Szarkowski begins his article, “The
Photographer’s Eye” by distinguishing photography from painting. The thesis of
Szarkowski’s article appears to be when he states, “The invention of
photography provided a radically new picture-making process – a process based
not on synthesis but on selection” (Szarkowski). Right off the bat, he appears
to have a snobbish, almost intolerable tone toward photography when compared
with painting: “Paintings were made – constructed from a storehouse of
traditional schemes and skills and attitudes – but photographs, as the man on
the street put it, were taken”. He moves forward with the thought process by
calling photography “mechanical and mindless”, and questions how the process
would be meaningful to humans. He even offers his criticisms about the artists:
“Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who
shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no
academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, and art,
a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other’s work”
(Szarkowski).
In his criticisms of photography, Szarkowski
has forgotten where painting came from. Prehistoric artists created cave
paintings over a period of 10,000 to 20,000 years (Kleiner 18). In prehistoric
times, did the artists ever train at academies? Were they united by a guild, or
share any common training? Did they ever study the works of other artists? No.
Because they were busy exploring the technique of using chunks of red and yellow
ocher to draw their subjects; or grinding those chunks of ocher into a powder,
mixing it with water, and painting on cave walls (Kleiner 17).
Likewise, photographers in the
beginning were more concerned with making the chemical procedures easier to
work with to develop the photograph, and lenses faster so the model didn’t have
to sit still for fifteen minutes for an exposure, than they were the artistic
compositions of the product they were making (Rosenblum 40). Cavemen took time
out of their hunting and gathering to draw and paint; there were no
professional cavemen artists. Likewise, it makes sense that schoolmasters,
salesmen, and newspaper editors took time out of their profession to dabble in
the photographic processes. After photographers, amateurs, professionals, and
snapshooters alike, got a handle on the process of photography they moved
forward on a long, arduous journey to grow artistically.
When discussing “The Thing Itself” in
the article, Szarkowski says, “The first thing that the photographer learned
was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this
fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him”. Portrait
painters had the flexibility in their art to fudge what their eyes saw. If a
rich aristocrat had a ridiculously large nose, and the painter knew that this
made the aristocrat a bit self-conscious, it would benefit the painter to shrink
the nose in the portrait by use of the brush and some skill. Those who lived
with the aristocrat would know that the nose had work done, so to speak, but
descendants would look upon the painting and never really question the
subject’s nose. This was not the case for photographers in the beginning. The
camera did not lie; large noses, birth marks, fat, thin, tall, short… every
physical aspect of the subject was recorded whether they wanted it or not. While
minor manipulations were eventually made in the darkroom, major changes to the
physical topography of a person in a photograph did not really occur until
digital photography (and the invention of editing software like Adobe
Photoshop) came about.
When
Szarkowski describes the details of a photograph, he suggests that what was
previously insignificant could now become essential. “The compelling clarity
with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had
never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but
filled with undiscovered meaning” (Szarkowski). While painters would sit a
model in a chair and paint them, photographers would make photographs of an
empty chair. Why was the chair empty? Is it for sale? Is it symbolic for the
person who sat in it every day? Was it an abstract view of something? On the
same token, the model in the chair for a painter was generally an aristocrat; yet
photography allowed even the lowest class citizen to have their picture made.
Szarkowski goes on to discuss the frame
of the photograph. He says the picture is “not conceived but selected”.
Remember that the painter could have a model in his studio as he conceived an
elaborate waterfall scene for the model’s painted portrait to be in. The
photographer, however, would have to work with what he had; a waterfall
background meant the photographer was lugging his camera equipment to the
waterfall and shooting the model in front of it. But the statement goes beyond
what was conceived or selected. Whether done through the lens or in postproduction,
cropping has to happen in photography. The photographer makes the decision to
allow information in the frame, or to omit it. Consider the images below:
As the
photographer crops more of the scene out of the photograph, the facts of the image
change as well. The image on the right gives few clues about the scene. The
girls could be anywhere in the world based on the hairstyles, the clothing, the
nondescript background. But allowing more information in the frame gives the
viewer more facts to appreciate: the flag, the buildings on the hill, the
background all tell the viewer that the image is probably from Israel. “The
central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a
concentration on the picture edge – the line that separates in from out – and
on the shapes that are created by it” (Szarkowski).
Szarkowski’s
perspective on time in terms of photography is noteworthy. “There is in fact no
such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures
of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time”. Time
never stops, and even when a photograph was taken with an exposure time of
1/2,000th of a second the photograph is not instantaneous. It may
seem to be so when paintings take weeks, even months to complete. The instant
perception of photography did help painters change their perceptions, however.
Consider how the horse was drawn and painted before photography: all four feet
were extended in the full gallop. When Muybridge studied movement with the use
of his photographic equipment, we learned that the four legs of a horse are in
different phases between bent and straight while at a gallop. This speaks,
also, to the trivial details Szarkowski mentioned in “Details”; who cares about
the leg placement of a horse when the focal point of the painting was usually
the war General sitting atop that horse, fighting victoriously? But Muybridge’s
study of movement changed the way painters portrayed the animal in paintings in
the future.
Finally,
Szarkowski speaks to the vantage point of photography. Suddenly, with the use
of a camera, the viewer was able to see the world from a different perspective.
“Photographers from necessity choose from the options available to them, and
often this means pictures from the other side of the proscenium showing the
actors’ backs, pictures from the bird’s view, or the worm’s, or pictures in
which the subject is distorted by extreme foreshortening, or by none, or by an
unfamiliar pattern of light, or by a seeming ambiguity of action or gesture”. In
terms of how the viewer saw the world in art, the painter got off the chair,
changed the paintbrush to a camera, and climbed high to see down on the world.
Or they lay on their belly to look up. Their camera changed meanings, making a
person tiny and insignificant or larger than life and perhaps overbearing. Obtaining
access to behind-the-scenes views was easier for the photographer because the
time lapse of his medium was substantially shorter than the painter’s. This allowed
new access to the viewer as well. Consider the vantage point of Edward Ruscha’s
Parking Lots from 1967:
In terms
of Szarkowski’s article, this photograph beautifully shows how the photographer
can use vantage point (a bird’s eye view) to show insignificant details. The
photograph is stunning to the viewer who studies it rather than simply looking
at it. The geometrical shapes within the frame of the photograph are orderly
and rhythmic. The lines in the darker parking lots are repetitive, and break up
the lines of school buses on the left, and the lines of buildings on the bottom
right. Within the frame of his photograph, Ruscha allows lines and shapes to
repeat in different formations to create an interesting new perspective on an
ordinary parking lot. The modernist photographer captured a timeless scene in a
way that lacked any social comment or political assertions.
Sherrie Levine’s photograph, After Walker Evans: 4, is a reproduction
of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans. The postmodern photograph is
simple: an Alabama sharecropper’s wife stands in front of wooden structure,
looking directly into the camera. Again, lines are prevalent in the photograph.
The horizontal lines that make up the wood slats, and the grain of the wood
both mimic the woman’s lips and the implied line that the eyes and ears make
up. The texture in her neck also softly imitates the wood grain behind her. The
part in the woman’s hair, the fine lines around her eyes, and the furrowed brow
run perpendicular to the horizontal lines, bringing visual variety to the
composition. Her blouse, a seemingly unorganized compilation of small shapes is
actually rhythmic and breaks up the lines in the upper portion of the
photograph nicely. The beauty of this
image, much like Ruscha’s Parking Lots,
is that in the large scheme of things a trivial detail takes the spotlight. As
the world turns, who really needs to be concerned with the wife of a
sharecropper, and what she looks like? But the photographic process became
progressively less expensive in terms of time and talent of the artist, so low-
and middle-class citizens were able to have their picture made. And
photographers were able to find beauty in the most mundane scenes.
Ruscha’s and Levine’s photographs are
generally similar in the ways previously described. But the two images were
created in two separate art movements, and it shows. Ruscha’s photograph lacks
social commentary as it explored a different vantage point. Ruscha removed
himself from the photograph and allowed the scene to present itself through the
viewfinder. Levine, on the other hand, considered the social misfortunes of
women and used her photography to create dialogue about women’s rights. “The
series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both
praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority…” (“After
Walker Evans: 4”). When Levine could have photographed the sharecropper, a
person whose lot in life is not very high on the social ladder, she chose to
take another social step down and photograph the sharecropper’s wife.
Another difference between the two eras
of photography, as shown in the works of Ruscha and Levine is how the
photograph is presented. “Although viewers may have been aware that photographs
were set up, rarely did they notice the contrived nature of the photographs at
first glance. The photographs were not overtly constructed” (“Modernism vs.
Postmodernism”). So while Ruscha’s photograph of a parking lot may look like he
walked to the top of a building, focused his lens, and took a photograph, the
photograph had more work behind the scenes to set it up. In contrast, Levine’s
Postmodern photograph requires a person to decode the meaning during the
studying of the image. The meaning may alter over time, as social and cultural
priorities and norms evolve. This destined the photograph to have an
ever-evolving, never constant meaning to the symbolism in the image.
In the beginning, photography was a
painter’s tool. The camera obscura was a tool used to get perspectives correct
in murals and other important drawings. In fact, Michelangelo and Leonardo da
Vinci used the technique (“Introduction”). But just as the cave paintings in
prehistoric times were once a tool to communicate something to other cave men
(such as which animals roamed the area, or sources of food, etc.), and pottery
bowls in early civilizations were used to hold food and water, every artistic
medium at one time or another is heralded as something that should move beyond
useful to become decoration. Paintings are now created to adorn walls; and pottery
bowls are set upon coffee tables and curio cabinets to decorate a space. It
just makes sense that photography would move beyond the tool of the artist to
become an art form in and of itself. The expectation, however, of the art form
to be completely removed from the toolbox of the artist is just as silly as the
idea of not putting an apple in the pottery bowl on the counter. Artists today
continue to use photography to enhance their art, rather than become their art.
This is acceptable, and in many cases necessary.
Szarkowski claims, “The history of
photography has been less of a journey than a growth”, but how are the two
mutually exclusive? How can something grow without first embarking upon a
journey to learn, experiment, and experience? He is correct in his thought that
the photographic movement has not been linear and consecutive; as each phase of
photography opens, the tendrils appear to reach back to the history of the
medium in some way or another to improve upon it. What modernists did,
postmodernists did better. Ruscha shot the ordinary; Levine shot the ordinary
with symbolism and meaning. And in doing so, opened dialogue that was otherwise
taboo.
As photography continues on its journey
in the arts, deeper studies on symbolism, details, and vantage points will
occur. Photographers are now faced with the constant question of how authentic
their images really are because Photoshop has become as much of a verb as it is
a noun. Many photographers have embraced the verb, but struggles emerge as
photographers who avoid using heavy postproduction manipulations find
themselves answering the almost cliché question, “Has this been Photoshopped?”
Either way, one can argue that whether the photograph has been manipulated or
not, the postmodern elements in photography will be improved upon by future
photographers. In a post-9/11 world, vantage points and lack of access will
force the photographer to stretch their creativity, exercise their knowledge,
and implement resourceful methods when creating new art. Stating that
photographs are taken today, rather than “constructed from a storehouse of
traditional schemes and skills and attitudes” implies that the photographer is
a second-rate artist who fumbles with his equipment and finds accidental
success every now and then. This is neither accurate, nor is it fair to the
artist or the art itself.
Works Cited
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner's Art through the Ages: A
Concise History of Western Art, 2nd Edition. Cengage Learning, 01/2010.
VitalBook file.
Levine, Sherrie. After
Walker Evans: 4. 1981. Gelatin silver print. Metropolitan Museum Online.
“Modernism vs.
Postmodernism”. www.myeclassonline.com. Photo
History II: PH333, P01. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh – Online Division, n.d.
Web. 13 August 2014.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A
World History of Photography. 4th ed. New York: Abbeville Press
Publishers, 2007. Print.
Ruscha, Edward. Parking
Lots (State Board of Equalization, 14601 Sherman Way, Van Nuys). 1967.
Gelatin Silver Print. Washington University in St. Louis.
Szarkowski, John. “The Photographer’s Eye”. www.jnevins.com.
n.d. Web. 12 August 2014.
