Page 38 - Studio International - March 1969

Photography A vigorous rewriting by Richard Hamilton of
some transcribed notes from two interview tapes:
(a) with Tristram Powell for a BBC film on the
and painting `History of Photography'; (b) with Christopher
Finch for the Arts Council film being made by
James Scott of Maya Film Productions.
Richard Hamilton

case there was a time when I felt that I would was all that fuss about photography and screen
like to see how close to photography I could prints just a few years ago) and the ground is
stay yet still be a painter in intent. I borrowed clear for some fruitful interaction.
an image which was not merely a photograph Since My Marilyn I've made several paintings
but one that was also very stylish in that sense. of people on beaches. Postcards have their
The modifications that I made to it were air- own fascination. Usually they are shot at such
brushed stains applied to the surface in such a a distance that the people recorded in the
way that the photographic quality was not scene are oblivious of their contribution to the
disturbed, colouring it as a retoucher would to record. I find it astonishing that a flick of a
keep its integrity. At the same time there was shutter over a coating of silver emulsion can
another painting on which the marks were hold so much information about that milli-
made in direct opposition to photographic second of activity over half a mile of beach at
quality. This was motivated by marks and Whitley Bay one summer's day. As this texture
comments made by Marilyn Monroe on prints of anonymous humanity is penetrated it yields
submitted for her approval. Crosses or ticks, more fragments of knowledge about individu-
notes for retouching, instructions to the photo- als isolated within it as well as endless patterns
grapher, even the venting of physical aggres- of group relationships. Ultimately the point
sion by attacking the emulsion. It seemed in- is reached where enlargement takes us into
teresting to take these as two extremes. In one unreadable abstract clumps of silver halides.
case the photograph pure and intact (at least The fascination that photographs hold for me
ostensibly so) and the other an outrageous lies in this allusive power of the camera's im-
interference of the handmade mark in savage agery. The attempts of some abstract artists to
conflict with the photograph. It's an old ob- create paintings or objects without external
session of mine to like to see conventions mix - references (however admirable the results)
I've always been an old style artist, a fine artist I like the difference between a diagram and a seems to me to be not only futile but retrograde ;
in the commonly accepted sense; that was my photograph and a mark which is simply sen- like a race to see how slowly the participants
student training and that's what I've re- suous paint, even the addition of real, or can move. I marvel that marks and shapes,
mained. I made abstract pictures at one time simulations of real, objects. These multiply the simple or complex, have the capacity to enlarge
until, in the mid-fifties, like a good many other levels of meaning and ways of reading. The consciousness, can allude back to an ever
painters, I began to move back to figuration. more recent uses that I've made of photo- widening history of mankind, can force emo-
The return to nature came at second hand graphy stem from the possibilities inherent in tional responses as well as aesthetic ones and
through the use of magazines rather than as a these two works, Still life and My Marilyn. permit both internal and external associations
response to real landscape or still-life objects Some of our attitudes to the camera are, even to germinate the imagination of the spectator.
or painting a person from life. Somehow it now, a hundred years after its invention, a I suppose that I am much more concerned
didn't seem necessary to hold on to that older little naive. We tend to think of the photo- with ideas about paint than with paint for its
tradition of direct contact with the world. graph as being a kind of truth. We like to think own sake, or even a subject for its own sake.
Magazines, or any visual intermediary could of it as what the eyes see and that can be far The reason for becoming involved with Bing
as well provide a stimulus. from the case. A camera is a very different Crosby in the painting called I'm dreaming of a
It's a matter of gaining a wider view- an ex- optical device from the human eye, different white Christmas was not a nostalgic affection
tension of his landscape- that makes an artist in subtle but significant ways. For example, for Bing Crosby films, rather because the paint-
look to the mass media for source material. camera lenses focus on a plane and an un- ing was quite demanding technically and it
The Cubists had adopted a multiple viewpoint decipherable blurr can sandwich this sharp also offered some metaphysical exploitation.
of their subject by moving around it. In the layer. Then, the print is very often retouched, It follows from a Duchamp idea about every-
fifties we became more aware of the possibility especially if it is to be reproduced. Somewhere thing having an opposite. Scientific thought is
of seeing the whole world, at once, through the in a process engraving works a hand is modify- now being directed at the notion that every
great visual matrix that surrounds us, a syn- ing it with pigments, stains and acids. Graphic particle has a negative particle and that a non-
thetic 'instant' view. Cinema, television, artists are continually painting the photograph world exists adjacent to our world. That this
magazines, newspapers flooded the artist with to transform it into a more printable image or world has as real an existence, in an opposite
a total landscape and this new visual am- to bring it closer to someone's preconception of phase, as the one we experience. It's nice to be
bience was photographic, reportage rather it. Strangely enough the point at which art able to see a ready-made token of that reversal
than art photography in the main. most crucially and excitingly meets photo- of our normal perception in the form of a pho-
There comes a point where the painter can get graphy is the area which has long been tinged tographic negative. The painting of a negative
interested in photographic quality as part of with suspicion and acrimony. Retouching the colour frame from a Bing Crosby film can take
his medium. Artists all over the world began photograph, even cropping the print, is re- us a little closer, in a symbolic way, to that
to use photography to make a frank transfer- garded by a 'true' photographer as a dubious looking-glass world. The idea that Bing in
ence of imagery into their work-as Rauschen- activity. Artists 'copying' photographs, or negative becomes racially reversed is amusing
berg and Warhol have done. The directness of using them as a ground for a painting, are play- too (the song from the film makes an apt title
photographic techniques, through half-tone ing an even fouler game. The stigma attached for the painting) - he becomes an American
silk screen for example, has made a new con- to the use of photography by painters has gone negro. His clothes, colour reversed, are more
tribution to the media of painting. In my own (but not without some rearguard action- there bizarre; he wears a black shirt and a white hat,