Photography-definitve art[/caption]Photography, although shunned by the establishment in its infancy, became the quintessential, defining art of the twentieth century.
This was not simply because photography’s roots were in the decades immediately preceding the year 1900, nor that it blossomed, came to maturity and ultimately transformed with the aging of the century itself.
Photography did what any great art must do: it unified the Apollonian and Dionysian understandings of the universe in one statement. These conceptions, and ways of conceiving, are symbiotic while opposed, like the shapes in the yin-yang symbol. The Apollonian is abstract, transcendent, mathematical, logical, while the Dionysian is real, immanent, cannot be understood by maths or physics and utterly passionate. Every facet of the one has a mirror opposite in the other, and the struggle for artists is to reconcile these into something that is not only complete, but greater than the mere sum of its parts.
Ansel Adams said that photography was a mixture of art, science and witchcraft, and how right he was. That grand old man, an inspiration to me both as an artist and a teacher, had much of great worth to say about art and life. I was brought up into photography when it was an arcane world full of mystery and hidden lore. My mother’s milk, in the form of ID-11 and hypo, I imbibed in the velvety gloom of the darkroom, moist and humid, where the deep orange safelight and the ticking of the clock served as ever-present reminder that this was indeed a womb, a place where creation happened.
This of course, is utterly Dionysian, for the face behind it is none other than that of the Goddess herself. The Goddess is not, as some represent her, the beatific and ever-forgiving Mother, or at least she is not just that. She is the primal force of creation, the screaming torment of parturition, Camille Paglia’s fetid swamp where sperm and ovum unite in the bubbling blind darkness. She is birth, the first blinding shock of light ad cold and reality, and she is death, the withering of everything and the return to the eternal darkness whence we came.
In her, birth and death are united, like the two faces of Janus, the doorward. That is why the Indian Goddess Kali carries on her belt the rotting skulls of the dead and why her most feared apparition for the Celts was the Morrigan, but not as young nubile or plentiful matron, which she also was, but the haggard crone, her womb dried and sterilised by age, her fecundity withered, whose appearance signalled the end of life. When Cu Chullainn, the greatest of the Fenians, saw her washing clothes in the river, he knew he would die that day, and so he did.
This terrifying place is the true home of creation, one of the worlds that the artist must inhabit. And photography, full of dark rooms and black boxes which take in the light and the life, even, according to many superstitions, steal and imprison the souls of those whose likeness is captured, is of that world. It is witchcraft indeed, yet not just that.
The other side of the coin is the Apollonian, for photography, in this classic sense, was not only about the dance of hands in light over the enlarging easel, but the rational and considered exploration of the hard and abstract rules of optics, sensitometry and chemistry. A photographer must understand, and be able to use creatively, focus, depth of field, exposure, the consequences of time and temperature on chemical reactions….the list is long and often arcane. This is the Apollonian world, of facts, figures, rules, laws, equations, of science.
The art, as I said, is in the reconciling of these fundamentally opposed schema. And in this, photography did something that no other art till then had done: it separated Reflex, the moment of creation, from Reflection, the consideration of the created. For every other visual artist, in every other discipline, Reflex and Reflection are part of an organic flow of creation. We make a mark, we consider the mark, we make another. Photography does not allow this, because of its instantaneous nature. It is, literally, a ‘slice of time’ (which allows it to be a time machine) but once taken, the photographic image is fixed. In a way we are like musicians (and Ansel Adams, for example, was a very talented one too); the instant of our creation, the moment the shutter trips, is our performance, and our later review of our images like listening to the recording. Sure we always could manipulate and transform the image later, even long before the convenience of Photoshop, as the work of Angus McBean and Jerry Uelsmann bears witness. But it is fundamentally different from the experience of drawing a line or shaping clay.
Instead, a photographer casts the net, captures what the world and the eye offers; the act is done in the heat of a moment. And later, we reflect, we consider, we examine, and if we are any good at all, we think about how we would do it differently the next time. A good photographer will become a great one, and even the ordinary become good, given time and willing.
This innate quality, the separation of the instant of creation from the hours of contemplation, was what gave photography the power to become as definitive an art as it has. Our world is predicated upon the instant. More than in any other era, we live on the bleeding edge of the new, of change. Egyptian culture remained effectively static for three thousand years; yet consider the changes we have gone through in the mere half-millennium or so since the Renaissance, when our culture was born. And that pace of change is not merely relentless, but increasing! Every instant of time has become precious in a way that it simply is not within a static culture. Tomorrow, the world will not be the same as it was today, yesterday is already a fish-wrapper and twenty-five years ago seems another place altogether, so different, in so many ways, that we must scratch our heads and ask ‘Did I really live through that?’
In such a world, photography is king.
Its slices of time become the perfectly preserved shades of a reality changing so quickly that even words cannot still it. At the same time its innate union of the Apollonian and Dionysian has allowed it to rise from mere record-making to a great, and indeed defining, art. As we race deeper into third millennium of the Common Era, we cannot know what art and artifice will, in fifty or a hundred or a thousand years, come to be seen as the defining art of this new age, adolescent yet precocious as it is. But photography’s place in the cultural and artistic history of the twentieth century is absolutely assured.
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