Painting versus photography: which is better?
This question cantinas two basic misunderstandings, one concerning the nature of painting and the other, the nature of photography. It implies that the purpose of painting is merely to depict a place, a scene, or a person with as much verisimilitude as possible; that the invention of photography now enables this to be achieved more exactly, in color was well as in black and white, and therefore photography has superseded painting. The truth is that painting and photography have entirely different functions.
The functions of photography in the modern world are many and varied. It is true that at one time the photographer, whether amateur or professional, was concerned largely with portraiture and to record places and scenes; every process, from preparing the photo-paper to coating the printed picture, was carried out by the photographer himself. This, of course, restricted the scope, quality and operation of photography. Today, every requirement is commercially produced, and processing is no concern of the individual — it has become a purely commercial concern, and has become so highly developed that, in conjunction with modern cameras, it has been able to extend vastly the scope and use of photography. When the modern use of photography for aerial, industrial, microscopic, underwater, astronomical, architectural, time-lapse, television, the press, atomic research, and a thousand and one other purposes is considered, it is at once seen that social and pictorial photography is relatively inconsequential, and confined chiefly to magazine and newspaper work when quantity is considered.
Secondly, the old adage that ‘the camera cannot lie’ and therefore that it always reveals the truth about a person, a scene, or an object, is totally untrue. While it is true that the camera must record the image in front of it, the photograph itself will vary enormously according to lighting, speed, aperture and focal depth used, as well as the speed of the film and the grain of the paper. Photographs can be ‘touched up,’ faked and altered out of all recognition; there are ways in which a variety of effects can be produced when the same subjects is dealt with. The camera can and does like, in the hands of the expert who may wish to flatter or cheat.
Thirdly, a photograph is a temporary production, while a painting is permanent, and will last for centuries, provided pigmentation is good and paints are correctly mixed. After a few years, photographs tend to blur and fade off, and there is no satisfactory method of curing this tendency.
But fourthly, and this is the most important point, no artist worthy of the name is ever content with pure representation, except those whose task is to produce calendars or attractive pictures fro chocolate-boxes. It is true that before the advent of modern art, great attention was paid by the artist to focus on intricate and often fascinating details; brushwork was fine and the object was partly that of exact representation. But even then, the artist was at pains to paint in appropriate lighting, compose his scenes very carefully for artistic effect, if necessary, altering them in detail to produce what he wanted or exclude what he didn’t want. In this, even the ‘artistic’ photographer is limited; in fact, by banally recording only what it ‘sees’, the camera is a poor tool in comparison with paint-brush.
But when the painter talks of ‘painting what he sees’ he means something completely different. By ‘seeing’, he means the effects the salient features of the subject have, not on his vision, but on his emotions, and in the case of certain forms of modern art, on his subconscious mind. Thus, at its simplest, this means that the artist can emphasize certain aspects of a sitter which appear to him to be characteristic, and tone down those which seem unimportant, irrelevant, or dull. He can deal in much the same way with a landscape.
He can make a certain shape, or color of light dominate, he can simplify, he can add overtones of mystery, or harshness, or brightness, or pathos, or despair, or any of a whole gamut of the personal emotions inspired in him by the work. Provided, these are intelligible, the result must raise painting as an artistic form, high above the level of photography, a mundane and rather commercial science in comparison.
