Digital BW, The Print

I saw David Hockney's really interesting 2 hr TV programme on the BBC last
year about his theories - very coll. (must be coming to a PBS station
sometime?)

His book is well worth a read - certainly makes you think

(lovely things like - how come everyone in paintings suddenly becomes left
handed around 1600 and something (or whatever) - the use of mirrors to
project an image. One of his examples has something like 6 left handed
people and a left-handed monkey!

Or why do some classic paintings display depth of field problems, carefully
painted in...

tim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Fisher [mailto:dougfisher@...]
> Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2002 9:55 AM
> To: Digital B/W Printing List
> Subject: [Digital BW] "Does a Painter With a Camera Cheat?"
>
>
> There was an interesting article in the New York Times that I
> thought others
> in this group might like to read.  While it might seem slightly
> off topic at
> a first glance of the title, I think it has relevance considering our
> ongoing discussions concerning quadtone acceptance in galleries, "is it
> really a 'carbon pigment print," etc.
>
> I have copied the text at the end of this message and I have
> copied the text
> at the end of this message:
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/arts/design/16KIMM.html?8hpib
>
> Doug
>
> ----------
>
> Does a Painter With a Camera Cheat?
> By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
>
> LATELY, one thing after another \ufffd a show, a book \ufffd has been mysteriously
> causing people to fret about painters, dead and alive, using
> "crutches" like
> lenses, cameras and photographs, or possibly having used them.
>
> It's 2002, isn't it? I'm guessing that psychoanalysts would
> diagnose this as
> displaced anxiety.
>
> Detractors of Gerhard Richter's retrospective, which recently
> closed at the
> Museum of Modern Art in New York and opens at the Art Institute of Chicago
> on Saturday, were fuming that his paintings looked "dead" because they
> depended on photographs \ufffd worse, that this dependence betrayed an
> inability
> to make an original image, as if an image, having first been captured
> through a viewfinder, were no longer original, never mind that Mr. Richter
> took most of the photographs too.
>
> Before that, David Hockney caused an amusing stir by writing a
> book claiming
> that old masters like Caravaggio and Holbein used lenses and other optical
> aids to paint and draw. A vast conspiracy of silence persisted
> for centuries
> among artists, who didn't want to own up to this fact. Not, Mr. Hockney
> hastened to add, that he thought there was anything wrong with
> using cameras
> and lenses. After all, he did the same thing. A big conference
> was convened
> in New York. Scientists and historians took the stage, each thanking Mr.
> Hockney for his stimulating ideas, many of the conferees then giving 10 or
> 15 reasons his theories made little or no sense in most instances \ufffd after
> which artists in the audience, blithely ignoring what had just transpired,
> rose to compliment Mr. Hockney for proving his case.
>
> Now we await the Thomas Eakins show that started in Philadelphia
> and arrives
> on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We know for certain
> that like
> Mr. Richter, Eakins, America's archetypal academic realist, sometimes
> painted from projected photographs. (They were usually Eakins's own
> photographs as well.) He didn't exactly hide the truth \ufffd he even required
> his students to use photographs \ufffd but his wife tried to hide it after he
> died.
>
> Why the anxiety? When the photograph was invented, people
> declared the death
> of painting. Who needed paintings to tell people what the world
> looked like
> now that photographs could do the job better?
>
> What actually transpired was predictable two-way traffic. Degas, having
> picked up tips from both Japanese prints and the new instantaneous
> photographs produced by boxy cameras set up on tripods, painted Vicomte
> Ludovic Lepic on the Place de la Concorde in the mid-1870's.
> Lepic was near
> the right edge of the picture, and another man at the other edge
> was nearly
> cut out of the frame. The image resembled what Cartier-Bresson
> would take on
> the spur of the moment by pulling his tiny Leica out of his pocket, except
> that Degas painted Lepic before hand-held cameras were invented. Degas
> learned from one kind of photography, then paved the way for another.
>
> Meanwhile, he retreated to his studio to set up carefully staged
> photographs, ghostly scenes, unlike his paintings, that looked eerier
> precisely because they weren't painted by hand but made by a machine that
> ostensibly showed the world just as it was. Since then, it has dawned on
> more than a few art students who lack Degas's agility that it is
> easier, or
> at least less time consuming, to snap a picture than to draw or paint one.
>
> BUT this has not interrupted the continuing conversation across
> media, which
> sometimes involves artists who don't even consciously realize the
> extent to
> which they are involved in it. Cindy Sherman, having decided she
> had nothing
> much to add as a painting student, picked up a camera. A few years ago at
> the Met she happened onto a mid-19th-century photograph by William Lake
> Price of someone dressed as Don Quixote, a picture derived from
> 19th-century
> genre paintings. Ms. Sherman had never seen it before. The label said:
> "Theatrical staging has found renewed relevance in the work of such
> contemporaries as Cindy Sherman."
>
> You may recall that critics of the German photographer Andreas Gursky's
> show, which appeared last year at the Modern and opens on Saturday at the
> Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, complained that his big glossy
> pictures seemed too stagy. Mr. Gursky digitally alters some of his
> photographs. Even when his pictures are unaltered, they look too
> good to be
> true. He emulates Mr. Richter, who, of course, copies photographs. In
> different ways, they are making a similar point: that art, whether it's a
> photograph or a painting, involves manipulation \ufffd of color, perspective,
> scale \ufffd which becomes the true measure of its ingenuity and content.
>
> Our displaced anxiety must partly entail a fear of being tricked
> (mistaking
> a tracing for a freehand drawing) and, more particularly, a fear of
> technology: a concern that what makes us human is being sacrificed to the
> brilliance and reliability of the machine. New digital
> technology, with its
> nearly limitless capacity to blur fiction and fact, has only enhanced the
> fear. But all this misses the point. Realism is a moving target. Skill is
> more than manual dexterity. Tools are tools, whether they are brushes or
> lenses. What artists make of them is the issue. The beauty part of art
> remains its capacity to accommodate different ways of seeing.
>
> I have just spent several happy months watching the realist artist Philip
> Pearlstein paint two models. Week in, week out, Mr. Pearlstein labored to
> capture what he saw, which kept changing under his gaze, the way anything
> does when you stare at it for a very long time. He was especially
> interested
> in the effects that a photograph can't account for \ufffd the perceptual
> distortions that happen at the edges of one's vision \ufffd and in
> conveying the
> pleasure that comes from suddenly noticing what was right in front of your
> nose, an emotional effect translated through intense scrutiny.
>
> Fidelity in art, it turns out, is about integrity, not optical
> mimicry. If I
> were an artist, I suppose it would be comforting to think that
> Van Eyck and
> Hals did what they did with mirrors. Anything to narrow the unbridgeable
> gulf between greatness and me. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to
> genius.
>
>
>
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