It's amazing the picture survives. Not only because it was lost until in 1951, but because the image remains intact. The most difficult part of photography's invention, scientifically, was not getting an image but keeping it. Lots of people were able to get an impression, but it would disappear as soon as it was exposed to light. Though amazing, these triumphs were not yet photography as we think of it. The idea of a fixed image is essential. The larger idea of photography also consists of ideas about depiction that were developed long before the first photograph, which means photography is not just a mixture of sunlight and silver.
Szarkowski's chapter "Before Photography" describes the ideas about picture-making that led up to the eureka moments of 1820s and 30s. To do this he must decide what the idea of photography is so that he can look back into art history and find its conceptual ancestors in depiction, and he comes up with a rather eloquent way of putting it: "The more difficult question is, where, and how, did the idea evolve, that one might catch a picture in a net, as one might catch not just the butterfly but the piece of sky in which it flew?"
I think this is a pretty good way of describing the act of photography, the opportunity to fix just a part of space and time. Though we disparage photography for not being more truthful about its representation of space and time, even just a little bit more like cinema, the fact is that more space and time were never really part of the desire to "catch a picture." This desire, Szarkowski claims, perhaps with good reason, comes from the pictorial tradition that developed many hundreds of years before photography, and so was not itself a purely eureka moment: no one penned a wish to catch the sky and the butterfly as a picture until the photographic process had nearly been invented.
We're going to spend a lot of time dealing with the various kinds of "truths" that photographs and other mechanically produced images might provide us, but for now let's consider one or two truths that the pictorial tradition that gave us photography managed to evolve. Though the suggestion of three-dimensional space has arguably been a part of depiction in the west for millennia, the most important leap forward in that endeavor occurred in the middle of the 15th century with the unification of the principles of perspective drawing by Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti described how one might be able to draw a figure, or really any space, by subjection of that space to a grid. Here we see that process in playful engraving by the German master Albrect Durer.
Durer made this engraving a full 50 years after Alberti published his treatise, which perhaps explains his comedic take. So much for sensuality in the artistic process; the most voluptuous model in Italy gets sectioned apart to fulfill the desire of a man who wouldn't know an erection if it were right in front of his nose. Note that Durer renders this scene in a more retrograde style of perspective than his fictional artist will likely deploy; we might remember from Szarkowski's chapter a particularly important progression of how artists using perspective concocted their spaces--from a view from the audience of a "stage," around 1450, towards a view from right on it, perhaps obstructed amidst the actors, about 100 years later.
Here Durer provides a standpoint (the picture's indicated place for the viewer's eye) that at the time would have been nearly passé--we are square with the opposite wall though we stand just to the right of the central axis of the room, thus allowing us to see the grid and the model without obstruction. Albrect Durer was a very great artist, so great that he used this rigid, stage-like rendering of space to mock the emotional rigidity of the process of perspective drawing.
"But there are lots of other places to stand," this picture tells us. "I've given you the full illusion of space, and you just want to be a wallflower?" Okay, just for the sake of wondering, let's imagine how this scene might have looked a hundred, maybe two hundred years later. One other place that might also work, one that would certainly have caught a photographer's eye in the 20th century, might be just beside, and just behind, the artist's left shoulder, looking towards the model. With this standpoint we would lose two things, both regrettably: the face of the artist and the open air outside. The loss of the artist's face would be a loss for comedy, certainly, but we might be able to evoke amusing asexual intensity if we captured his hands right. In any case, we would stand to gain something rather poignant--the model partitioned, her head, breasts, and right arm in clear view, and her legs seen through the barrier of the grid. The model partially obstructed by the grid that turns her body into asexual sections.
Such a picture would describe something about the perspective drawing process that would not have been possible in Durer's time, for lack of concept or technique or both. What we should take from this hypothetical exercise is not the hypothetical picture, and certainly not a criticism of Durer's imagination, but that the perspective picture, by unifying space so well that the viewer can believe in its fluidity, provides the inspiration for its own evolution. In doing so it also furnishes the limits for its own truth. What the perspective system provides, with intermittently greater dynamism over time, is not just the butterfly and its sky, but an opportunity for us to pretend to be there, looking up. And so there is a trade. If we choose the butterfly and the sky, we can't get what's on the ground. There is a deep, important truth to this experience that picturing before perspective never described.
No comments:
Post a Comment