Photography
Debunking the Myth of How Early Photography Influenced Painting
A complex dialogue between two art forms
It’s often said that the invention of photography “freed” painters from the need to slavishly represent reality in their work. If a photograph could capture a real-life scene in a matter of moments, then why spend days and weeks toiling over a painted version?
As such, the advent of photography in the mid-19th century has been cited as a key catalyst for art’s move into Impressionism and its emphasis on the transitory moment.
Indeed, in 1855 the Belgian painter Antione Joseph Wiertz wrote enthusiastically of a sense of liberation offered by the daguerreotype (a type of early photograph):
“Good news for the future of painting! [..] Let it not be thought that the daguerreotype kills art. No, it only kills the work of patience and pays homage to the work of thought.”
But there are problems with this story.
It ignores the direction that art was moving in before photography was popularised, and it oversimplifies the complex exchange of visual ideas that passed back and forth between painting and photography — a two-way dialogue that lasted well into the 20th century.
So what was the influence of early photography on the story of painting?
Painting in the Age of Photography
At the time of photography’s arrival — roughly the 1830s — Western painting was at a fascinating juncture after having moved through several overlapping phases over the past one hundred years, from Rococo to the “return to order” of Neoclassicism and then Romanticism.
An underlying question was at stake: where should an artist place their attention? Onto the real world of real people and places or inward to the imagination?
Photography entered this artistic milieu when the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured the oldest surviving photographic print in 1826. Then, in 1837, Louis Daguerre successfully used a chemically-treated copper sheet to register a photographic image — with the daguerreotype becoming the first commercially available photographic process.
It’s interesting to note that early discussions around photography tended to revolve around its validity as an art form, with many photographers looking to the traditional modes of painting for their aesthetic lead, both to explore the possibilities of the medium and to legitimise it.
One of the more outstanding examples of this was with the photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, who in his The Two Ways of Life (1857) adopted the genre of painting known as history painting. This remarkable photograph was carefully constructed from 32 separate images, seamlessly combined into one panoramic montage.
Such uses of photography were actually quite rare — but they highlight an important point about the new medium: that at the time of its invention it sought to establish itself as “art” by taking on many of the hallmarks of painting.
Julia Margaret Cameron, for instance, a British photographer and one of the most notable portraitists of the century, produced imagery influenced by traditional allegorical and religious paintings and by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists. Other photographers experimented with deliberately distorting images and using methods to place parts of the image out of focus to be more evocative of paintings.
By far the most dominant use of early photography was portraiture. The new medium would popularise the genre, which had previously been available only to society’s elite.
The fast growth of studio photography and the rise of commercial portraitists such as André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri and Félix Nadar would bring a culture of modelling, performance and posing into wider usage, one that portrait painting and also theatre had only partially activated.
Disdéri pioneered the carte de visite (visiting card): a small-format photograph that was patented in Paris and which produced eight individual separate negatives on a single plate. Sitters were encouraged by the photographer to adopt a variety of poses to insert a sense of dramatic play into their portrait.
The directness and sometimes informality of these photographs would inform the aesthetics of painting. Édouard Manet, for example, who took a keen interest in photography and kept albums of photographic calling cards, became known for breaching many of the conventions of traditional painting. He evolved a painting style that used strong frontal lighting — as photographers did in the studio — and adopted a distinct sense of vernacular or everyday portraiture in his paintings.
Unworthy Tricks
Despite the effort of photographers to “coincide” their work within the scope of contemporary aesthetics, the new photographic medium was still treated with suspicion by some.
For the outspoken French writer Charles Baudelaire, far from freeing painting from the need to represent, he worried that photography might just confirm it.
In 1859, he penned a vitriolic attack on the prospects of all “true” art. For Baudelaire, the real scourge of painting was the simple-minded expectations of the audience, whom he characterised as wanting to be “astonished” by the artist’s skill. He parodied the tastes of the modern viewer: “I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature”.
For Baudelaire, the critical powers of the imagination were the true tools of a worthy artist. Conversely, for a painter to wish “to strike, to surprise, to stupefy [..] by means of unworthy tricks” — that is, to bow down to audience demands for displays of skill in painting — was a dereliction of creativity.
Hence, for Baudelaire, photography arrived as a sort of confirmation of this “lamentable period”. Photography could give what the audience wanted: accuracy and truth in appearance. According to the critic, photography was the natural refuge of “every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies”.
The advent of photography therefore, constituted a threat to the more noble practice of painting, which might succumb yet further to the public demands for naturalism.
The Photographic Eye
It’s often said that photography brought about a new type of “eye”: a way of seeing the world that was profoundly informed by the camera aesthetic of cropped compositions, asymmetry, and the exploration of spontaneity.
Yet much of the cause-and-effect chain between photography and painting has been mischaracterised.
Take the example of Edgar Degas, whose paintings repeatedly present unconventional cropping and “snapshot” perspectives, such as his paintings Place de la Concorde (1875), which shows Viscount Lepic and his family milling around the Paris open air.
In relation to photography, such pictorial ambiguities may indeed have been a riposte to (rather than an influence of) the formal and somewhat static uses of photography at the time — being largely studio based and relying on long shutter speeds.
But more likely, paintings with irregular balance and “aborted narratives”, as the historian Eugenia Parry describes them, owed their aesthetics as much to the instabilities of wider society as to the influence of photography. As Andre Dombrowski argues, “formal innovations as cropping and unexpected viewpoints were mobilised for their political resonance” in the years following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In other words, changing times demanded changing techniques in painting.
Another photographer often linked to Degas’ unconventional paintings is English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who made extraordinary images of animals and people in motion.
Degas is known to have drawn and sculpted from Muybridge’s series. And yet it’s clear that Degas had already begun exploring the form and movement of horses and the “momentary” image twenty years before Muybridge’s equine photographs of 1887.
Conclusion
“Instantaneousness is photography, nothing more,” wrote Degas in 1872, implying that he considered his carefully thought-out painting technique as being in contrast with the immediate moment of the photograph.
The further implication is that the merits of “snapshot” approaches to painting were already established before photography found mass appeal.
This is not to say that Degas and other artists were against the new medium. Degas was an avid photographer and possessed numerous photographs that he used as source material for his art. Yet, as the historian Malcolm Danial points out, Degas’ rather formal photographs are, surprisingly, “the antithesis of the unstructured and instantaneous images one might imagine: they are carefully posed and lit, often requiring exposures of several minutes.”
And so the relationship between early photography and painting emerges as a complicated one. What we see in fact is a dialogue between the two forms, across the disciplines of studio portraiture, still lives and “theatrical” tableau vivant images — in each case, engaging and responding to the broader debates about what each medium was best suited for.
In truth, the impressionistic mode of painting that became so successful in the second half of the 19th century was inscribed in the artists’ methods, especially in the practice of working — on location as it were — which encouraged a more rapid style of painting in order to complete a work within one or two sessions. The transient nature of reality thus became a strong theme in the work. This mode of painting had taken shape at least as far back as the early 1800s, with artists like John Constable in Britain and Jean Baptiste Camille Corot in France, both of whom pioneered the method of painting outdoors to produce preparatory sketches for their larger studio-based works.
During this time, the “photographic eye” was still emerging as an aesthetic system, and arguably didn’t mature until the 20th century when its effects would be profound. Meanwhile, painters used photographs to paint from, and many also owned cameras and took photographs themselves.
Painting of the later 19th century, therefore, which would become celebrated for its revolt against the smooth precision of academic art, used photography for its own innovative purposes.
If you liked this, you may also be interested in my book Masterpieces of Art Explained, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.
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posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 11:34 AM
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