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Photography and Beauty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Étienne Gilson
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Extract

In advocating the difficult art of defining concepts Socrates started a revolution which continues to our day. The implementation of this art is both difficult and thankless because it deprives man of the pleasure of talking without knowing what he is speaking about, a factor which contributes a good deal to the art of conversation. Let us begin, therefore, by making clear that our reflections do not aim at modifying experience as such. All photographers, professional or otherwise, who believe they have the right to the title of artist, are not only justified in their claim to a certain degree, but may reserve the right to say they are artists in any sense they may wish to give the word. One simply begs permission for the philosopher, meticulous in his use of words, to ask himself whether photography is truly an art and if so, in what sense?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 14 , Issue 55 , September 1966 , pp. 28 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 André Vigneau, Une brève histoire de l'art de Niepce à nos jours, with preface by Jean Cassou (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1963). This pleasant volume contains 192 pages of text and 173 illustrations. The critical study of Mr. Jean Keim, which I have mentioned is entitled "La photographie est aussi un art," Critique, August-September (1964), 207 ss.

2 On this text by François Arago, see Jean A. Keim's essay, so valuable in many ways on "Photography and Reality," in Diogenes, 50 (1965), pp. 64-78.

3 Numerous works on photography could be quoted. However, if the question at hand is to describe photography as it is, independently of its possible utilizations for various purposes and ends which are not directly its own, I recommend in particular Alfredo Ornano's Il libro della foto…, fifth edition, revised and augmented by Dr. Ing. Federico Ferrero, Ulrico Hoepli (Milano, 1965). All amateur photographers will recognize at once in this book the accepted principles of the technique which he himself has been using in some cases for many years; cameras, lenses, emulsions, exposure, negatives and positives, etc. The first camera I ever used, as a child, was called Franceville. It was a simple camera obscura with a hole that served as a lens. The shutter was a small metal plate which was raised and lowered with a finger.

4 "Cameras Don't Take Pictures," this title of a recent essay by Paul Byers (The Columbia University Forum, 9, 1966, 1, pp. 27-31) clearly indicates the author's tendencies (a professional photographer who has long collaborated with specialists of the behavioral sciences). It is quite certain that this type of photo graphy has other goals than the taking of snapshots. But one must round out this happy formula by saying: "Cameras don't take pictures, but they make them." A similar remark can be applied to the amusing metaphor recently pro-pounded by a printer of art books: "lens painting." Lenses will paint the day that paint-brushes make photographs.

5 A. Vigneau, Une brève histoire de l'art etc., p. 70: Photograph by Delacroix. Study after the model. Bibliothèque Nationale. As a working photograph for a painter, compare the Modèle photographié pour Delacroix by Eugène Durrieu (circa 1854); reproduced in Yvan Christ's L'âge d'or de la photographie (Paris, Vincent, Fréal and Co., 1965), p. 75.

6 From P. Lacey, op. cit., p. 8 and p. 25. There are numerous examples in P. Lacey's book. Thomas Eakins, first a painter, later Professor of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is represented by two nudes (one of which in the style of Boucher) visibly inspired by painting (pp. 40-42). On the other hand, Richard Weston (pp. 74-75) welds as perfectly as possible a perfect photographic technique with the natural beauty of the model who is served by this technique. There is also a nude figure by Emmanuel Sougez, born in Bordeaux in 1889, (pp. 106-107), whose modelling is of extraordinary beauty. A typical case is that of J. Frederick Smith of New York, who specializes in commercial art. His formula is simple: good photographs of aesthetically perfect female models according to the taste of the day. Smith prefers svelte models because their thinness remains feminine without accentuating female characteristics: "While feminine, it is not too emphatically female." (op. cit., p. 200). Admirers of Bonnard will be amused to imagine what the painter might have done with the model of Willy Ronis (Nu, 1935), in André Vigneau, Une brève histoire de l'art, p. 163.

7 Cahiers de Charles Du Bos, 10 (1966) 36.

8 R. Gouriou, La photographie et les droits d'auteur, Librairie générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence (Paris, 1959). For the general notion of art implied in our remarks on photography we refer the reader to our earlier writings: Peinture et réalité (Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958); Les arts du beau (same publisher, 1963); Matières et formes, poïétiques particulières des arts majeurs (same publisher, 1964). These three works have appeared in English: one, Painting and Reality, in the Bollingen Series, as well as in a Meridian paperback; the other two were published by Scribner's Sons, New York City.