Does photography add anything to a subject?

[Craig Griffiths]

I have been reading “A philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful” by Edmund Burke of late, and came across a comment that has me thinking especially if you substitute photography for painting and drawing.

Burke writes “If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but…….my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have affected in the reality.”

Granted that some people can see more in some scenes than others and focus on different parts of the same scene, but can they ever see more than is actually there?

So my contemplating mind has got to thinking. Does photography simply reflect the beauty that already exists, or can it add to a subject.

[BarryS]

Based on only that comment, I'd say Burke demonstrates a fundamental inability to understand art. By it's nature, art is highly interpretive.

[domenico Foschi]

Barry's one line comment more than efficiently expresses my own thought as well.
This stays to testify that Art and Reasoning are deeply incompatible.

[Craig Griffiths]

While I agree with Barry and Domenico, I am a little confused (nothing new I must admit).

Doesn't art only represent beauty that already exists in the subject, even if that beauty is not immediately obvious? How can a piece of art add beauty to a subject if that beauty doesn't already exist.

[Walter Calahan]

Photography can't add anything. It is a subjective reduction of the light striking something, so less than the whole scene.

[lenser]

Photography, as in simply pointing the camera and tripping the shutter, is unlikely to add a great deal. But, the subjective eye and skilled interpretation by the artist, no matter the medium, is capable of adding dynamically to the vision of any place, person or object that appears in the work.

As stated simply and brilliantly by Justus Dahinden, a Swiss architect: "It's not the camera. It's the eye."

Burke my have been a brilliant philosopher, but it seems he lacked a sense of vision.

Tim

[Donald Miller]

I sometimes think that we photographers tend to believe our own press entirely too much. The fact remains that our interpertation of an object or subject is simply that...our interpertation...to believe that we are imbued with a magical ability to see what others can not see is simply incomprehensible to me.

Everyone other than a blind person can see everything that we each see. Others may not avail themselves of the same opportunity but that does not mean that we have an ability that they do not have. That would seem to indicate to me that it is a matter of choice rather than a different ability.

The camera and film are simply incapable of depicting anything more than a crude representational substitute for the actual object or subject.

I would say in closing that art is indeed an empty shell if one believes that it is only about beauty. Art is about life...all of life...it's ugliness, it's sadness, it's joy, it's horror, it's pain, it's triumph, and yes finally sometimes even it's beauty.

[BarryS]

...

Doesn't art only represent beauty that already exists in the subject, even if that beauty is not immediately obvious? How can a piece of art add beauty to a subject if that beauty doesn't already exist.


Photography can't add anything...

Art *always* adds something.

Imagine Irving Penn's beautiful photographs of cigarette butts. Perhaps you'll tell me that Penn has only revealed the intrinsic beauty of the cigarette butts. However if you grant the intrinsic beauty of disgusting gross cigarette butts, then you have to grant it to every object in the world, the universe. If everything is beautiful, the concept collapses--beauty describes nothing. I think Penn created that beauty.

[domenico Foschi]

"If everything is beautiful, the concept collapses--beauty describes nothing."
Barry, could you expand on this concept?

[BarryS]

Domenico-- Aren't all adjectives descriptive of *select* qualities? Some foods are flavorful. Flavorful means nothing without the opposite qualities of bland and tasteless. If every food is flavorful, then what use is describing anything as flavorful? Big doesn't exist without small. Everything can't be big.

Beauty can't exist without existence of the non-beautiful. It's a quality in opposition to other qualities. Therefore, not everything is beautiful. We have empirical evidence that artists (including photographers) have produced beautiful images of a vast number of objects. They cannot all be beautiful, therefore in some cases, the beauty had to come from the artistic process.

[Craig Griffiths]

"Beauty can't exist without existence of the non-beautiful. It's a quality in opposition to other qualities. Therefore, not everything is beautiful."

Barry, wouldnt this assume that everyone had the same view of beauty? While Penn's image might be beautiful to you it might be "disgusting gross cigarette butts" to someone else. I personally do not believe everything is beautiful, but beauty is different things to different people, hence particular images appeal to some and not others.

Perhaps it is the act of seeing that is the important in that it isolates the beauty that is already there, and the camera captures what is there. Wouldn't the viewer seeing the image have felt the same if they were able to isolate and see the original that the photographer saw?

I really don't know what the answer is, hence the questions.

[Bruce Watson]

Doesn't art only represent beauty that already exists in the subject, even if that beauty is not immediately obvious? How can a piece of art add beauty to a subject if that beauty doesn't already exist?

Assuming the art you are talking about is photography, you seem to be implying that the art is strictly documentary. Unless that is the intent, I usually assume that's not the case. You'd be surprised perhaps to stand where I've made some photographs in the field, hold the resulting print in your hands, and compare the print to the scene. Sometimes there's enough difference that it's difficult to believe that the photograph was made of that scene.

How can a piece of art add beauty to a subject? There are many ways. For one, it can add beauty by subtracting out the distraction that is color. IOW it lets you see the beauty in the underlying structures, patterns, and visual rhythms that color often hides. For another, by careful manipulation of local contrast one can clarify details that are otherwise obscured from the naked eye. For yet another, by careful manipulation of tones one can create beauty where none existed; in rebalancing the tonal relationships one can create a visual balance that didn't exist in the original scene. I can go on and on and on but I'm sure you get the idea.

[BarryS]

I think beauty is a probabilistic quality. If I were to ask a sampling of say, 10,000 people if they thought a bunch of cigarette butts were beautiful--perhaps 0.01% might respond yes. If I showed the same 10,000 people an Irving Penn photograph of the same cigarette butts, we might expect a higher percentage--let's be conservative and say 5% would consider the photograph beautiful. So that beauty did not previously exist for the 4.99%. Just as Magritte painted the words--"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" on his painting of a pipe, the Penn photograph is not the cigarette butts, but an artistic construct.

A photograph has a certain relation with reality, but it's not reality. If I show you a 4x5" print and a 40x50" print of the same image, you'll likely have a very different reaction to each print. And that's the same image, let alone the reality of the actual scene or subject. A photograph (or other artwork) is the end result of a string of qualities, decisions, chance, and process.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Burke had a very mechanistic idea of aesthetics. It starts to get wacky when he talks about objects emitting particles that enter the eye and exert pressures on the tissues in the brain, "relaxing the solids of the whole system" to cause the feeling of beauty. Like the empiricist philosopher David Hume, Burke imagines that everything that is available to the senses happens through a series of proximate physical causes, and that includes aesthetic feeling. The passage quoted in the original post reflects this general empiricist view--if we have the sensation of beauty, there must be beauty in the object that exerts its force upon us through a chain of physical events.

Burke's "Inquiry" is often excerpted in anthologies about aesthetic theory (incorrectly, I would argue) as a lighter version of Kant's _Critique of Judgment_. While Kant agreed that there was a distinction to be made between the Beautiful and the Sublime, one of the main goals of the _Critique of Judgment_ was to refute Burke's mechanistic, empiricist idea about the nature of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic feeling.

[BarryS]

Ok, I actually went and read some of Burke's writings. They were enjoyable reading, but like countless philosophies--they combine well-formed ideas, musings, wild-ass personal opinion, bad science, and questionable analogies. Good fuel for thought and debate--less so for literal interpretation.

[Colin Graham]

Really interesting David, thanks for providing some context.

Beauty is an odd thing to get your head around. Certain shapes and forms result in all manner of chemical and muscle responses.. It almost does suggest physical law- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I don't know if I've ever been assailed by beauty isotopes- but I've surely been whacked by the ugly stick a time or two! :-)

[ASRafferty]

Just to complement David's presentation of Burke's approach... the essay quoted turns on the distinction between "clarity" and "obscurity," with a very simplistic approach to clarity's appeal to the senses and understanding, and obscurity's more likely appeal to the emotions (presumably because reason can't find anything to hang onto in an "obscure" representation). The essay still begs the question of whether "beauty" lies more closely associated with "clarity" or "obscurity," reason or the emotions.

So, whether or not photography adds anything to a subject, it's very likely that photography adds something to the art forms that Burke had available to consider, and complicates things considerably more than Burke may have thought they were.

[Maris Rusis]

Yes, photography does add something important that painting and drawing cannot. It confers credibility.

One can paint or draw, by hand or machine, anything that can be imagined in the mind or fabricated in the memory of a computer. A photograph consisting of an accumulation of marks caused by the impact of a physical sample sent by subject matter into a sensitive surface exists only if the subject matter exists.

Imaginary things cannot send physical samples. Photography does not lie or deceive. But fallible humans can deceive themselves by mis-identifying subject matter. There is no final cure for that; not even photography!

[Greg Lockrey]

Does photography simply reflect the beauty that already exists, or can it add to a subject.

Photography takes a subject out of the context of it's reality and forces the viewer to focus on it's elements of it's beauty. For example a weathered building in real life has no particular appeal when viewed in person, but a photograph of it forces the viewer to observe the elements that make for a beautiful photograph i.e. texture of the wood, the tones and the composition. This is the vocabulary that speaks to people in their own understanding and feelings. In other words the photo doesn't add to but make aware of the beauty because you are focused on it.

[cjbroadbent]

It's the other way round. It's the subject that adds something to photography.
Perhaps photography owes some of it's worth to transient beauty but most of it's worth seems to come from the effort taken to re-create an ideal. An ideal freak. an ideal mountain lake, an ideal still-life...
Organising the subject is 5/8ths of the effort - lighting, 2/8ths - camerawork, 1/8th.
This is a camerawork forum and the other seven eighths tend to be forgotten.
It takes more than half the day to prepare a model for a beauty shot. I takes me two days to set up a still-life. It took Nat.Geographic three months to do a cover shot of a hill-top town in Umbria.
So, in my thesis, we create (fabricate) beauty for the photograph - just like in the theatre, in films, in music.

[Brian K]

I think all the time spent theorizing about art and photography would be better spent creating art and photography.

Christopher, really? "Organising the subject is 5/8ths of the effort - lighting, 2/8ths - camerawork, 1/8th." Is it that formulaic? Kind of takes the fun out of it.

Personally I shoot whatever catches my eye. And as I have no intention of merely documenting it, whatever it is that I found beauty in, I want to expand upon.

[cjbroadbent]

Personally I shoot whatever catches my eye. And as I have no intention of merely documenting it, whatever it is that I found beauty in, I want to expand upon.
Brian,
lucky you. We taxi drivers try to keep up.

[jetcode]

If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects...

Not even close. The 'accuracy' is highly dependant on the talent of the one doing the drawing.

Art doesn't need to be accurate to represent an object in the mind. In fact the whole point of art is to represent an object in a unique way which ranges from abstract to photographic in detail. The artwork will always be a unique representation and viewed uniquely.

[Brian K]

Brian,
lucky you. We taxi drivers try to keep up.

Christopher I spent 25 years shooting advertising and editorial, basically shooting images I would rarely ever choose to do on my own. Now all I shoot is what I choose to.

[cjbroadbent]

Brian,
I'm in good company then. But those who I admire among us, who climb mountains at dawn to do LF landscape, are surely doing their 5/8th's effort, hoping that nature will do something with the light, and hoping their 1/8th's camerawork won't screw-up.
That's faith, hope and perseverance. That effort is more like prospecting for gold than doing a documentary representation. Beauty maybe there, but you've got to dig it out.
We were paid to do just that for ads and eds.