Digital Renaissance

We now live in a period of the digital Renaissance of the image in which photography differs from Renaissance painting in two respects. In photography, the symbols have been replaced by metaphors and, secondly, the interpretation of photography is confused by the direct connection that the photo has with time and light. Photography is, therefore, a different medium than painting. It is striking that almost all theoreticians of photography have expressed suspicion about art. They wanted to draw photography away from the jargon of iconographic art theory to emphasise the unique position of photography. (The problem with iconography is that it has remained apolitical. It is an interpretation of art, without involving the social context of production.)

The first critic who separated the particular position of photography from art was Walter Benjamin, who was trained in Marxism. He states that the most crucial aspect of photography should be the caption, with which he wanted to indicate that the notion of photography strongly depends on the textual context in which the photograph is placed. He was suspicious of an aesthetic approach to photography, because, in this way, photography is placed outside the context of the story and is only considered as art, understood as beauty, as esthetical experience. Understood as aesthetics, the photography becomes "creative", according to Benjamin; it becomes a form of artistic journalism. "The world is beautiful - that's the password," he writes in his famous essay A Short History of Photography. (Benjamin, 1931) The main objection Benjamin had to the aestheticisation of photography was that it was taken out of the political context and brought into the context of art.

Also, Roland Barthes concluded that viewing photography within the context of art was tricky. Not so much because of the de-contextualisation of the photograph, but because of the anaesthesia of the hallucinating power of photography. “Society is concerned to tame the photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. To do this, it possesses two means. The first consists of making photography into art, for art is mad. Whence the photographer’s insistence on his rivalry with the artist, on subjecting himself to the rhetoric of painting and its sublimated mode of exhibition.” (Barthes, 1980). Although Barthes made his remark in his anti-semiotic period, it is a striking analysis.

Susan Sontag was also a fierce critic of the annexation of photography by the art world. She fiercely criticised photographers like Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson. According to her, Weston mistakenly thought he was subversive, and surrealist photojournalist Cartier-Bresson naively thought that he was going to discover the ‘structure of the world’. She blames the photographers for not making a difference between making the world beautiful and unmasking it, two opposite movements. Sontag as well points at the danger of the de-contextualisation of photography, inspired by the admiration of the beauty of the single photograph. “Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted.” This wrote Sontag in her famous collection of essays On photography. (Sontag, 1979)

The world is being turned into a department store where every item is subjected to aesthetic appreciation. According to Sontag, a beautiful photo only produced emotional alienation and was unable to convey the truth. Sontag essentially took a suspicion of beauty on photography. According to her all photography in a consumer society was merely a perpetual discovery of beauty, including the beauty of the poor and miserable.

The domain of aesthetics

British critic John Berger, who became known for his popular TV program Ways of Seeing, also articulated the malicious relationship between photography and art in a socially critical way. He wrote in his book Understanding a Photograph: “It now seems clear that photography deserves to be considered as though it were not a fine art.” (Berger, 1967, p 17). Even though Berger thinks that the museum is only made for the nobility and exclude the mass, his attitude is less accusatory than that of Sontag and much more analytical. Berger refers to the absence of the symbols due to the unique physical connection with the reality of photography. While painting can consciously add symbols to the image, photography must work with the flat reality. Berger calls photography a collection of apparitions on a flat surface, which we must distinguish from the images of ancient cultures that saw the apparitions as signs. According to him, the Cartesian revolution has taken the meaning out of the phenomena and replaced it with rational calculations. That is why, according to Berger, art has withdrawn itself to the domain of aesthetics, precisely the subject of the study of iconologists. If photography is viewed as art, the signs in photography become fragmented: the aesthetic experience is personal. The universal meaning of the symbolic signs has been lost. Since the Renaissance, the phenomena have been reduced to coincidences, because the meaning has been taken out of the visible world. “The visible, however, deprived of any ontological function, was philosophy reduced to the area of aesthetics.” (Berger, 1967) This meant that the aesthetics took over the meaning. The appreciation of the world was incorporated in tot the context of beauty, which was assigned as the essence of fine art. “Thus, the reading of appearances became fragmented; they were no longer treated as a signifying whole.” (Berger, 1967) Photography, inscribed into the tradition of art, became treated as an area of esthetics. But this process has never been unambiguous. What exactly means the contexts of art?

Sales value‍

It is striking that the most influential critics of photography were suspicious of treating photography as art. Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag and Berger all see the danger of the depoliticisation of photography that results from the aesthetic annexation. But strikingly enough, we recently see the rise of documentary photography as art in galleries and museums, a phenomenon partly due to economic motives and partly due to the disappearance of the mass media audience. The most interesting analysis comes from John Berger because he links the impotence of the interpretation of photography to the demise of the symbolic interpretation that was inherent in the mythical world experience. Maybe a big historical step in thinking about the image, but the essence of the matter is not insignificant. In the art of painting, based on the survival of historical and cultural knowledge, the images were originally symbolically charged. As art became more individual and less religious, the symbolism was replaced by a very personal perception of reality, as a result of which the meaningful elements became metaphors: signs without universal meaning. This is precisely what happens if a single photograph is presented within the frame of aesthetics. The significance of metaphors in photography depends on the viewer's insight and personal history and is, therefore, individual. Meanings in the strict sense of the word cannot be given to the metaphors in photographic images, at least in the unique single photographs, presented as autonomous art. By omitting the political and historical context of photography, individual photos tend to be put in an aesthetic context, resulting in the disappearance of the meaning of the underlying story. That's why Walter Benjamin said that perhaps the subtitle should become the most essential thing in photography.
Interpreting photography as art might obscure meanings in documentary photography that is used as a means of communication to make statements about the world.

The photograph might be understood as a dialogue with art history and not as a dialogue with the world. Partly because of economic reasons, photographers tend to ignore the social context of their work when it is exposed in an art gallery.
Many galleries do not expose documentary photography because it is not regarded as art, read: has no sales value. Therefore, these forms of photography are trapped in a gap. That is why there are documentary photographers who avoid the definition of art. The Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian, said in an interview in The Financial Times: “I don't consider myself an artist. I see myself as a storyteller.” (Spence, 2016).

Art for Art’s sake

There is a general confusion about the concept of art. First, we have to address the confusion between art and fine art. The concept of fine art developed by Charles Batteux has contributed to a depreciation of the concept of art in photography. Batteux wrote the book Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principle (1746). "The laws of taste," Batteux argued, "have nothing but the imitation of beautiful nature as their object"; from which it follows that fine art, which focuses on taste, must imitate nature. In defining the fine arts, Batteux proposes that they are "essentially imitations of belle nature”. Fine art is representational, and it aims at providing pleasure. (Batteux, 1746, 2015)

From the fine art theory of Batteux followed the l’art pour l’art (art for art sake) principle, which stated that art should not be used for political or social purposes. The theory l’art pour l’art was a rejection of politicising art. It affirmed that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art could be void of moral implication and was allowed to be morally neutral.

Fine art had to contain three elements; it was a form of mimesis: art must reflect reality, art was a kind of expression and art was considered a study of form. This historical burden hovers over photography as well: photography has long been seen as a representation of reality. But nowadays photography has come to be the place for expression, combined with art as form, in the context of art galleries summarised under the name ‘fine art’.

Victor Burgin was one of the photo critics who campaigned against fine art and Batteux as the founder. Victor Burgin reacts in his book Thinking Photography and in The end of Art Theory, against Batteux, seeing him as the source of inspiration for modernism formulated by Clement Greenberg. Modernism, roughly from the beginning of the 20th century to around 1980 when postmodernism emerges, is an art movement that primarily investigates form and research into the medium, matter itself.

We need a different approach to the issue. The fear of interpreting photography as art is largely the result of a limited concept of the function of art. The narrative context of the photo should form an essential part of the concept of "photography as art". By taking art photography out of its autonomous cocoon ("an autonomous photo must be able to stand on its own") and placing it explicitly in a social context. Photos do not have to be interpreted in an aesthetic jargon if they are declared autonomous but can remain in the context in which they were made.

The opposites of art photography and documentary photography are just two poles of an apparent contradiction. This is what Alan Sekula said in Thinking Photography (Sekula, 1982). He called both branches of photography a myth: the symbolist myth and the realist myth.

Marxist aesthetics

Photography as an art can also be socially motivated and have an urge to change the world. Writer George Orwell once said: ‘“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” (Orwell, 1946). This guideline could prevent the tendency to banish art photography from political discourse and isolate it in the safe, comfortable space of the art trade, which in itself is also a political attitude. In the context of the art as fine art, as the quest for unpolitical beauty, art photography becomes comfortable, worry-free, l’art pour l’art.

Marxist aesthetics, separated from the Marxist economic theory, can come to help. Unlike most of the classic art theories, that try to examine art from within, the Marxist theory of art is more sociological of nature. The Marxist aesthetics try to understand art as a historical phenomenon and a social construction embedded in the economic world. (Graham, 1997). The Marxist school finds that the term ‘art’ supposes a form of abstract universal reality which is not to be found anywhere, because art has a social function and therefore changes according to the societal reality. And that is what appears to be often the core of (documentary) photography.

Where Walter Benjamin wrote his seminal essay, but it was philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who elaborated more on a philosophical theory of art. Herbert Marcuse expressed in his book The Aesthetic Dimension (Marcuse, 1978) his concerns about the function of art in a world ‘of misery’. Criticising the orthodox approach to art, (and also the orthodox Marxist theory) he presents a theory about art in which he sees the political potential of art in art itself. Even though he limited himself mainly to literature, we can extrapolate his thoughts to the visual arts. Marcuse points out that art can break the dominant view, also referred to as ideology, of what reality is supposed to be: “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.”

Marcuse is convinced of the emancipatory character of art and argues against the art for art sake: “In this sense art is "art for art's sake" inasmuch as the aesthetic form reveals tabooed and repressed dimensions of reality: aspects of liberation.” For Marcuse, it is clear that art is a vehicle that can change the consciousness of the people. This change aims at a system in which the sensibility, the imagination and the reason are emancipated from the rule of exploitation. Art speaks in the form of illusion, a fictitious reality, but this fiction, this autonomy is always grounded in the social and political reality.

Notable in his theory is the redefining of the classical concept of beauty. In the opinion of Marcuse beauty pertains to the domain of Eros, and as such, it rebels against the reality principle of domination. The work of art speaks the liberating language. He concludes: “If people were free, then art would be the form and expression of their freedom.”

The theory of Marcuse could be summed up in this statement: “The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension.” With this, he says that art is not aliened from the political sphere, but that the aesthetical dimension is the language of art that has and should have a political and social impact on our society.

The Marxist theory seems new, but in the history of art bourgeois beauty as the primary purpose never has been the only motive. As Umberto Eco has pointed out in his elaborate overview of the history of beauty. About the avant-garde, Eco states correctly “On the contrary, its (avant-garde art) aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes.” (Eco, 2004)

The window as a mirror

The widespread separation of photography into two oppositional fields, the autonomous and the documentary, art photography and pure photography, can no longer be upheld. In fact, John Szarkowski, when he made a distinction between the romantic photography, used as a means of expression, embodied by Aperture editor Minor White and realist photography as an exploration of the world, represented by Robert Frank, never meant to separate these two visions completely. (Szarkowski, 1978). At the end of his famous introduction, he writes: “The intention of this analysis has not been to divide photography into two parts. On the contrary, it has been to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles.” This means that the separation of photography in into windows, looking to the world, and mirrors, looking inside, has never been rigorous. In recent times the supposed distinction has even diminished, as photography has been redefined as a storytelling tool, in which the story can be documentary as well as personal. We can read modern, 21st-century photography in the context of both: of art and documentary. It is striking that even though some documentary photographers vehemently reject the title of art photographer, others use the title with proud, saying that being an artist frees them from the task of describing the world realistically. Famous is the quote of photographer and artist Andres Serrano: “I’ve never called myself a photographer. I studied painting and sculpture and see myself as an artist with a camera.” (Serrano, 2020). As is evident in his work, being an artist does not imply a non-political attitude.

It is time to respond to the old-school Marxist critics who feared the contextualisation of photography in the realm of art and who wanted to purify photography as a documentary tool that was able to describe and criticise the real world. The task of commenting on the political and social world also falls within the realm of art photography. But the term ‘art’ may be distinguished from the term ‘fine art’, the latter being incorporated into the world of market values and commodities and less into that of the critical attitude of the avant-garde. But even here the separation can be thin. The landscape photography of Ansel Adams, always criticised as being romantic idealist fine artworks, has also played an essential role in defence of the national parks in the USA.

Photography should now be seen as a full art discipline, be it an art form or a documentary form. Incorporating photography into the art world may be seen as the liberation of the documentary photographer. In the digital age, the documentary photographer is not limited anymore to the realist truth that photos were supposed to convey, solving the problem Susan Sontag posed as the impossible task of photography to bring beauty and tell the truth at the same time.

The documentary image that brought the observable world to the fore in modernist tradition has acquired a different status in the digital age. The digitally edited photo is the representation of the photographer's view. This is not only due to digitisation as a technical possibility but also to an overall change in culture, a change in the code used to read photography. This change also has to do with the shift from concerned photography to the world of art photography; the shift from the photo as a document to the photo as an expression of art. The documentary photographer has, in a certain way, become an autonomous artist who exposes his vision in his photographic works. The realism in his images now only seems like a style, as Walker Evans said about his work.

How photography is understood depends strongly on the context of the display of the work. The ultimate emancipation of photography as an art medium could be that the story of the photo comes to the fore and not the supposed relation to reality. In this way, all forms of visual photography become art, whereby the concept of art must be understood as authentic visual communication. Photography is a medium visual art in which the photographer can be subjective, personal, investigative, descriptive, truthful, spiritual and politically concerned at the same time.

Bibliography

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Marcuse, H. (1978). In The Aesthetic Dimension.  Beacon Press.

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Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Vintage  Publishing.

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Serrano, A. (2020). Andres Serrano, biography.  From Andres Serrano: http://andresserrano.org/biography