5.1 – Manipulating versus Differentiating

NON-REPRESENTATIONAL TREATMENTS OF THE IMAGE-IN-THE-VIEWFINDER.

MANIPULATING PHOTOGRAPHS

We saw earlier that an artist might choose to make a near-photographic image more interesting by applying the equivalent of filters or effects. Photographers, too, have done the same at various times in the history of photography, but they have often been ambivalent about how far such effects were what they termed ‘legitimate’.

This kind of thinking has often led photographers to tie themselves up in philosophical knots. What sort of distortions are acceptable, or, as they say, ‘legitimate’? Photographers who claimed to be fine artists have been particularly exercised because of their claim that their art form is as ‘legitimate’ as painting. This assumes that there are some kinds of law which photographers might break. However, if photographers are careful, (so the argument goes), they can obey the law and become as law-abiding as assume painters to be.

Meanwhile painters have never concerned themselves with such man-made laws, only with the laws of nature. For example, in his discourses, Reynolds did suggest that his pupils should learn the rules of art. But these rules are not artificial conventions, laid down by an artist or an academy: they reside in the nature of human response.

For example, if you paint a spot of white in the middle on a black canvas, your eye will go straight to it. But if you paint the same spot near the edge of your canvas, your eye may also be attracted to that, and you may sense a lack of balance in the composition. The white in the middle may make a composition which may look strong, or it may look boring. The white near the edge may make a composition which is award and uncomfortable, or interesting and stimulating. You have to consult your own responses in order to judge the effect. A rule-book will not help you.

Reynolds told his students to become increasingly sensitive to the responses which great works of art can arouse. Students would then become better able to produce new works of their own. Reynolds warned that it was a mistake to expect that following man-made rules would automatically produce great paintings. As Reynolds put it,

A painter should form his rules from pictures rather than from books or precepts ; this is having information at the first hand, — at the fountain-head.

Rules were first made from pictures ; not pictures from rules.

The first compilers of rules for painting were in the situation in which it is desirable a student should be. Thus every picture an artist sees, whether the most excellent or most ordinary, he should consider from whence that fine effect, or that ill effect, proceeds ; and then there is no picture, ever so indifferent, but he may look at to his profit.

From memoranda of Sir Joshua Reynolds, recorded in ‘The art of painting in oil and in fresco – translated from the French – with original observations on the rise and progress of British art’, by W B S Taylor, 1839

https://archive.org/details/artpaintinginoi01taylgoog/page/n8/mode/2up

The well-known painter, Bernard Dunstan RA (1920 – 2017) summarised the rules which Reynolds laid out. Arguably ‘rules’ is the wrong word, because Reynolds’ directives are more like helpful hints – something to try on those occasions when you find your painting is not progressing as well as you would like. If you were happy with your progress, these rules would be superfluous.

Academic teachers were able to develop precepts, such as that a well-designed figure painting should have a main group and a secondary one; that there should be a certain proportion between the dark areas and the light ones; that the main figure or figures should not be exactly in the middle of the picture; that a pyramidal form of construction is one of the useful ways of building up a group; that the general colour of a picture should be warm, rather than cold; and so on. You can find the most intelligent and sensitive statement of the academic approach to picture making in Reynolds’s Discourses.

Bernard Dunstan (1920-2017),
Composing your Paintings (1971)

Arguably these rules are concerned exclusively with selecting and arranging a scene, so they could apply to photography just as much as to painting. However when a photographer attempts to reconstruct a grand academic composition, it invariably looks false and posed. The photograph is too specific. In a photograph the viewer is not so much aware of the great volumes and masses which the painter has made and controlled, but is more easily distracted by odd details. This is another aspect of differential analysis. Without it the viewer is not directed to general concepts of form and movement.

Photographers cannot display differential analysis, as we have seen, but they are able to manipulate the image, darkening some areas, lightening others, and adjusting contrast (both overall and in specific areas). The resulting image will not be a true record of the array-in-the-viewfinder.

This seemingly goes against the pronouncement of the great photographer, Edward Weston: that the main value of a photograph was its ‘Realism’ – its duplication of the array-in-the-viewfinder. Paradoxically, Weston was perfectly happy to manipulate the print, falsifying it in fact, in order better to generate a response in the viewer. The print looked as if it were a factual report but, in reality, it was false. So in practice, what counted for Weston was not ‘Realism’ itself but the illusion of realism.

As another photographer, Ansel Adams, put it, the final result should not have the ‘feel’ of any other graphic medium. It should have the ‘feel’, or appearance, of a photograph. The sky could be darkened or lightened. In this sense Adams was saying that it was acceptable for the photographer to manipulate the scene. Presumably, if Adams had used colour photography, he would have found it acceptable to change a red dress into a blue one. It is easier to change the colour of a dress on the computer than to change it in real life, but the result is the same, a manipulation of the scene, not its treatment.

With only the photograph as evidence, the viewer has no way in which to determine whether the dress was red or blue in reality. Some photographers, such as the pictorialists, were happy to make their adjustments obvious to the viewer. They would scratch the surface of the plate, for example or introduce extreme blurring and smudging. This would not be acceptable to Adams because the image would then look too much like a painting. Concealed faking was acceptable, overt faking was not. As Adams is alleged to have said:

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships!

Frequently attributed to Ansel Adams, but I have not been able to find the original source.

The print looked as if it were a factual report but, in reality, it was false.

For Adams, the art of photography was not the art of representing a scene but the art of manipulating the scene itself. This is something which, oddly enough, painters have always done, so it is not uniquely photographic. So in the end, the claim that photography was an independent art form depended entirely on one thing – that a photograph should look like a photograph.

It is difficult to take a photograph which does not look like a photograph. A photographic camera can instantly capture a scene with incredible accuracy and immense detail. This is typical of photography. It can give a sense of falseness which the followers of Naturalistic Photography tried hard to overcome by applying a slight blur. But those who wished to argue that photography was an independent art-form had to exaggerate that very detail that had so disappointed the Naturalistic photographers.

We might consider the other arts – music, literature, acting, gardening and so on. All involve the artist piecing something together, not duplicating something. What the photographer can do is put together a scene, just as a set-designer might, or a window dresser, or a painter – but that is as far as the art goes. It has nothing to do with representation – with differential analysis.

TWO USES OF THE WORD, ‘INTERPRETATION’ – SCENE AND IMAGE

When given a subject, photographers may talk about ‘interpreting’ it. By interpretation they mean choices they make when setting up the positioning, the lighting and the viewpoint. Under the heading of interpretation, they may also include manipulation of the image – that is when manipulation is an alternative to changing the scene – for example darkening a sky or changing the colour of a dress. They carry out a manipulation effectively to fake the scene.

“if three different photographers are given the same model, the same lights, the same background, the results will be as different as if three artists are given the same piece of paper, paints, and model.”

Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980)
in Photobiography, Odhams, 1951.

Here Beaton is supposing that the photographers would be able to adjust the model, the lights, and the background – the scene in other words. But if the three photographers were all presented with the same fixed scene, viewpoint, and colour-accurate camera, they would be forced to produce results which were identical. This is not true of painters.

Supposing three painters were presented with the same scene (or even with the same photograph) as a subject, they would produce different results depending on the kind of differential analysis that they made. For a painter ‘interpretation’ includes all that it does for photographers, plus a very great deal more.

It is unfortunate that the same word is used for both activities. For a painter, ‘interpretation’ encompasses a much larger area of thought and feeling than it does for a photographer.

The photographer effectively holds up a frame and invites the viewer to look through the frame. It is an ACT OF SHOWING (or, as Roger Scruton called it, an ‘act of ostentation’).

The photographer may construct the scene he photographs, but, unlike the painter, he cannot construct the representation. A photographer cannot use an circle to represent a head.

The painter can imitate the photographer, as in Dürer’s illustration, but primarily a painter makes lines and coloured shapes which may or may not correspond with a real scene. Their is an ACT OF INVENTION.

These activities demand different types of ‘eye’. The photographer looks for scenes to point out.
Ansel Adams claimed that he ‘made’ photographs, which sounds very grand, but in practice it meant only that he selected and arranged the subject matter and adjusted the result in the darkroom. He never made a shape on the image.