i’ve been thinking about photography. i find it interesting. photography, i imagine (this is not backed up by any research…and i’m sure most of my friends know more about this than i do) was initially intended as merely a device to record. possibly seen as an ‘improvement’ upon drawings, made more ‘accurate.’
and, in one respect that’s true…photographs, when untampered with, do record a moment in time rather accurately.
as with all things, photographs became more and more commonplace. no longer did people have to stand still for (what we would call) absurdly long durations. pictures are instant, now. there’s not even any need to wait for development to see them. or, as with most pictures, they are never developed. merely shared via the internet to facebook, twitter, flickr, posterous, wordpress, blogspot, tumblr, instagram…the list goes on…
these things, however, are just the backdrop for where my mind has gone…
but, before we move on, we must color in the last of the backdrop…
now and again, as with all things, as photography has become more commonplace and as the rules for photography have been refined and refined, so has the ability and desire to break outside those rules…
when i think of paintings, i’m often drawn to the more abstract ones…certainly with a firm basis in reality, and i certainly respect greatly the artist who can perfectly capture a moment…the sketches where you double take as you’re not sure whether it’s really a drawing/painting or a photo…those are amazing. even so, i am pulled to the more abstractly-slanted portraits and artworks…
in a painting or a drawing, there may be certain rules in place, but they are in place by choice…rather, there are only a few confining aspects of the mediums of paint and pen…two-dimensional (at least in reality) and the physical confines of the size of the canvas…other than that, paint and pen can go almost anywhere…
photographs, however, have greater limits…i suppose the limit is found in the subject matter. the subject matter of a painting is only confined to the ability of the artist and the immensity of the artist’s imagination…photographs, though, cannot actually be of saturn, or the second coming of christ…they may represent these things, certainly…but, the photograph has a much more firm and irremovable anchor in this reality…
and herein lies the artistry…earlier, i wrote this:
‘photographs are the unrhyming and candid poetry of the eye; almost prosaic and much more poetic than philosophic; beckoning infinity via the finite.’
photographs have a very different brush and stroke quite differently than the wild and vague and grand brushes of a painting. there lines are more oblique and blunt than the delicate strands of a quiet sketch.
and yet, this makes it so much more beautiful (in it’s own right). rather, it is not less than painting or drawing. they are different and most certainly not equal…they just are, both of them…
chesterton says it better than i do:
If the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.
hopefully that helps make sense of it…in this photography is more likened to syme and painting is more the secretary…
it is said that there is an uneasy stigma between painting and photography, which, i think is idiocy and sadness…why should you ever choose between hemingway and donne? keats and faulkner? dickinson and joyce? dostoevsky and shaw? i see no point to that…colors are made to accent each other as all these are merely colors and frames for experience and life…
i find it interesting…and contradictory, and wonderful…
any thoughts?
