Charles Lewis Art - California

Photography is Taking Over (and why this is a bad thing)

Go do the gallery scene. Once you saw paintings, sculpture. Now you see photos. Uhh…. excuse me, I mean Photography (capital “P”). Not just photography, but fine art photography. A recent crawl around San Fran on a first Thursday gallery night got me in a dither. Gallery after gallery was showing photos. Excuse me, I mean Photography. There were a few paintings, but miles of walls with photos.

I like to look at photos. I even like to look at your boring vacation photos. To me, the essence of photography is found in photojournalism. Slices of life, nicely composed, that sort of thing. Cartier-Bresson, and such. I like imagery that tells a story, whether photos or paintings. I’ve struggled with the “is photography art?” question for years – actually, I’m not sure what art is! 

Painting is a neural form that repositions reality, if it addresses outside reality at all, and that’s what I like about it. It gives ‘what is’ a twist into what could be. Sometimes it flat out spears your psyche and makes you quiver. Photography, fine art or not, is just what it says it is – a photo. Sure, today’s digital images are often heavily processed and can be very imaginative, but the fact remains, they are photos. Mighty good photos, in some cases, but photos nonetheless. I’m not a total greenhorn in the world of photography – in an earlier life I did the art direction for over 50 magazine cover photos, working with top shooters whose daily rate was about my monthly salary.  I respect and admire their “eye.” That was good fun, and really hard work. Sometimes it took 12 hours to do the lighting and five minutes shooting.

Back to the main topic – galleries favoring photography.  One problem is commercial - there are only so many dollars out there for wall imagery and I hate to see painters getting squeezed out. Another is aesthetic – for the viewer, photography is easy. It shows things you are familiar with. Humans, streets, vehicles, flowers (gag!), stuff that everyone can relate to. Photography is a quick and easy reflection of your standard frame of reference. You don’t have to stretch. You don’t have to engage your imagination. It asks little or nothing of you. (I know, a lot of painting fits this description too.)

In the New York Times essay, “On (Digital) Photography: Sontag, 34 Years Later,” [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Riff-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss] by A.O. Scott, the author notes: “The photograph, whatever its cultural pedigree, does not so much exalt the everyday as establish the aesthetic parameters, the peaks and troughs, of everydayness. The camera may record astounding events or reveal shocking truths, but always within the context of the ordinary, the literal, the real. Which means that every photograph is equivalent even as each one is distinct, and that they all capture a precise present and register its conversion into an irretrievable past. Photography is the definitively modern, technologically relentless engine for the mass production of nostalgia.”

“But to consider photography as a fine art …. all but requires attention to its everyday, vulgar, popular uses. In its early years, in the middle of the 19th century, there was some argument about whether taking pictures with a camera could legitimately be called an art. How can particular images hold on to their distinction, their exalted particularity? Is it by retaining trace memories of older artisanal practices and materials — by being printed on special paper, framed and composed with exquisite care, shot in studios full of expensive equipment? Or is there some less-definable expressive quality that turns the banal into the beautiful?”

Personally, a photo lasts at most a couple of days on my wall. Then I’m bored with it. I can absorb everything it has to offer in a few minutes. By the second hour, much less the second day, I’m done. I like photos. I take a lot, just for fun. I love my little pocket digicam. But they aren’t art to me. They are just photos. Nothing wrong with that, I just hate to see photography tarted up as something it’s not in order to sell to the art crowd.

Why is this massive gallery trend toward photography bad (for painters, anyway)? It slowly reduces the public’s ability to see and comprehend art in a sophisticated, meaningful way. What you see is what you get. And since photography has even less of a qualitative base than does painting, it is even easier to sell based on nothing but a photographers ‘name.’ Who cares if the pictures are any good?

For example, I saw some prints in a San Francisco gallery by Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German couple who spent years taking pictures of water towers, among other ‘post-industrial’structures (‘post-industrial’ is art-speak for old and decrepit). They carefully place them so that they are all in a similar perspective using an architectural view camera, and hence look pretty much all alike. They've done hundreds. They are famous for their water towers, and the prints are priced accordingly.  (from Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher] Bernd and Hilla Becher are among the most influential artists of our time. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ they have brought their influence in a unique way to bear on generations of documentary photographers and artists.)  

"Among the most influential artists of our time"?  You gotta be joking. "Brought their influence to bear on generations of documentary photographers and artists."  Uh, well…. I guess.  Yeah, baby, dig that water tower! Oh wow, another one! And another! So many East German water towers, so little time. After all, there’s one in every town! I’m guessing that if you had one of these prints on your wall, aside from the pain in your wallet from the big bucks you paid for the thing, you’d be hard pressed to say it’s long-term interesting.

I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to riff on the ‘photorealism’ school of painting here. You take a photo, not even a particularly good photo, and spend countless hours trying to paint it to look as much like the photo as possible. This is nonsense.

Let the accusations fly!