Clive Bell by Roger Fry
thanks to
Pat Gately
Both can be ways of recording and communicating the appearances of things – how they look. Portrait miniaturists once did the job that is now done by photographers.
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Clive Bell by Roger Fry |
For some purposes photography outdoes painting. For example only the invention of photography revealed what the legs of a horse at full gallop are doing – painters could not get it right. Clive Bell, writing in the early years of the 20th century, declares that paintings descriptive of scenes of daily life ‘are grown superfluous’. ‘For an account of manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported by a little light journalism’. Painting meanwhile, partly for other reasons, such as the discovery of ‘primitive’ art, was going in other directions, towards expressionism and abstraction. This raises the question: Does painting, as a representational art, have a distinctive role?
The obvious difference is that the photographic image is produced directly by light rays reflected from an object onto a light-sensitive surface; the route from object (seen or imagined) to painted image is indirect, going through the artist’s mind, his medium and technique.
The subject – photo relation is CAUSAL: the laws of optics and chemistry alone determine the appearance recorded on film.
The subject – painting relation is INTENTIONAL.
Note on ‘intentional’: a distinction can be made between verbs that are and
those that are not intentional (this is a technical philosophical sense of ‘intentional’)
‘To kick’ is non-intentional, that is, if you kick a ball there must exist a
ball that you kick. ‘To think’ is intentional, that is, if you think of a ball
there need not exist a ball that you are thinking of: the ball that you think
of is the intentional object of your thought. This sense is different from the
ordinary sense in which what it means to say that something, normally some action,
is intentional, is, roughly, that it is done on purpose or with some purpose.
Scruton maintains that the relation between subject and painting is intentional
in both senses:
1. ‘To represent’ is an intentional verb: the subject of a painting – what it
represents - need not exist (the technical sense)
2. Making a representational painting is an intentional act: the intention is
to make an image in which the viewer recognises an intended subject (the ordinary
sense)
By contrast the relation between subject and photograph is intentional in neither sense:
1. ‘To photograph’ is non-intentional: the subject of a photograph – what
it is a photograph of – must actually exist.
2. Photographing a subject is usually intentional, that is the photographer
deliberately points the camera at some thing that he wishes to photograph; but
it is not an essential feature of the relation: an accidentally taken photo
of X is still a photo of X.
NB the above points are meant to apply to photographs and paintings as ‘ideal types’.
1. The scope of what can be represented by painting is much wider than that of photography. Photography can represent only actual particular things. Painting can represent things-of-a-kind, and imaginary things.
2. Painting has the power to convey a thought about the subject: ‘a thought embodied in perceptual form’. To understand a representational painting is to divine the artist’s intention, so that one not only sees in the painting what she intended to be seen, but one sees it as she saw it. She can communicate thought in this way because of the control she has over the medium. The photographer has much less control over the way the image appears, because of the causal nature of the process, and so lacks the power to make the image convey how she saw the subject. In other words she has a much more limited ability to insert her own intention between subject and image.
The primary interest of an ideal photograph is in telling one what the subject looked like at a particular time; the image is a stand-in for the subject itself. The consequence is that any aesthetic interest in the photograph is derivative from an aesthetic interest in the subject. Therefore it is not as a representation that the photograph has aesthetic interest.
In a representational painting it is not only the aesthetic qualities of the subject represented that command interest, but also, and primarily, the way it is represented. Thus it is possible to be interested in the painting as a representation, and not for the sake of gaining knowledge of the subject, but for its own sake. This is an aesthetic interest.
Whether this is a good reason for denying that photography is representational is not important. What matters is the claim that a photograph can have no aesthetic significance as a representation.
Scruton’s paper has two theses:
a positive thesis about the nature of representation: a pictorial art, to be aesthetically interesting as representational, must be capable of conveying thought by controlling the image. (Painting is the paradigm of such an art)
a negative thesis about photography: the automatic (causal) nature of the photo-subject relation precludes control of the image and therefore the means of conveying thought.
1. Reject positive thesis. The point would be to deny that there is an aesthetically valuable activity that photography fails to exemplify. This is an unpromising line of reply. Scruton is not of course claiming that all painting is representational in his special sense. The illustrations to botanical field guides, for example, may be photographs or paintings. In either case their purpose is to show what the plant in question looks like, as an aid to recognition. The interest is primarily in the subject, not the image for its own sake. But there is a strong case for holding that there are also paintings that are of interest as conveying how the subject is seen by the artist. If this is a distinctive kind of aesthetic interest then it is a good question whether photography can satisfy it
2. Accept the negative thesis: accept the argument for the non-representational character of photography, but claim that it has aesthetic interest in other ways. As a reply to Scruton this would be an ignoratio elenchi, that is it denies a claim he does not make and is therefore irrelevant. Of course it may be true that photography has aesthetic interest in other ways.
3. Deny the negative thesis. Scruton himself considers three ways in which
a photograph may be made to represent its subject:
(a) Arranging the model, i.e. the object(s) to be photographed so as to represent
a subject
(b) Modifying the result of photography e.g.by touching up or photomontage
(c) Selection of shot, angle, focus, contrast, etc
To these Scruton replies:
(a) The representing is done by the prior arrangement, not by the photograph
(b) This is certainly inserting the artist’s intention between the subject and
the image, but the image is no longer an ideal photograph
(c) These may be parts of strictly photographic technique, but give very limited
control over the image
Critics of Scruton concentrate on (c), claiming that such techniques have much
greater power than Scruton believes to express the photographer’s intention
(e.g.King, ‘Scruton and Reasons for Looking at Photographs’). Warburton however
(‘Individual Style in Photographic Art’) concedes that photographers have limited
control over the single image, but contends that they can impose individual
style on their oeuvre through the selection of images they wish to exhibit.
A photographer’s particular take on the world can only be seen from a sequence
or collection of pictures.
Does representational painting have a distinctive role? So far from being made obsolete by photography painting can fulfil a function that photography is incapable of fulfilling.
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Last revised 16:03:05 |
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John Benson |
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A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |