careful examination, whether you were viewing a painting or a photograph?

Photographers are arguing that the eye-like realism of a photograph imposes a special responsibility upon the photographer - artist or no - to refrain from distorting the documentary truth of the scene. They passionately debate whether to licence themselves the freedom to digitally remove a discarded soda pop can or an offending telephone wire from an otherwise au naturel landscape.

Yet when you dig into this dichotomy a bit deeper you are left scratching your head. To create a painting or a photograph:

The first thing you do is to discard the entire dimension of time
The second thing you do is to discard the entire dimension of spatial depth
The third thing you do is to discard nine-tenths of the remaining two dimensions, keeping only a small rectangular chunk of the flattened timeless scene
The fourth thing you do is (frequently) discard nine-tenths of the range of brightnesses in what's left of the scene.

After you get done with that much butchery does it really matter if you move the two dimensional semblance of a boulder from stage left to stage right? Or add the semblance of a tenth primrose to the nine that were "really" in the scene?

I urge art photographers to wake up to the program. If you are doing art, then do art. The frame around your image is your licence to create (or at least to do what passes for creation among the non-divine). Create as in make new, not create as in slavishly imitate Nature. What offends about a "photo" of a polar bear swinging through a jungle on a vine is not the falsity of the scene but its triviality (and possibly its imperfect execution).

Fig 3

80-18, Dale Cotton

In the above picture I've eliminated the sign board on the grey garage, the blue box, raked leaves from the central section of the lawn, darkened the sky, changed the colour of the green garbage can, and fiddled with the over-all contrast. Now I have an image that more coherently expresses the gothic mood and rococo figurations I wanted for this scene.

One hundred years ago photographers routinely grafted the properly exposed sky from one photo into the featureless white swath that should have been a sky in another photo. That's because the limitations of their technology frequently made it impossible to properly expose both a city skyline and the sky above it. Today, that photographer's grandchild has the technology to create a masterpiece by grafting a full-colour cloud-strewn sky from Minnesota onto a full-colour woodland from Maine - with no disconcerting loss of realism. That's not only something she can do: I say she owes it to her audience to do no less than the very best she knows how.

There are those who are combining photographic elements using software such as Photoshop to create true tromp-l'oiels of things never-before-seen. Such works range from immature grandstanding to subtle and impressive masterpieces.

Some have argued that tampering with the documentary "truth" of images leads down a well-lubricated slope that will end in falsified evidence in the courtroom and on the front pages of the newspapers. Yes, this technological capability has existed in digital form for more than a decade. Subtle changes, such as the ones I've illustrated in 80-18 above, will have little impact on public awareness. But surreal fantasies and polar bears in the Sahara can only serve to increase public awareness of the capabilities long available to the unscrupulous.

Yet even this is a past cause. In the pro-terrorist segments of the near east, the video tape segments of Bin Laden that the U.S. government hoped would damage his cause were dismissed by the pro-terrorists as having been doctored in some back room of some CIA citadel.

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