Page 53 - Studio International - January 1973

Image-wise, it is now abundantly clear that
The photograph so because it has exhausted its own ideas; the selective and even manipulative powers of
others, perhaps more accurately, because
and the painter photography represents the most relevant the photographer are as great as those of the
painter. Moreover, attitudes are shifting. The
imagery of our time and most artists strive to
reflect the contemporary world. Both of these earlier criteria of superiority: the natural image
are really too facile as answers. The being filtered through a human instead of a lens,
Aaron Scharf complexities of the interchange are much more the palpability of the painted surface producing
profound than that. the more substantive character of the 'made'
In the hands of imaginative artists this object, now, in the age of television, cinema and
interchange between the two media has photomechanical reproduction, may no longer
Van Deren Coke's splendid book1 has been produced a virile and diverse array of images be invoked with its former assurance — though
expanded from a 79 page catalogue of an which in sheer magnitude has never before been these humanizing features are often considered
exhibition held in several museums and witnessed in any single historical period. This is to be more necessary than ever — even by those
universities in the States in 1964 and 1965. This significant. It may mean that the artist has the who make heavy use of the photograph.
great magnification of the material is itself freedom of an unlimited choice. But, Furthermore, with a number of new or
symptomatic of the reciprocal growth of paradoxically, the irrepressible proliferation of revivified photo-chemical techniques, or by the
academic research into the whole question of styles — the visual counterpart of our century's addition of crayon or paint, even this 'plastic'
painting and photography and the uncontrollable technological growth — may in sense is not entirely beyond the scope of
interpenetration of the two media. effect inhibit the artist. photography. Frequently, indeed, the borderline
Coke is a cunning and indefatigable sleuth. Still, however deeply one distrusts modern between painting and photography is
He has unearthed, with an assiduity born of the society for its fearsome multiplication of all unidentifiable and no meaningful categories can
collector's instinct, an abundance of things, it is hard not to exult in the brilliant be found for the classification of such images.
incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the galaxy of styles which this marriage-of-the- Coke is often very perceptive about the
extensive use made of photographs by painters media has propagated. The system, of course, spectator's role vis-d-vis the painting and the
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with works both ways. Photography is to painting as photograph. He says, for example, that
particular concentration on our own painting is to photography; inescapably, whereas the response to the photograph (in this
contemporaries. These matched images, technical and stylistic nuances are compounded case of a lynching in Mississippi) is immediate,
lavishly illustrated here, are, I know, only half in both. `for we do not linger a moment over how the
those contained in Coke's bulging files. He has Coke's deliberate concentration on the effects picture was made', in viewing the painting,
proven beyond any doubt that, in a multiplicity of the photograph on the painter, to the `attention is divided between the way in which
of ways, the photograph has made profound exclusion of the photographer, may in some the forms are represented and the message the
incursions into recent art. To put it perhaps quarters be criticized for its one-sidedness. But forms are meant to convey'.
more accurately, painting has now invaded the this massive compilation of visual documents This raises some rather fundamental
domain of photography. Some would say this is (including invaluable statements by the artists questions about the relation of subject matter to
themselves) is, I believe, a necessary, indeed form in respect both of photography and
inevitable, step in the evolution of the study of painting in the era of photography. If the subject
the subject. The day may not be far off when in is a horrific or tragic one, is the photograph a
the literature of art the all too synthetic and more telling vehicle than the painting because,
hierarchical distinctions between painter and as Coke suggests, it can be taken in at once and
photographer will no longer be tenable. thereby penetrate to a more subconscious
Coke, himself, is a talented and sensitive (and more emotionally resonant) level ? This is
photographer, and he is most certainly aware of the factor which to surrealists made the
the obverse situation and the need for an photograph mightier than painting. Or is our
analytical study of photography as part of the inability to 'linger' over photographic form the
whole context of visual imagery in the modern result of one hundred years of conditioned
era — or, in philosophical terms, a study of all response to photography as merely a mechanistic
objects on which we fix our mental images. medium ? If we do eventually learn to look at
photographs, really to see what they contain,
will this power of immediacy be lost ?
Fig. 1 Anonymous photograph of Certainly, as Coke points out, some of the
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo photographs illustrated in his book make a
Vanzetti 1921
Coll. Princeton University much stronger impact than the paintings for
which they were sources. This, I agree with
Fig. 2 Ben Shahn In the Courtroom Coke, is the case in Rico Lebrun's noble attempt
Cage 1931-2
Gouache, 11 1/2 x 14 1/2 in. to recapture the hideous event recorded in
Coll. Princeton University Lee Miller's photograph of the dead at
Buchenwald. But the painting fails when
Fig. 3 Robert Delaunay
Garden of the Champ de Mars 5922 compared with the photograph because it is
Oil, 66 3/4 x 70 3/4 in. transformed, made artful, without cognizance
Coll. Joseph H. Hirshhorn,
New York it seems of the precise visual elements in the
Courtesy Marlborough Gallery, photograph which so convincingly conveys the
New York
Coke writes: 'If the artist had been revolting scene.
aloft, the motion of the balloon This happens too in Ben Shahn's gouache
would have prevented him from
sketching the famous landmark (1931-2) of Sacco and Vanzetti in the
with any degree of accuracy. In courtroom cage. The gouache and the
addition, he would have seen the
angles and interlacing patterns of the photograph are reproduced (Figures 1 and 2)
structure in a different fashion than so you can compare them yourself.
did the camera. If airborne, the
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