Photographs Belong in Art Galleries

Visitors study pictures on show at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Photograph: Alamy. The Guardian, Nov 13, 2014.

I have wanted to write something about the question of photography-as-art for a while. A recent article in The Guardian (“Flat, Soulless, and Stupid: Why Photographs Don’t Work in Art Galleries.” Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 13 Nov 2014) now prompts me to do so.

In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones says he wishes we would not put photographs (apparently, any photographs) in art galleries. Well. I couldn’t disagree more.

After a few words praising the miracle of photography (“Photography is a miracle of the modern world….”), Jones writes:

It just looks stupid when a photograph is framed or backlit and displayed vertically in an exhibition, in the way paintings have traditionally been shown. A photograph in a gallery is a flat, soulless, superficial substitute for painting. Putting up massive prints is a waste of space, when the curators could provide iPads and let us scroll through a digital gallery that would easily be as beautiful and compelling as the expensive prints.

I confess that Jones raises an interesting issue here. We have now been aware for years of the impact digital technology has had on the taking and making and creating of photography. Similarly, we should look at how digital technology has completely revolutionized the looking-at and using of photography. However, this is not the main topic at hand here. Jones gets on to the main point:

That is because when you put a photograph on the wall I cannot help comparing it with the paintings whose framed grandeur it emulates, and I can’t help finding photography wanting.

Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard

Paintings are made with time and difficulty, material complexity, textural depth, talent and craft, imagination and “mindfulness”. A good painting is a rich and vigorous thing. A photograph, however well lit, however cleverly set it up, only has one layer of content. It is all there on the surface. You see it, you’ve got it. It is absurd to claim this quick fix of light has the same depth, soul, or repays as much looking as a painting by Caravaggio – to take a painter so many photographers emulate.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyeres

Well, this is absurd. A good photograph is also a “rich and vigorous thing,” just as a good poem, or a good piece of music, or a good sculpture can be rich and glorious things, only different. Art takes many forms and exploits many different media and technologies. The requirements that Jones apparently posits for art are just as true for good photography. A good photograph can take time and difficulty – to set up and compose, to produce the right exposure and execute a good capture, to make decisions about post-processing and carry them out skillfully, to produce a good print that is faithful to the artist’s vision. Good photography certainly exhibits textural depth, and good photographers call on talent and craft, as well as skill, insight, and knowledge of the materials and tools. It is probably true that the average snapshot does not display much “mindfulness.” No one claims the average snapshot is art. But the intentional photographic image can have something to say, can be an expression of the artist’s vision and creativity, executed with considerable thoughtfulness, certainly as much as the average painting.

Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten by a Lizard” rewards thoughtful viewing with pleasure. The painting depicts a decisive moment captured with technical skill and visual astuteness. But so does the work of many photographs. See the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson for the definitive “decisive moment.” Not to mention the many fine (and fine art) photographs who do emulate Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro. And for that matter, I suspect Caravaggio would be avidly exploring the medium of photography were he around today.

Ernst Haas, La Suerte De Capa, Pamplona, Spain.

What qualifies photography as art?

A photograph is an expression of a photographer’s vision, a creative act. It is impossible to for a photograph to reproduce exactly what the eye sees – even should we want to – and for that matter probably impossible for the eye to see precisely the complete reality of a scene, even should we decide how to define what that is. Making a photograph involves choices: exposure, what to include, what to leave out, composition and framing, lighting, and myriad subtle combinations of all the elements of photographing a scene. In making such choices, the photographer gives expression to a personal vision of what the image should look like. These choices and actions are no different than the painter’s, the sculptor’s, or the poet’s.
A photograph that has something to say is certainly worth appreciation as a work of art. A good photograph calls attention to itself, demands to be seen, studied, appreciated. A good photograph rewards repeated viewing no less than a good painting. Why do we hang art in galleries and museums in the first place? Because the art has something to say to us. This can be as true of a photograph as any work of art. We study the works. We admire them. They are exemplars of a genre, a time and place, an artist’s work. Or they convey a particularly powerful or inspirational message. Or they are executed with exceptionally noteworthy skill, craft, and originality. In these regards, good photographs are no different from good paintings.
Good photography requires not just some talent but skill, technical knowledge, craft. Every artist must know and account for the properties of the tools and materials, whether it’s pigment, canvas, or digital sensors or film. Executing a print to be hung and exhibited demands subtle degrees of control over the process. The choices or paper or other media and processes significantly affect the outcome, as do sharpness, the quality and character of the light being used or emulated, or the chemistry of toning. The photographer makes these choices deliberately, with a view to making an image and creating a print that expresses the photographer’s vision.
We often regard any physical work resulting in the creating of a product and carried out with extreme skill, insight, power, a certain elán, to be artful, artistic, a work of art. We can look at a fine painting and appreciate it as a work of art. But we can also look at, say, an original hand-crafted item of furniture that evinces great skill, ability, and originality and say as well, “That’s a work of art.” Art is the result of many human “thing-making” enterprises when the artist brings creativity, craft, vision, and expression to it. And, too, as well with photography.
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River.
Photography, like painting and other visual arts, is a shared act of creation. Just as the photographer expresses a vision in the image, the viewer develops an impression, “sees” relationships and patterns and colors and themes and ideas in the image, any of which may or may not be apparent to a casual observer of the original scene. A photograph can provoke, anger, stir reactions of fear, love, excitement. A photograph can be hung in a gallery where we go to study it, to study the work of the artist-photographer. But we can also hng a photograph in a room, much as we would a partiularly pleasurable or satisfying painting. It contributes to an ambience, creates a mood, defines a presence, adds to the psychosocial dimension of the room, where it can entertain or simply convey pleasure to the viewer, casual or not. We can expect of photographs that we choose to live with that they contribute no less to our humanness – to our spirit of mindfulness – than paintings or sculptures or poems.
And we shouldn’t leave aside such genres as documentary photography and photojournalism. A documentary image can have as much power and resonance and timelessness as a painting like Picasso’s Guernica. The photographer can bring as much craft and vision to journalistic image-making as the painter. Perhaps, not all journalism qualifies as “great art.” But of course neither does all painting. But great journalistic image-making contributes mightily to our awareness and appreciation of the human condition, whether the image-making involves photographic emulsion on film, light-sensitive digital sensors, or pigment brushed onto a canvas.

Joanne Mason, Tranquility.

Jones’ core criticism of photography has to do with the medium itself. One might infer that he doesn’t consider the act and process of creation to be important elements of art. Even so, we can take issue with his claim that a photograph is “flat and soulless,” that “a photograph only has one layer of content. It’s all there on the surface.” True, perhaps, to the degree that the finished product of photography is usually (though even not always!) a two-dimensional artifact. But “soulless”? A photograph can have many layers of meaning, can suggest many different dimensions of reality. Light and shadow and color, arranged in the patterns that photographer chooses to capture, can reveal different relationships, different perceptions than those first occurring to the eye. Repeated viewing can suggest alternate views. There is depth in a good photograph. A great photograph helps us see something in a new way, and photography can do this as well as any other medium.

One of the purposes of art is to stimulate new ways of seeing the familiar. (See my recent post on “Defamiliarization in Photography.” Art renders the familiar as new and unfamilar so that we may discover new realities, different perspectives, different ways of seeing. Anything that can do this deserves our admiration. And when the work is done with skill, craft, insight and originality, it deserves as well to be studied, to be viewed alongside other great works, to be seen up close and from a distance, to be viewed often. In short, it deserves to be hung in our galleries.