02 - THE PIONEERS
Plato Rivellis: A still life photograph. But all photographs are still lifes. Therefore, the photographer of the last century did nothing more than a poor imitation of a painting theme that was popular at that time, which again usually characterized an academic and sterile painting.
Andreas Pagoulatos: In the case of older arts such as painting or sculpture, their prehistory coincides with a small part of prehistory itself. In the case of cinema, the 7th art, its prehistory coincides with the history of photography. Is there a prehistory to photography; And what is it?
PR: I suppose that in the minds of the early photographers, prehistory had to do with painting. Is it because it started as a machine to be the extension of the camera obscura that old painters had? Or because it was a two-dimensional depiction and their minds went to painting? But there lies the very interesting part. The great photographers tried from the beginning to find the peculiarities of the medium and there the differences appeared. If you try to copy painting, or any other art, at best you will copy the external elements of that art, consequently you will imitate bad painting. And it is evident in the great photographers of the last century that they caught the bug of photography. What made the power of photography and the great impression it gave to the world at that time, which was the depiction of reality for the first time with such accuracy, is exactly the enemy of art. No one wants to depict reality. Except for bad painters, bad photographers, in the sense that they do not dare, do not know, cannot overcome what is in front of them.
AP: We entered this way, in this era, early, rather in the middle of the 19th century, the era of the pioneers. And I use the term pioneers instead of pioneers because I believe that for there to be pioneers and pioneering, the language must already have been laid out. Or to have been organized to some extent at least or even I would say to have been established.
PR: First of all, linguistic problems exist, the word pioneer is not Greek, it is correct but we avoid it for that reason. And on the other hand, the word pioneering and again in art has been associated with its French version, the avant garde which obviously we cannot talk about pioneering in an era that is just discovering the art of photography. The pioneers or the pioneers of that era discovered the technological possibilities of the medium and the expressive possibilities simultaneously. But here we can put many questions. And one of them and sorry I put the question myself to myself, is it so important to be the first to do something; Indeed, I am impressed when I see something in the history of art that is done for the first time. But I try to calm down, to convince myself that it is not important there and that we simply historically attribute a value to it. A director who had passed through Greece a few years ago, Peter Brook, had said that contemporary is what grabs us by the neck. That is, what moves us. Therefore, if Euripides moves us today, he is contemporary and possibly also a pioneer. Therefore, the word pioneering for me and the word academicism and new does not have particular interest, I put all these in a bag and say there is good and bad photography. There is photography that moves and photography that simply depicts.
AP: What types of photography begin to appear and gradually organize in this first period?
PR: The genres appeared very quickly. That is, the applications of photography. The great difficulty was for these photographers, the pioneers as you said, to discover the possibilities of the medium. And I think they also had to fight the world's prejudice against a medium they were not sure deserved. Just think that Baudelaire, this French poet, mocked photography because obviously he treated it as a means and even a very poor means of depicting reality. At the same time, however, the other great of France, Victor Hugo, wrote a letter to Cameron telling her madam you have moved us with your high art. Therefore, the photographer always had to fight the social distrust against his work but also his own distrust against photography and especially in comparison with high painting which was known.
AP: Do aesthetic trends and schools begin to appear?
PR: Never with the intensity and clarity that exists in painting. First of all, painting at the end of the last century when these schools started, because until the Renaissance and after, painters had an awareness of differences but did not have the sense that they belonged to schools. Schools and trends were much clearer from the middle of the last century and after the famous dispute between Delacroix and Angrand whether painting is drawing or color, and so on and so forth. Photography did not experience such great confrontations, it did not have the luxury to do so, since until the beginning of our own century it was trying to understand whether it was art or not, and to convince others. Moreover, I prefer to see the history of art as a history of artists. That is, I am more interested in the names of the creators and their presence and not the categories they may form.
Just ten years after the invention of photography, two Scots from Edinburgh had already gathered an impressive material from 1500 photographs, mostly portraits of nobles and plebeians. 258 of these were selected by them to present their work at the Royal British Academy. These photographs were subsequently lost, to be rediscovered in 1967 and to gain global admiration and naturally the highest prices ever achieved in the collectible photography market. David Octavious Hill was a painter and chose photography to replace the original design with which he started his paintings. Robert Adamson was a chemist. Their collaboration yielded an impressively original photographic work that far exceeds the admiration of scientific or even artistic discovery and originality. (08:43)
Talking about the pioneers of photographic art in the last century, it is difficult to avoid the name of Julia Margaret Cameron and that is because long before many others she understood the artistic possibility of the medium as well as its expressive peculiarity. The heroic world she created in the last 16 years of her life through photography with the passion and reverence of the newly enlightened remains a proof of the transformative power of the photographic medium. Besides, she undoubtedly believed in the magic of photographic transformation when she said she held her lens with tender enthusiasm because she knew it would lead her to creation. The friends, relatives, and acquaintances who made up Cameron's world and who patiently sat for hours in front of her lens letting her play with natural lighting, to enliven the background that always played a dominant role or to direct the frightened glances and the fleeting kisses, did not know that through time they would become familiar and sacred figures to us.
Since photography started with the tradition of painting within it, it was inevitable that a type of photography that competed with the painting of the time would develop and this was called pictorialism. This does not have much importance and does not because we can find many examples of bad pictorialist photographers and just as many good pictorialist photographers. Therefore, I think a lot of ink has been spilled and many confrontations have occurred. From time to time these confrontations are fruitful. I will remember the phrase of Walker Evans who said, I photograph against Stieglitz. That is, against the view that wants photography to be an artistic and even there we can say a bit disparagingly, an artifying photographic art. This, then, for Evans was a motive, his anti-pictorialist position. For a viewer like us, if one looks at these things more calmly, they still come down to who is a good photographer and who is not a good photographer, in the sense of who first creates emotion, because without that I do not understand why there should be all this fuss of art and secondly who creates it by exploiting the main characteristics of photography. Of course, all arts move within the same flock of ideas. The same things are shared, the same concerns exist but are expressed through different disciplines. The artist does not owe, no one told him that he must be ethically so or otherwise, he does not owe to follow only the discipline of his own art but it is advisable to do so. And why should he do it? Because the artist wants limitations. He gets lost. There is no greater threat to the artist than complete freedom. And if someone else does not impose the limitations, he imposes them on himself. And he needs those limitations to be able to push their boundaries. He must therefore find it alone. What does photography do? I distinctly remember Tarkovsky after his 6th film, who said I still search what cinema can do. The photographer then must search what photography can do. To find namely the special power that this medium has as expression. And that's what the great photographers of the last century did.
AP: I would like now to come back as you often put it to Cameron and ask you a somewhat naive question, because I too am moved in front of Cameron's photographs, perhaps I do not fully understand what the essential differences are of a photographer like Cameron, with another, say, good pictorialist photographer and what exactly is the differentiation from field to field.
PR: It is always much easier for me, but exactly because it is easy I avoid criticizing photographers. It is much clearer why someone is bad and completely unclear why someone is good. Therefore, I believe there are many things one can say about Cameron or any photographer, but always keeping in the back of our minds that we will not understand the essence of the photographer and every artist, the essence of his art. However, I can say about Cameron that precisely the fact that her photographs remind us of pre-Raphaelite painters who were her friends at that time, precisely the fact that she had no other preconceptions about art representations, makes the result even more interesting which has a photographic quality, namely, Cameron's portraits that look at the lens, have the vivacity of time that the corresponding painting work cannot have. If we compare these portraits with the equally significant portraits of Nadar, we will see that Nadar, did not create his own world. That is, he depicted very well and with much strictness the depicted, he put a typical background of that era's studio, on the contrary, Cameron, used the depicted along with the background, along with the lighting to create her own world. Consequently, if we see the names of the people depicted by Nadar, we are interested. It is Prince so-and-so, the composer so-and-so, it is Sarah Bernhardt, and so on and so forth. The names of Cameron's people, whether they are well-known scientists of the era and artists, or her maid or her neighbor, do not interest us and more or less unify as heroes of the same theatrical illusion and since I said that word I believe that if an artist, in whatever space he is in, as specific and realistic, does not create an illusion, if you want a charming lie, it does not interest. This lie, then, is the transition to another world. Cameron achieved this with purely photographic means. And especially with very simple means. And Cameron herself has some blurring in her photographs, something unprecedented for that era when everyone's effort was to make absolute technical accuracy, and she wrote when they criticized her for it, well don't they understand that I do it on purpose? It is unprecedented if we think that we are in 1860.
AP: I would like now to ask you, Plato, about the idiosyncrasies of the photographic work of the American topographer, Carleton Watkins.
PR: Yes, and he is a photographer whom I love and I think has influenced all the topographers of today's century and of course the Americans. Watkins then does what Cameron does in portraits, he does it in nature. And it is very impressive that the photographers after him who invoke him as their teacher have not understood it. I will refer mainly to Ansel Adams. Watkins then photographs rocks of the Pacific and transforms the rocks which the viewer recognizes as rocks into a paper world, a different world. And a landscape of the Pacific with rocks you understand how impressive it is, how easily it can, as we say simply, take the photographer who depicts them under and how difficult it is for him to keep his personal view fresh and untouched. And the very important thing is that if you finally see all of Cameron's portraits or all of Watkins' rocks you discover a photographic artistic language.
The majestic themes exert a charming attraction on the photographer and the viewer and one of these is undoubtedly the landscapes of nature. This attraction is all the more dangerous as it is more seductive because it can lead both to ecstatic admiration connected with the memory or the references that the subject generates and not with the emotion that the presence in the photograph of the creator himself provokes. The American Carleton Watkins in the last century had the instinct to face the majestic nature of the American West and to use its impressive elements instead of succumbing to them. He was not led to majestic photography which would attempt to counteract it but used this form to allow the grandeur of nature to function as an element of the photograph. The rocks of the Pacific became the rocks of Watkins. They were transformed into a photographic setting precisely because the photographer did not attempt to render them in their natural presence. This lesson is many who in the coming years would need to learn.
Charles Negre was one of the most important French photographers of the 19th century. He died in 1880 forgotten and unknown although in his own workshop some of the most important photographers of the era such as the French Gustave le Grec and Henri Le Secq or the English Roger Fenton studied and worked. Negre would perhaps have been a mediocre painter since that's how he started his journey in the world of art, without known great results in the field of painting. But he, like most of the big names of his era, believed in photography early on. Just remember the words of his contemporary Negre great painter Delacroix, that a genius using the Daguerreotype, photography that is, as it should be used will rise to heights we have not yet known. Negre himself expressed his faith in photography saying that where science ends art begins and that when the chemist has prepared the paper it is the turn of the artist to direct the lens with the help of observation of feeling and thought to reproduce elements and impressions that make us dream. And he adds, in the past, the issue was the reproduction of nature, today it is the selection from nature.
AP: By studying photographic books with photos from the 19th century, one discovers the plethora of notable photographs from anonymous photographers. Would you like to discuss this phenomenon of anonymous photographers and their significance?
PR: There have always been, let's say, captivating amateurs, in the sense of lovers of the art, photographers who did their work behind the scenes, and just left it there. Let me give a typical example of Jenny de Vasson, a French housewife who painted, wrote poems, and also took photographs. Holding very high ideals shortly before she died, she felt that her painting and poetry were far inferior to the things she believed were significant and destroyed them. Considering photography a minor medium, she left her photographs behind, which we found years later, and I believe she is a very notable photographer. Personally, I am deeply fascinated by this army of anonymous and unknown people, and it warms my heart to see how many people around us are artists and very serious artists just not in the spotlight. In the past century, there were more such cases because there wasn't the ability to communicate as today, but I believe even now there are many around us doing very important work that we may never know. This doesn't happen in the art of spectacle but is very common in poetry or the visual poetry that is photography.
And since I mentioned this word, visual poetry, and just a while ago the word emotion, perhaps these sound very solemn. I certainly don't mean the word emotion, which I consider a great threat to art. The word emotion is dynamite; it overturns art. I'm talking about a complex emotion that is an artistic emotion arising from intellectual, psychological, and emotional elements, all mixed together, making the artwork. In photography, this becomes more problematic because we also recognize the subject. I believe, for instance, that a photograph by the not very well-known to the general public, Timothy O’Sullivan, an eminent American photographer of Irish descent from the last century, which depicts an American canyon where he manages not just to stay impressed by the volumes of America, remember the Grand Canyon we have seen in the movies, but also to create anxiety from these volumes along with a juxtaposition of shadow and light. All these elements are both technical and formalistic, but all these together would have no place if they did not convey a message of emotion, a message in a bottle that Timothy O’Sullivan throws into the sea for someone to find and facing it to feel an intensity of emotion again. This, in very general terms, is called Poetry with a capital P. It can be done with photography as it can be done with all other arts.