“Is photography an art?”
There’s a great deal of proof that it is, at the International Photography Exhibition at Expo, located close to the end of the Expo Express at Place d’Accueil. In my opinion this is one of the finest exhibitions on the site, and it is one of the most coherently displayed. It’s well‑aired (almost open‑air), hardly ever crowded, easy to see at any time at full leisure, and full of meaning for the thoughtful Expo‑ite. Let’s discuss it.
“The Camera As Witness,” as the Exhibition is called, consists of 500 photographs by 272 photographers from every part of the world. (The committee of selection included representatives from France, Germany, the U.S.A., and Canada. Yousuf Karsh, Gaby Desmarais, and Jean‑Paul Morisset were the Canadian representatives.) The pictures are thematically arranged, showing children and grownups at work, at play, living, loving, and dying in all their various habitats and environments. Only the photographers are identified; but the pictures speak for themselves, and we do learn a great deal about the world we live in from these photographs.
I have recently discussed the Centennial panorama books on Canada being brought out by various publishers. Beautiful as these are, none of them can be called strictly documentary. They belong to the ritual of eulogy, like a presentation address or a valedictory, and we are satisfied if we are moved and enthralled by their effects. But art, traditionally, is a ruthless revelation—as in King Lear or Oedipus—and therefore the first condition of all art is a will to show us “the things that are.” Of the artist we ask, according to Job: “How hast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is?” The camera is certainly a very good instrument for this, whether moving or stationary, and one might even think better than any of the arts of the past. If the history of art is a progress in documentary depiction—from words to sculptures, from sculpture and painting to drama, from drama to novel, from novel to film—then film is the ultimate art in the series. And yet there are difficulties in considering either film or photography as art forms. The reasons for this are many and complex.
It’s a question of reality. The moving‑picture film, as we know, is a sequence of still shots. Put together, these give us the illusion of motion, which—as Gérald Robitaille says in his fascinating book on art—was the aim of the artist for many millennia before the discovery of film. Siegfried Kracauer in his provocative book Theory of Film argues that the essential nature of the film is to provide a varied representation of reality. Anything that reveals reality is “really true to the medium... characteristic, of the medium”; all else is suspect.
I agree with Kracauer to a point. But not in his theory of film as an art medium. He holds that the mere reality of objects, and people, constitutes film art. The failure of religion and other value systems, he argues, leaves us today with pure objects, naked reality, unclouded by conceptual systems; and our way out of this existential cul‑de‑sac is through further open exploration of this “reality.” This gives us the kind of films we have in Jean‑Luc Godard and François Truffaut, influenced by the novelist Alain Robbe‑Grillet, in which the surface of reality, uninterpreted, passes exasperatingly before the eyeballs. Until finally you ask, “So what?”
The pure film, therefore, is nature described as flux: it’s the world of Heraclitus, who said that you cannot step into the same river twice because all reality is meaningless change, a series of camera clicks. And the still photograph is in even a worse state than this: one single instant of time—one hundredth of a second at f‑11—pretending to represent “reality”!
The German critic and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laokoon tried to distinguish between the different arts in this way, and he actually discussed the problem of why a particular moment, in painting or sculpture, is the right moment at which the action is to be arrested and depicted. His model was the sculpture of Laocoön and his sons in the coils of the serpent, and he had many interesting points to make, about the drama of that particular moment, just preceding agony. Today, we would say that the ideal moment, for the camera, or the imagist poem, is at epiphany—a moment of revelation which is numinous in some way, an ecstasy, as any action or moment can be in a work of art. I think of Keats’ arrested moment in the “Grecian Urn”, in which the lover is about to kiss the girl and is stopped just there. “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
There are several photographs at the International Photographic Pavilion which have caught something like this in the flux of time, a numinous instant. They are works of art, or as near as photography can come to art. There are still difficulties, of course, of personal expression, and of detailed execution, which as photographs they may still lack. But for me, at any rate, it’s a great revelation to see how far photography has gone.
Dudek, Louis. "The Revelation of Photography as Art and as Witness" The Gazette, 15 July 1967. Rpt. in In Defence of Art: Critical Essays & Reviews, Ed. Aileen Collins. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988, pp.271-272.
Copyright the estate of Louis Dudek.
