When photography first arrived in the middle of the 19th century with all its vaunted truthfulness, painters and sculptors did not like it one bit. They were threatened. They were miffed. They were scornful. Finally they took the matter into their own hands. They turned photography inside out.
Honore Daumier said, "Photography imitates everything and expresses nothing." Paul Gauguin said, "Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us." Vincent van Gogh referred to "the photographic and empty perfection of certain people."Photography, they suggested, was too objective and too superficial. If people wanted that kind of perfect, mechanical thing, then let them have it.
But scorn of the camera did not stop some artists -- including Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Constantin Brancusi, Medardo Rosso, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch and even Gauguin -- from dabbling in photography. Some did it openly, others surreptitiously. (The heirs of Gustave Moreau hid his photographs to preserve his reputation.)
What were these artists doing with the rival medium? Were they trying to sneak a peek at a reality that was more accurate than the one they saw with the naked eye?
On the face of it, yes. "The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso," an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, surveys a dozen artists who used photography to further their art. Degas copied dancers and horses from photographs -- his own and those of Eadweard Muybridge. Bonnard's intimate paintings, cropped in odd ways, look as if they had borrowed something from his family snapshots. Artists, it seemed, though outwardly suspicious of photography, didn't mind taking cues about reality from it.
"Without a doubt the commonplace view of photography ever since its inception . . . is that it records a moment of reality as it actually appeared," writes Martin Jay, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, in his book "Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought."
If photographs seemed to offer a better and more prolonged glimpse of reality, they also planted a doubt about the human ability to grasp reality and even the definition of reality. By the end of the 19th century, photography began to generate "a subcurrent of skepticism," Jay writes.
One of the first major blows was dealt by Muybridge, an English photographer. His famous photographs of galloping horses, published in 1878, revealed something that the human eye was blind to. As Aaron Scharf describes it in "Art and Photography": "They contradicted almost all of the previous representations made by artists. The most startling thing was that, unlike the traditional flying gallop in which all four legs were shown off the turf, spread out like those of a frozen rabbit, they were at one moment proved to be jack-knifed beneath the body of the animal."
In his painting and sculpture Degas happily followed Muybridge's lead. Others disparaged the new truth. Auguste Rodin insisted the old way of depicting a gallop, typified by Theodore Gericault, was better. "For now I believe it is Gericault who is right, and not the camera, for his horses appear to run and, though false, they are nevertheless true."
To add to the confusion, people began to learn that photographs could be manipulated. "By the mid-1840s," writes Jay, "photographers discovered that they could retouch their photographs or even combine them to make a composite."
Francis Galton, for example, was known for "combining a number of underexposed photographic negatives of social types (such as criminals) into a 'sandwich' that could then be used to print a single composite positive of that type," writes Robert A. Sobieszek in the catalog "Photography and the Human Soul." In this way Galton created portraits of Jews, consumptives, healthy people and criminals.
Amid this confusion, ocularcentrism, or sight-centeredness, began to erode. And fantasy, spiritualism, symbolism and surrealism rushed in to fill the vacuum. This is when the story of art and photography took an unexpected turn.
Many of the artists who were most entranced by photography were Symbolists like Fernand Khnopff, Munch, Gauguin and Moreau. They were not at all interested in realism but rather in the "inner landscape," the invisible truth. Dorothy Kosinski, the curator of "The Artist and the Camera," says that for these Symbolists, "the photograph suggested a new scopic realm, inflected with issues of time, memory, nostalgia, motion and space."
Degas is not normally thought of as a Symbolist, but his engagement with photography suggests otherwise. He would seat his photographic subjects in "almost total darkness, as though searching with his lens for something hidden within those faces that could not readily be perceived by the human eye in the light of day," Elizabeth Childs, a professor of art history at Washington University, writes in the catalog for the "The Artist and the Camera." He was looking for souls to emerge, for something the ordinary eye could not see.
Gauguin was famously antipathetic to the camera's version of the truth, once testily asking: "What truth? The true color of the sky, of a tree, of all of material nature?" But his doubts about the truthfulness of photographs seemed to free him to use them as documents of a fantasy world in Tahiti and Samoa that he knew no longer existed.
Many of the artists who turned to photography did it not so much for their realism as for the access they provided to the invisible. This trend continued into the 20th century with Marcel Duchamp's quest for "invisible reality."
The beat went on. Surrealists used photographs to evoke uncanniness. Andy Warhol lined up row upon row of silk-screen photos, mining them for their mind-numbing, commercial effect.
It seems that artists have always resented photography for capturing visible reality and always loved it for capturing invisible reality. Go figure.