Photographic Art

There is no evidence that these famous photographers, both American and English, German or French, were aware of the means inherent in Photography or their own peculiar approach. The freshness and originality of his vision, the fineness of his perception of life were always, to some extent, clouded and obscured. They did not understand their own material and that is why they did not respect it or came to accept it at all; they suffered an inferiority complex that limited or destroyed them.

That complex might have been overcome in some cases if the claim that photography was not “art” had not been made. Such an assertion was, in fact, the defensive mechanism of an Erewhon of art, no less fantastic than the country imagined by Samuel Butler (1872): Erewhon feared the machine. Instead of encouraging photographers to find out what Photography was, that attack only intensified their initial feeling of inferiority.

In the fight that broke out, they discovered themselves as second Holbein, Rembrandt and Whistler, always being anything but photographers. His work became an even greater mix, deserving of the little respect he had, being neither painting nor photography. They did not doubt the criteria of the painting nor were they able to perceive that, in essence, Photography could deny ninety-nine percent of what was called and continues to be called painting.

Throughout all his work, we see a singular lack of perception and respect for the fundamental nature of the photographic machine. At every step you try to turn the camera into a brush, make the photographs look like pictures, etchings, charcoals, or anything less than photographs. And, curiously, they always imitated the work of inferior painters.

WORK CHANGE

Despite its many and varied phases, the history of Photography is, almost entirely, a cluster of inaccuracies and misunderstandings, unconscious attempts and struggles. Of men and women, painters or not, who were fascinated by a mechanism and materials that unconsciously tried to turn into painting, a shortcut to a medium that enjoyed acceptance.

They were not aware of having a new and peculiar instrument born of science at hand, an instrument as sensitive and easy to master as any plastic material, but which required the full perception of its inherent technique and its own special approach, before it was possible any deep record.

In that sense, the development of Photography, which so beautifully and completely review the numbers of Camera Work, is interesting notorious for its expressive aesthetics as for its historical sense.

The photographers let these wonderful books, which have no equal or equal and contain the only complete review of the development of Photography and its relationship with other phases of life; that these books whose publication Stieglitz devoted years of affection, enthusiasm and hard work, rotted in his hands, and were for him a constant burden, both physical and economic. It is a miracle that I did not end up destroying all the specimens.

But he continued to treasure them, as did the collection of snapshots, almost all of them purchased, which represent the evolution of Photography and are the only such collection that exists.

All of that he retained, perhaps because he had faith in Photography, in the work he had done, and in the young generation of students who, he thought, would seek and use them. All those experiments of the past not to imitate but to clarify their own work, their growth.

The photographers had no other way of accessing their tradition, the experimental work of the past. And, while a painter could become familiar with the development and past achievements of his environment, this was not the case with students or workers of Photography.

There was nowhere to see the work of Hill, White, Kásebier, Eugene, Stieglitz and the works of Europe in permanent exhibition. However, the photographers did not seem interested.

They did nothing to preserve or use those objects. That was already, in itself, a critique of the intensity with which they worked and was noted in the quality of the works they produced. Portodas parts perceived that lack of faith in the dignity and value of their own environment and, at the same time, the absurd attempt to show the world that they were also artists.

Moreover, in parallel to the production of this considerable number of bastard photographs, interesting but temporary, there was an equally broad and stupid discussion about whether or not Photography was art. It goes without saying that the discussion used to be as carefree and not as critical of its terminology and norms as photographers were. But, partly thanks to that evolution, we are now unfortunately aware that nobody knows for sure what art is. That word no longer appears so free in the mouth of serious people. Fortunately also, a few photographers are demonstrating with their work that the camera is a machine and also wonderful. They are demonstrating that, using it in a pure and intelligent way, it can become an instrument of a new way of vision, of unknown possibilities, related to painting and other plastic arts but without interfering in their respective fields. It has taken casiochenta years to come to this clarification of the true meaning of Photography, to move from the notably truthful but instinctive approach of David Octavius ​​Hill to the conscious control implicit in the work of Alfred Stieglitz. Photography – his philosophy, so to speak – began to emerge through his work.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

At the same time, the work of Alfred Stieglitz was a notable exception, who guided everyone else in the struggle to establish respect and understanding of Photography as an expressive medium. Stieglitz led the photographic cohorts, organized exhibitions in the art museums of European capitals and also in the United States. But he soon realized that he and his collaborators did not work in the same direction.

He himself tells a significant anecdote referring to the moment in which, in 1884, being an engineering student in Germany, he discovered Photography on his own. The fervor and the passionate intensity with which he experimented using that process yet to be developed did not take long to attract the attention of his companions. The students began asking him questions and later his instructor did. Later, many painters, some of them famous, were interested, who said: “Of course, this is not art, but we would like to paint like you photographs.” To which Stieglitz replied: “I don’t know anything about art, but, for whatever reason, I’ve never intended to photograph as you paint.” Herein lies the key, the essential leitmotif of his work. From the beginning, Stieglitz accepted the machine, finding in it something that was almost part of himself, and fell in love with it.

He fought for the machine and for the opportunity it offered to channel people’s impulses, to grant him the due respect for raising people’s interest in that way. He fought for his extraordinary possibilities to record the world directly, through the science of optics and the chemistry of silver and platinum, translated into subtle tones that were beyond the reach of any human hand.

Stieglitz was interested in establishing Photography, not establishing photographers, or even establishing himself. And then, quite naturally and consciously, it went further. Photography began to symbolize a great impersonal struggle for him. That machine he approached so freely, by which he felt compelled to review himself, was a despised object, rejected. For him, it became a symbol of every young and new desire, regardless of the form it could take, against a world and a social system that tries to disrupt and destroy everything that it does not understand and that causes fear.

Photography became then a weapon for him, a means of fighting for fair play, for the tolerance of those who wished to perform a correct and honest activity. Stieglitz endorsed the laws of change and growth, defending the right to exist and grow from those who, as the years have shown, introduced a new vision into human life.

The first portraits of simple people that Stieglitz made in Germany and in Italy, the commentary he expressed in his famous “Rumbo”, the photographs he made of New York upon returning to his homeland, reflect the ideas of American democracy that he was imbued. The evolution of his work as a whole gives us, then, the image of the direction and quality of his life. His direction reveals an uninhibited way of focusing on people and things; Its initial quality corresponds to an intense desire to affirm their beauty.

As these two primal impulses evolve, they face the impacts of reality without resentment or bitterness, without disappointment, penetrating reality.

The direction of this life remains unequivocally the same, but the statement deepens, strengthening with a critical intelligence and, more specifically, self-criticism, which recognizes neither beauties nor ugliness because it has understood the crucial forces that generate such concepts.

Stieglitz thus removed the “mechanical look” of the camera from the realm of objects that people make or build, to direct it directly to what people are. He gave the portraitist, in any medium, a new meaning: that of being a deliberate attempt to review the forces that make up a person and whose sum documents, therefore, the world of that person. Stieglitz’s amazing portraits, whether they objectify forces or hands, a woman’s torso or a tree’s torso, suggest the beginning of a penetration of the scientific spirit into the plastic arts.

Through the photographic line, its shape and its tonal values, Stieglitz managed to transcend the mere creation of images, going beyond any empty gesture of his own personality, which will be done at the expense of the object or the person in front of him. He examined our world of impulses and inhibitions, of openings or withdrawals, letting himself be carried away by a spirit of selfless search guided by a yearning love. Photographs of objects and people – of shapes of sun and clouds – become equivalent to a deeply critical but positive inquiry about contemporary life. They are the objective, not the beautiful conclusions of that research.

Stieglitz’s photographs come from that basis of struggle and passionate search, which show us his intellectual and spiritual growth. It is a complete work in itself and aesthetically satisfactory. The machine and its own special technique are dominated without the need to resort to tricks in the use of materials, without scattering, without in any way avoiding the objective world in front of the camera. Nor is there the slightest hint of brushstrokes or strokes, neither in the treatment nor, which is even more subtle, in the sensation; according to his own words «nothing of mechanization, but always Photography».

The whole of Alfred Stieglitz’s work, which covers a period of almost fifty years of creative experiments, projects a complete analysis and a synthesis of that machine that is the camera. Using the methods and materials that belong exclusively to Photography, Stieglitz demonstrated without a doubt that, when that machine, the camera, is guided by an artist of great sensitivity and deep perception, is able to produce and capture the perfect equivalent of a unitary thought and sense. That unity could be described as a vision of life, of the forces that take shape in life. His work constitutes, therefore, a monumental work.

However, he did not call his work “art”; rather, he argued that it was Photography. Dilucidate it is an academic issue and can be left to the discretion of those who are especially concerned that a thing is art or not. We only have to go to the Boston Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, to contemplate its scarce but great examples of Stieglitz’s work, to feel grateful that life has once again been enriched by a new beauty, for another legacy preserved for generations to come.

Apart from what these photos offer themselves, it is also possible to understand them as symbols of the machine used not to exploit and degrade human beings, but as an instrument to bring back to life something that makes the mind mature and refreshes the spirit. They prophesy, perhaps, and make people conceive of hopes for a new world, humanly speaking, that is not an absurd Erewhon but a place where people have learned to use machines with a different attitude towards them and towards themselves. In such a world, the machine would take its place not only as a valuable tool for economic liberation, but also as a new means of achieving intellectual and spiritual enrichment.

The works of Alfred Stieglitz follow a purely photographic tradition initiated by Hill and Brady, photographers whose positives were still back then in the limbo of forgotten objects. And it is that in the last works carried out by this American we find a very evolved crystallization of the photographic principle, the unconditional subjugation of a machine to the sole purpose of the expression. Stieglitz should be considered as the apex of an American tradition, without the external influence of the art schools of Paris or their diluted offspring in the New World.

This evolution extends over a relatively short period of sixty years and there was no real progress until the years between 1895 and 1910, at which time an intense resurgence of enthusiasm and energy was manifested throughout the world. Moreover, this rebirth found its greatest aesthetic achievement in the United States, where a small group of men and women worked with honest and sincere goals, instinctively some and consciously a few, but without relying on previous graphic or photographic formulas and without preconceived ideas about of what is and what is not art. That innocence was his strong point. Everything they intended to say should be developed through their own experiments: it was born from real life.

Similarly, the creators of our skyscrapers had to face the similar circumstance of being unprecedented and it was thanks to the very need to evolve a new way, both in Architecture and in Photography, as the resulting expression was vitalized.

In what medium has it been possible to capture the tremendous energy and potential force of New York more completely than in the purely direct photographs of Stieglitz?

Where has this more subtle feeling that constitutes the reverse of all this been reflected, the quiet simplicity of life in small American towns, so sensitively suggested in the first works of Clarece White? Is it possible to find in painting a greater originality and a more penetrating vision than in the portraits of Steichen, Kásebier and Frank Eugene?

They are not the only ones who have given beauty to the world, but these workers, together with the great Scotsman David Octavius Hill, are the important creators of a living photographic tradition. And they will be the teachers not only of the United States, but also of Europe because, thanks to the intense interest in the life of which they were part, they came to a universal expression through national expression. In spite of the indifference, the contempt and the security of receiving a little or no remuneration, they continued their activity, like so many others, although their work seemed doomed to a temporary darkness. His accomplishments continued without fearing, attesting to the motivation that served as impulse.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECTIVITY

Photography, which constitutes the first and only contribution he has made so far as all media, in the total exclusivity of his media. First of all, we must keep in mind that a medium is not an art.

The painting, the words, the sounds of the scale, the lenses and the photographic emulsions are the inert materials that the artist uses to shape what he intends to express. I also consider it evident that he cannot express more than what he sees and understands in the world around him, and that it is the depth and scope of his vision that ultimately give the measure of his art.Moreover, the mere existence of a medium constitutes its absolute justification. If, as so many seem to think, each and every one of them is needed, the comparison of expressive possibilities is useless and Irrelevant. It is not the least important that a watercolor is less than an oil or that a drawing, an engraving or a photograph is not as important as any of the other two.

Having to despise something to achieve respect is a sign of helplessness. Let us accept, instead, with joy and gratitude everything that the human spirit seeks to achieve an increasingly full and intense self-realization.

Thus, the peculiarity of the photographic medium is an absolute objectivity without palliatives. Unlike the other arts, which are really “anti-photographic”, that objectivity is in the very essence of photography and constitutes its contribution and at the same time its limitation. Like almost everyone who manages other media, science to the arts, has its raison d’être, they completely misunderstand the inherent qualities of their respective media, neither do photographers, with the possible exception of two or three, have known conceive the photographic medium.

The full potential of each medium depends on the purity with which it is used and every attempt at mixing ends up producing objects as inert as color engravings, photographic painting and, in Photography, the positive on rubber, the positive on oil, etc. .

This same lack of understanding and respect for the material by the photographers themselves is directly responsible for the consequent lack of respect on the part of the intelligent public and for having the idea that Photography is nothing but a bad excuse for the inability to do something else.

Let us pause for a moment to elucidate what the materials of Photography really are. We have a camera, a machine that science has put in our hands.

Thanks to its so-called clinical eye, it is possible to capture the representation of objects on a sensitive emulsion. From that negative it is possible to make a positive copy that, without any extrinsic manual interference, registers a scale of black and white tonal values that is well beyond the capacity of the human hand or gaze. It is also able to capture the different textures of objects in an impossible way for the hand of man. Moreover, a lens with optical correction can draw a line that, although different from a hand-drawn line – a trace of Ingres, for example – can, on the other hand, be equally subtle and emotional.

All this, the shapes of the objects, their relative color values, the textures, the lines constitute the strictly photographic instruments of our orchestra. It is up to the photographer to learn to understand them, to dominate them, to harmonize them.

But that machine that is the camera cannot escape the objects in front of it. Neither does the photographer. You can choose these objects, place them and exclude them before making the exhibition, but not after.

There is your problem and these are the expressive instruments by which you can solve it. But as soon as you select the moment, the light and the objects, you must be faithful to them. If you include a strip of grass in your space, it will have to be perceived as the living and differentiated object that it is and so it must be embodied.

You will have to take your right place, even if it is no less important than a shape or texture, in relation to the mountain, the tree or anything else that is included. Objectivity must be used and controlled through photography because it is not possible to evade or mask it using non-photographic means.

The photographer’s problem consists, then, in clearly perceiving the limitations and, at the same time, the possibilities inherent in his environment, since precisely honesty is not, in this respect, but the intensity of the vision, a prerequisite for an expression live. This means expressing true respect for the object in front of you, concretized in terms of chiaroscuro (color and Photography have nothing in common) through an almost infinite range of tonal values. Get it done this is achieved without resorting to tricks or manipulations, using direct photographic methods.

It is in the organization of that objectivity that the photographer’s point of view regarding Life comes into play and where a formal conception born of emotions, of the intellect or both, is so inevitably necessary for him, before realizing the exhibition, as for a painter before applying the brush on the canvas.

The objects can be organized to express the causes of which they are an effect or they can be used as abstract forms, in order to generate an emotion not related to the objectivity itself. This organization is done by moving the camera in relation to the objects themselves or by placing those objects, although here, as in everything, the expression simply gives us the measure of a vision that may have greater or lesser depth depending on the cases. Photography is just a new way that starts from a different direction but moves towards that common goal that is Life.

Understood and conceived in this way, Photography is barely beginning to be used consciously as an expressive medium. In the other phases of the photographic method, such as scientific and other records, there has been at least, perhaps out of necessity, poor control and poor compression of purely photographic qualities.

That is why I have affirmed that these other bases were closer to a truth than the so-called pictorialism, especially that nothing original and nothing experimental pictorialism that fills today halls and yearbooks. In comparison with this so-called pictorial photography, a simple snapshot of the National Geographic magazine, a reproduction of a painting by Druet or a photographic report is a relief without palliative.

They are honest, direct and sometimes possessors of beauty, although not intended. I said a simple snapshot. The truth is that it is not so simple to achieve them, as almost all pictorial photographers could check if they dispensed with those oil pigments and those soft focus lenses that are used to conceal a multitude of faults, a great lack of knowledge and a botched work. Actually, they don’t manage to hide all that for those who know how to see.

Gums, oils, soft focus lenses are the greatest enemies not only of Photography, which can be compensated with simplicity and naturalness, but also of photographers. As oil and rubber introduce the sensation of being before a painting, something that is even more alien to Photography than the color of an engraving.

And God lives that a color engraving is already abominable enough. By introducing a pigmented texture, this extraordinary differentiation of textures is annulled, which can only be achieved through photography and the subtlety of shades is destroyed. With the soft focus lens the solidity of the shapes is destroyed, as well as any differentiation of the textures, and the blurred line is no longer a line, since the important lines, that is, those that have true rhythmic and emotional intensity, do not vibrate laterally but backward, in a third dimension.

It is not about defending a pure or direct photograph from the moral point of view. It is just that, for the reasons I have cited, the demonstrable physical results of the use of non-photographic methods are not satisfactory, they have no life. That light surrounded by an amorphous halo that is achieved so expensively with a soft focus lens is not satisfactory. It’s too easy and I know it perfectly because I’ve been through that too.

I have made rubber positives, and I have made five engravings of Whistler with a soft focus lens. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I had to go through that experience myself at a time when the true meaning of Photography had not crystallized nor was it as clearly defined as now (not being, by the way, that crystallization, the result of talks and theorizations, but of real works made).

I will add yet another factor, of which Stieglitz’s work, in particular, allows us to become aware. Well, to the plastic expression, the machine has added the element of differentiated time.

The camera is capable of retaining an extraordinary moment. If that moment has life for the photographer, that is, if he has a significant relationship with other moments of his experience, and he knows how to shape that relativity, it is possible to achieve with a machine what the brain and the hand cannot achieve. Through the act of memory. Perceiving it like this, the total concept of the portrait acquires a new meaning, the record of innumerable moods, elusive and continuously changing, manifested physically. This is as applicable to any object as to the human object.

With the look of the machine, Stieglitz embodied precisely that, demonstrating that the portrait of an individual constitutes, in fact, the sum of a hundred photographs or more. He has looked with three eyes and has managed to preserve, with purely photographic means, filling the space and using tonality and tactility, line and form, that moment when the forces that manifest in a person are more intensely physical and objective . By thus revealing the spirit of the individual, he has documented the world of that individual that exists today. In this sense, portraitist painting, already almost a corpse, becomes something absurd.

It has been the vision of this artist, of this intuitive knowledge seeker, that, in this modern world, has taken over the mechanism and materials of a machine and indicates the way forward. Stieglitz is the one who insists again, through the science of optics and the chemistry of light, metals and paper, on the eternal value of the concept of craftsmanship, for being the only way that satisfies him and because he knows that This quality of the work is a precondition for the quality of life. Through a conscious creative control of this phase, the machine has developed a new method to perceive the life of objectivity and record it.

The photographer has joined the ranks of those who truly seek knowledge, whether it is intuitive and aesthetic or conceptual and scientific. Moreover, by establishing his own spiritual control over the camera, he has revealed the wall of antagonism, destructive and totally fictitious, that these two groups have interposed with each other. In this sense, it can be said that Stieglitz has gone much further than Hill. His work has a much broader, more conscious scope, the result of many more years of intensive experimentation.