The Relations Of Photography And Painting
THE RELATIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
sir kenneth clark, k.c.b.
Sir Kenneth Clark, an able art historian, formerly of the National Gallery in London, is now president of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The following excerpts from a Centenary Lecture given before the Royal Photographic Society on 13 October 1953 have considerable bearing on the topic, what kind of an art might photography be? Reprinted by permission from May 1954 issue of "The Photographic Journal,” official organ of The Royal Photographic Society.
After 100 years it is usually possible to see an event fairly clearly and to make an informed guess as to its historical significance. But this does not seem to be true of photography. For the critic and historian of art, photography is still a disturbing factor, because it exposes the very wide difference of opinion which exists as to the whole aim and basis of painting. On the one hand there is the assumption that, if art is a matter of imitation, the camera can do it better; on the other is the opinion held by many educated people that photography has nothing to do with art at all. Consciously or unconsciously, the former is the popular or democratic view.
When I was at the National Gallery I received many letters beginning "I have an old photograph of the Virgin Mary,” etc. After the first shock, I recognized that this was an inevitable linguistic change, because most people have seen paintings only in photographic reproduction, and so have no material means of distinguishing between them. All those who talk about establishing the appreciation of art on a broader basis must start from this fact. And we must not delude ourselves that this is a recent, vulgar error. On the contrary, the idea that the chief aim of painting is imitation has been maintained by nearly all the thinkers and artists who have expressed their views on the subject since antiquity. Aristotle and Pliny have no doubt about it. The greatest writer on art, John Ruskin, while preparing the first volume of MODERN PAINTERS, wrote to his father "Photography is a noble invention, say what they will of it—and anyone who has worked, blundered and stammered as I have done for four days, and then sees the thing he has been trying to do so long in vain done perfectly and faultlessly in half a minute, won’t abuse it afterwards.” And statements on the importance of recording the appearance of life do not come solely from theorists. In many pages of his TREATISE ON PAINTING Leonardo tells the artist he must be able to catch and set down correctly every gesture and expression. These and a dozen other examples are the utterances of men who had struggled with their art, thought about it deeply. They would, we may be sure, have taken the invention of photography very seriously. And, in fact, it was the great artists of the 19th century who thought about the camera, and profited by it.
Photography compels us to ask this question. If it can come so close to achieving what many good judges have believed to be the aim of painting, why do we hesitate to consider it as a branch of art? What essential quality does it lack?
I think that Goethe's favourite doctrine—that the nature of a thing can be understood only in its growth is particularly true of photography and I therefore propose glancing at the relationship of photography and painting in the first 100 years of its history.
• Like every other invention, photography was discovered in two places simultaneously. Fox Talbot made his first photograph of the window of Lacock Abbey in 1835; Daguerre photographed the corner of his studio in 1837. Both communicated their discoveries to the world in 1839.
Daguerreotypes were in every way part of the new revolutionary century. They were at one with the popular press and Reform Acts. The craving to have one’s face perpetuated, which hitherto only the upper classes could satisfy, was now within the reach of the new democracy. And this new art made no concession to the tradition of painting. It aimed at what would please an uninstructed public; brilliancy and detail. Every early comment on Daguerreotypes dwells on this perfection of detail.
Fox Talbot’s invention had a different social and artistic background. Although in fact it has become the system used by modern photography, and has survived when Daguerre’s invention is only a historical curiosity, it seemed at first to be no more than a piece of dilettantism. He arrived at it because, like all other cultivated people at that date, he tried to sketch from nature, and being dissatisfied with his efforts, as he tells us, on the shores of Lake Como, set about seeing if he could not "fix the beautiful images of the camera lucida." His book, the first ever to be illustrated by photographs, is called THE PENCIL OF NATURE, the idea underlying the title is that of Nature turned artist. But, as we can see from his first photographs he felt that Nature—or rather the Sun, who is always spoken of in old books on photography as being the artist concerned—is still in statu pupilari. His first subjects might have been drawn direct from such a book as David Cox’s YOUNG ARTIST’S COMPANION. This complete contrast to the bustling, speculative world of Daguerreotype, was borne out by the results. Daguerre, having made public his invention, gave up photography and returned to the construction of dioramas; Fox Talbot continued, in the pleasant seclusion of Lacock Abbey or in Tractarian Oxford, to produce pictures in the manner of de Windt and Cotman. His process, printed on paper, could not achieve the fabulous detail of the Daguerreotype, but in any case he would not have thought it appropriate to anything but a scientific record. He aimed at breadth, at a balance of light and dark, and intended, as he expressed it, "to awaken a train of thought and feelings, and picturesque imaginings.”
Well, these were the two paths, and without attempting to guess which was the right one, let us see where they led. Broadly speaking, Fox Talbot’s path led to pictorial photography, to the photography influenced by painting: Daguerre’s path led to pure photography—the photography that influenced painting.
• The success or failure of pictorial photography depends much on the degree to which its sources of inspiration can be translated into photographic terms. David Octavius Hill was fortunate in working within the living tradition of Raeburn and Geddes. If we did not know the dates we could easily and convincingly argue that Raeburn had been influenced by Hill, because there is something essentially photographic in Raeburn’s lighting, and in his simplification of tone. Hill was himself a portrait painter, and his photographs are beautiful for exactly the same reason as his pictures would have been, had he been a master of that medium. He saw his subjects with a sense of character; he lit them in such a way as to combine character with modelling. And he recognized exactly how much of the painter’s equipment could be utilized in photography. This is proved by the way in which he anticipated almost every effect which the camera has since made. He was even able to convey the sense of movement simply by the use of pattern—very much as Goya did. If any photographer could be called a great artist it was D. O. Hill; and it is important to remember that he had nothing at all to do with the technical side of photography. This was done under his direction by a young chemist named Adamson, and when Adamson died (at the age of 27) Hill’s career as a photographer was at an end.
We may pause on this fact, which shows us that, whether or not photography is an art, it is emphatically not a craft. A craft, I take it, is a kind of making in which mastery of technique is so difficult and so important that it becomes almost an end in itself : skill generates its own creative fervour, independent of the idea. A craft exists in the act. In photography the act consists in pressing a button. This absence of the element of craftsmanship is one of the factors which we will have to take into account when we return to our main questions. For the moment we may notice that the greatest of photographers was the least of craftsmen.
Hill made pictorial photography acceptable because he was a true artist working in a respectable tradition. The result achieved by a false artist working in a degraded tradition may be seen in Rejlander’s famous, thirty negative composite photography, "Two Ways of Life.” It was the sensation of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 and was bought by Queen Victoria. Rejlander did not require such an elaborate stage in order to display a vulgarity which we cannot, alas, call unique, but which has about it something final and unsurpassable. Even in the kind of simple subject which the camera can compass, he managed to produce that distortion of tone, that littleness and shininess, and that squalid obviousness of sentiment which were the peculiar achievements of mid19th century popular painting.
Photography reflected almost every mode of vision in 19th century art. The result is not very flattering to English painting. In looking through the artisticphotographs of the period it is hard to remember that we are not turning over back numbers of the ROYAL ACADEMY ILLUSTRATED: with this difference, that whereas the favourite painters of the Academy did have one line which they stuck to (if they were wise)—be it sheep in the snow or ships in full sail or silver birches, each of which must have originally involved some real conviction, the academic photographers were willing and able to try any style. An example by one of the most famous of Victorian photographers, H. P. Robinson, will illustrate this: first his composite photograph "Fading Away” (1858), which is in the "Keepsake” style, based on Millais. Like some of the earliest preRaphaelite paintings, it caused a scandal. Although the Victorian public had such an insatiable appetite for dying girls that they demanded at least three a month in wood engravings, the spectacle of one in a photograph was considered very shocking. Curiously enough this is precisely the subject which, four years earlier, Delacroix in his journal had given as an instance of something which the camera could not do. It would lose, he said, at every point, for whereas the painter would be, in imagination, an actor in the scene, and would see only what moved him, the camera would include everything. Actually Robinson has shown considerable skill in eliminating the inessential, and the realism of detail harmonizes well with the pre-Raphaelite style in which the whole is conceived. If Robinson had imitated, shall we say, Holman Hunt, instead of the sentimental style of Fred Walker, which could not survive the realism of photography, he might have produced remarkable results.
• Although it is generally supposed today that the so-called pictorial photographers were on the wrong lines, we have only to read the current references to the subject in the ’fifties and ’sixties to see why a self respecting professional went to such length to be "artistic.” The rage for securing one’s likeness had turned photography into a large industry. One photographer used to take ninetyseven negatives in eight hours, and one company is recorded to have taken four dozen negatives of Lord Palmerston at a single sitting. When we remember the difficulty of preparing and developing wet collodion plates it will be realized that this rate of production left very little time for thought or originality in the lighting arrangement of each photograph. It must have seemed that photography could be redeemed for art only by the denial of those qualities which had led to its degradation. For posterity the situation was saved by the amateur. The fact, already noted, that photography was not a craft meant that the distinction between amateur and professional was really no more than economic. The amateur had time to concentrate on those aspects of his art which were likely to give permanence.
Two of these amateurs are remembered as genuine artists: Lewis Carroll and Mrs. Cameron. The former followed the tradition of Octavius Hill, but with a more evolved equipment, which gave his work a more purely photographic quality. The underlying vision had changed from Raeburn to that of the Victorian illustrators, but there is the same care in pose and lighting and the same feeling for texture.
In contrast to Lewis Carroll’s fastidious art was the rich, irregular romanticism of Mrs. Cameron. Instead of the daughters of rural deans, she loved to photograph the prophets of Victorianism. Like all those who tried to keep alive the soul in the deadening atmosphere of the ’sixties and ’seventies, she believed • It is significant that Octavius Hill, Lewis Carroll, and Mrs. Cameron are all remembered for their portraits. But Fox Talbot invented photography in order to record picturesque landscapes, and his lead was followed by Hill, whose Edinburgh landscapes have the same character of dramatic poetry as all his work. Amongst Daguerre’s earliest works were views of Paris suburbs which are halfway between the etchings of Meryon and the paintings of Utrillo. There is a subtle reason for the relatively small proportion of landscape photographs. As a subject, pure landscape depends almost entirely on the responses of the artist. A literal, or as we say, photographic record may occasionally interest us by its extreme sharpness of definition. Frith’s photographs of Egypt, taken in the ’fifties, are such miracles in this respect that they give us that hallucination of superior physical powers which is said to be one of the pleasant results of opium. The realism of the camera becomes sur-realism, and resemblance to the paintings of Salvador Dali is not accidental. But, in general, an absolutely clear and direct photograph of a landscape is of no more than documentary interest. Landscape becomes art only when it reflects the mind of the artist; and, after Octavius Hill, the photographer of landscape was concerned only to provide the secondary
that the greatest living painter was G. F. Watts. Mrs. Cameron shared his belief in the greatness of her sitters. "When I have such men before me,” she wrote of Carlyle, "my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.” I think if we compare her photograph of Carlyle with Watts’ portrait, and ask which came nearer to recording the greatness of the inner man, the answer is Mrs. Cameron. The actual means by which such duty was done were, first, a much larger image than had been usual (she may almost be said to have invented the "close-up”) and then, remarkable feeling for lighting, in which character, plasticity, and dramatic effect were all united. This was one of the ways in which she eliminated accidents and trivialities. The other, perhaps inseparable from it, was in the end of more doubtful value. She says 'When focusing, and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.” It is always dangerous to deny a medium its full potentialities; and Mrs. Cameron’s discovery had unfortunate results at the beginning of this century. But she succeeded. She was an artist and a hero worshipper. "I handled my lens,” she says, "with a tender ardour.” As a result, her portraits really belong to all time—a very rare attribute in a photograph. They are as near to ideal art as the camera can go. Unfortunately she wanted to go nearer still. The results prove, even more conclusively than Rejlander’s grotesque concoctions, that photography is incompatible with the European tradition of imaginative art. Her illustrations, including those she did for Tennyson’s IDYLLS OF THE KING, are simply embarrassing, for in spite of all her pains in choosing and posing her models, they remain likenesses of individuals, with all their imperfections on their heads. reflexion of what some landscape painter had seen. As with subject painting, he provides an index of which artists had most persuasively influenced the popular vision. It was, I suppose, the work of the Barbizon School which lay behind the average mid-nineteenth century conception of what makes an acceptable landscape, in particular the work of Daubigny. We can hardly realize how artful his rather commonplace-looking orchards and rivers are till we learn how much labor and how many superimposed printings it took the photographer Silvy to achieve a similar effect. And the camera can easily transfer its allegiance from Millais to Monet; it can even adapt itself to what seems the highly formalized style of Chinese painting. [Or the "drip and run" school of Pollack. Editor’s note.]
Of all influences on early twentieth century photography the most persuasive was that of Whistler. His charm lay in the fact that his misty simplifications were at the opposite pole to the sharply focused detail of hack photographers. But sharp focus is not the only thing that the camera can do. It can render most delicate effects of tone, and it permits of free choice in the disposition of area. These were two of Whistler’s gifts, and his design has that element of taste, achieved by trial and error, that is within the province of the camera.
• Whistler’s influence is the culmination of what I may call the Fox Talbot tradition—the school of photography which, for better and for worse, was influenced by painting. It flourished chiefly in England, and perhaps some of its unsuccess was due simply to the badness of English art during the period. But, in part, it was also due to the fact that it denied the camera one of its chief potentialities: clear definition. This latter the Daguerre tradition maintained for purely commercial reasons. 7he public liked the maximum of sharp detail and most prosaic rendering possible. But, because it lacked all aesthetic pretensions. French photography never became arty, and in the end developed a style of its own. And whereas in England the photographers’ vision was completely subordinated to painting, in France the greatest painters of the nineteenth century were deeply influenced by the camera. The importance of photography and the music of Mozart were perhaps the only two matters on which Ingres and Delacroix agreed. Delacroix, of course, never supposed that the photograph could be an end in itself: logically enough, for he had always rejected, with penetrating critical insight, the prevailing doctrine of realism. But he was the first to see how photographs could help the painter by revealing characteristics which the eye had overlooked: he found them, he said, more valuable than the formalized attitudes in Marc Antonio’s engravings. His remark that they are invaluable to painters who work from memory has had a good deal more justification than is commonly realized ; and his statement that they show the exact degree of tightness and softness in the modelling is borne out in the work of his great rival.
• Ingres was the first great artist in whose work the influence of photography is apparent. It provided a stimulus to his style at a moment when one was badly needed. The qualities of modelling spoken of by Delacroix give his "Madame Gonse" a character new in European painting. In "Madam Reiset,” pose, illumination, and the whole character of the head are so close to a Daguerreotype that in a small reproduction it is hard to believe that it is a painting. Was Ingres simply imitating a photograph? The problem is a little more intricate than that. Thirty years before the invention of photography Ingres had adopted a system of illumination from in front in order to bring out the maximum of drawing, and it was partly due to his immense prestige that French photographers accepted this system, instead of the more dramatic lighting which Hill took from Raeburn. So, by a familiar historical process, Ingres became influenced by his own creation.
A similar interaction seems to have taken place with Courbet. Being committed to a doctrine of absolute realism he could not ignore the camera, although fortunately for him he was too muddle headed to realize its logical implications. He is one of the first artists whose letters record the use of photography, and I have seen it stated (but cannot verify the reference) that the nude which forms the central figure of his great "Atelier” was painted from a photograph. Certainly the relationship between the earliest photographs of the nude and Courbet’s paintings is very close. But then these photographs themselves have a marked style and period flavor. One may say that this way of looking—the selection of the model, the posing, the lighting—were all part of the prevailing fashion. But, in the end, almost everything in fashion depends on the inventive powers of an individual artist, so perhaps, after all, and in France too, the photographer had been unconsciously influenced by the painter.
It is generally said that the great artist who profited most from the camera was Degas. He began, like Ingres, by studying Daguerreotypes; and the little picture in the National Gallery representing Princess Metternich, is a copy of an Ambrotype: Degas had never seen the sitter. The important fact is, however, that Degas recognized the value, to painting, of the snapshot.
Just as Delacroix realized that the photograph furnished the painter’s memory with details and characteristics which he might not have observed, so Degas saw that the snapshot revealed certain gestures, movements, and expressions too transitory even for his eye to seize upon. He went further, and found in snapshots, as Ingres had found in Daguerreotypes, a new basis of style. Free and accidentallooking composition, taken in conjunction with the design of Japanese prints which had recently been "discovered,” was a final liberation from the Renaissance pyramid and the intricate symmetry of Poussin.
I say "snapshots,” but the dry-plate camera, upon which the real snapshot depends, was not in use until the ’eighties; the source of inspiration was actually the stereoscopic camera, from which the first prints of action were obtained. It was also the stereoscope which influenced the impressionists, particularly Pissaro in his pictures of Paris boulevards. When the dry plate at last appeared, it confirmed, in a remarkable way, Degas’ vision.
• This was a moment at which photography might have had a second golden age. All the early writers on the subject had pointed out that although the camera could record the simulacrum of life it could not render the essence of life, which was movement. And then, with the dry plate, it was in this above all that the photographer could excel the painter, for his instrument could record gestures, movements and expressions which even Degas could not observe. What an extraordinary series of prints might have come down to us if one photographer had accepted the inspiration of Degas and Toulouse Lautrec, and had combined a pictorial sense with the truth revealing properties of the medium. But, alas, there was no D. O. Hill of the dry plate. [The Frenchman Atget, even if he proves to be no second Hill, created a place in history at this point that needs to be considered. Editor's note.} The man who came closest to this title was the American photographer, Stieglitz, who saw the point, but was impeded by an incurable artiness. His photograph of a ship full of immigrants, lor example, although it really was taken on the spot, looks uncomfortably like a film shot—which may be a tribute to the films, but is more likely the proof of a certain self-consciousness in the photographer.
1914 was the year when the nineteenth century ended, for photography as well as everything else. When we emerged after the War there was a new type of camera and a new type of cameraman. In looking through some thousands of press photographs in preparation for this paper I found I could spot infallibly those which were taken before 1914, because they were still controlled by some sense of the traditional pictorial design. The photographer felt that his subject had momentarily come to rest, or taken up a new existence within a frame. Things still existed for him in space. Now they exist only in time.
The modern press photographer is engaged in snipping little bits off an endless belt of time. To help him do so, he has faster shutters and faster films, and he is quite ready to sacrifice depth of focus (a spatial quality) if, in compensation, he can catch a more rapid movement. The result is an almost complete annihilation of the pictorial sense. Of the press photographs I examined, there were many which were painfully, but irresistibly pathetic. A photograph of a murderer returning to his mother after twenty years in prison records expressions which only Rembrandt could have conveyed; and how we wish it were Rembrandt, so that we might be spared all the hideous and trivial detail which comes between us and the sublimation of tragedy. Crude, chaotic, vulgar, and monotonous as street noises, they are evidence of an immense vitality: but they certainly are not art.
• I will now try to summarize a few of the conclusions which may be drawn from this short historical survey. First, and most obvious, photography is entirely unsuited to what may be called ideal art. I need not labor the point that it cannot deal with high imaginative subjects drawn from Christian legend, from poetry or ancient history. The total inadequacy of the camera in this respect confirms, I think, the high place once given to historical painting. Photography may have destroyed the basis of Sir Joshua Reynold’s art—the art of portraiture —but it has reinforced the argument of his DISCOURSES. HOW gladly Hayden would have availed himself of the argument that whereas the minor branches of the art could be rivaled by a soulless box, the high vocation to which he devoted his life and his friend’s money remained inviolate. However, the question is not quite so simple as that, because there are other branches of ideal art where the camera is equally insufficient—indeed this degree of insufficiency serves to remind us how ideal they are. Of these none has proved more irresistible, and a more inevitable, form of error than the nude. From Daguerre onwards, photographers have been unable to see why a theme which has provided so many masterpieces of European art, from the Greeks onwards, should not be perfectly suited to their medium. The subject was attractive in itself, and was determinable by selection, arrangement, lighting—all those activities which are under the photographer’s control. And yet photographs of the nude, I hardly need remind you, are almost always unsuccessful, and the greater the efforts to make them artistic, the more ineffective they become. Curiously enough photographic nudes are like fashions in dress—every age seems able to swallow its own, but those of twenty years earlier look ridiculous.
Photography shows that Still Life is also a branch of ideal art. The ingredients being in themselves of no interest, they have to be completely transformed by the artist’s pictorial imagination. The photographer’s resources—choice, arrangement, lighting—are not enough to work this miracle. Even the most naive photographers do not suppose that they can do much with the fruit and humble crockery that furnished the masterpieces of Chardin and Cézanne, but they have not given up hope that by the use of already simplified shapes—barrels, buckets, machinery—they may achieve the kind of construction which underlies all ideal art. As an example, we may take a print by Moholy Nagy or a photogram. Whether or not one is in sympathy with the style of negation, one must surely concede that the attempt to make the camera, with all its power of subie record, aspire to the condition of a blueprint was singularly ill judged.
Since the year 1420, many of the greatest painters who have ever lived are remembered chiefly by their portraits. Now the essence of a portrait is that it represents an individual human soul. The trouble with Mrs. Cameron’s "Rosebud Girls” was that they remained individual models. But a portrait cannot be too individual. A generalized portrait is as much a failure as a particularized nude. Portraiture is not at all a "pure” art, and our responses to it are complex. I suppose that it might be argued that our response to portraiture is purest when we are ignorant of the sitter portrayed and the non-aesthetic element of recognition is excluded. It is true that we know nothing, except what the portrait tells us about Rembrandt’s Jan Six: but is the added emotion which we feel in front of Rembrandt’s own ravaged visage no part of our total aesthetic experience? I really don’t know, and so I do not write off as unimportant that photographs give us information about people that interest us. For this reason we are grateful to that fascinating eccentric, the friend of Baudelaire, and of Constantin Guys, who worked under the name of Nadar. Through him, we feel that we know the life of the Second Empire, Delacroix, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rossini, and a dozen others: it is the photographs of Nadar and Carjat which have stamped them on our minds as firmly as Holbein has moulded our images of Henry VIII and his court, or Vandyck the circle of Charles I. Of course one can admire a portrait photograph of a character in whom one is only slightly interested, but the great fascination of photographic portraits is that they enable us to think, "so that is what, say, Livingstone, really looked like." Not all photographs provoke this comment. Now I am not for a moment denying that portraits by any of the great painters, Van Eyck, Holbein, Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, are far superior to any photograph. Even if we had 100 photos of Innocent X they would not tell us as much about him as a single Velasquez. A picture has specific pictorial virtues, and it has the human quality of one mind brought to bear on another.
• The truth is that we do not turn to photography because it is a small and flat imitation of what we have seen, but because it deals with life. For this reason, if Still Life provides the dullest photographs, the most exciting are those which represent life in movement. But here, as I have suggested, we reach a point where there is a conflict between space and time. This is the problem which Lessing examined in that great piece of art-criticism, the LAOCOON, and if we remember his arguments why the visual arts deal with existence in space, we can identify the cause of our uneasiness before those photographs in which existence is sacrificed to momentary action. A very remarkable snapshot of Mr. Lloyd George tells you a good deal about him in his later years, but compared to a photograph by Hill or Mrs. Cameron it has lost the quality of a work of art, because it seems to have no independent existence. It exists only by a momentary appeal to us: it was taken, and is gone, in a flash. Whereas Mrs. Cameron’s "Blumenthal’’ is there forever. Many of the press photographs taken in the last ten years have extended our feelings of wonder and pity, and have even given us a shock of visual excitement. But we do not often cut out such photographs for prolonged contemplation; on the other hand if you go to an artist’s studio, it is ten to one you will find torn out press photographs pinned up on the walls. And I think the reason for this is just what it seems. The photograph is a piece of raw material. The artist likes it precisely because he can re-shape it, because it is still in a state to receive the imprint of his mind. And for the same reason we throw it aside after a single interested glance.
This, I think, helps us towards an answer to the question—the banal, but not quite meaningless question—with which this paper began: "Is photography an art?” The short answer is: "Yes, but an incomplete one.” It is to a large extent a purveyor of raw material ; and the rawer the material the truer it is to its own nature. The photographer may select, emphasize, arrange. But great as is his control over the medium, there is always something very important which is outside his control: the element of transforming in the doing, which is not merely a matter of craftsmanship, but is the most direct communication of the painter’s personality, and of his power to set experience in order. This, I think, accounts for another conclusion which seems to have emerged from our backward glance: that, except in scientific terms, the photographer has never invented a new way of seeing. His vision is derived—directly or unconsciously—from that of painters: and his success depends very largely upon whether the painter’s vision he is following can be adequately rendered by the camera or not. Now, the painter comes to see only thru the struggle of doing: this is what we mean when we say that a painter gradually achieves his own style. But the photographer is the victim of a kind of facile eclectism. The change of vision achieved by the long pains of stylistic evolution which lie between Millais and the latest Claude Monets could be achieved simply by standing in the right place at the right time and pressing a button. No wonder a photograph cannot have quite the depth of personal communication of a great painting.
To the objection that Sir Clark's great photographers seemed to end with Julia Margaret Cameron he explained that in order to keep within the limits of a lecture he confined his study to the painting and photography of the 19th century—which as he said, ended in 1914. The conclusions that he draws, then, are reasonably valid for photography up to that time.
When it ivas suggested that he continue the study, he responded with a hope that someday there ivould be time. It would be interesting to see if his conclusions change, and what sharp observations he would make when he considered the vast amount of photography done so far in the 20th century. It would be fascinating to see how he would trace the Fox Talbot tradition, as he calls it, of painting-oriented photography, or pictorialism, to its present influence by the non-objective school ; and then to see how he would trace the "Daguerre tradition” thru the photojournalists and the work of Paul Strand and Edward Weston and Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams. It would be fabulous to watch his reactions to portrait photography when he saw the Stiegliz series on the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, the portraits of Strand and Weston and the occasional isolated examples from many photographers such as Man Ray’s Picasso. Would he still say that the Hill’s and Cameron’s were the best portrait photography could do, or still say that a hundred photographs by Stieglitz of Pope Innocent X would reveal less than one painting by Velasquez?
We do not know whether he ivill ever continue his study or not. It is to be hoped that he does, because the photography of the 20th century, shot full of interacting influences, the creative turmoil of the twenties, the birth of a new era, the emergence of neiv ivorld powers and all the rest ivill take the best efforts of an expert to unravel.
