invention of the photograph

J.M.W. Turner - The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834)

Painters, in the business of copying reality, saw the new invention of the camera as a dire threat. How could the human hand compete with the photon? J.M.W. Turner is said to have remarked after seeing a daguerreotype that he was glad he’d already had his day, since the era of painting was now over. But not all artists believed in the inevitable triumph of the camera. The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even—and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import—a materialist. In Baudelaire’s romantic view, the true duty of photography was “to be the servant of the sciences and arts, but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. If it photography is allowed to encroach upon the domain of the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse for us.” Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored, “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.”

Inspired by Baudelaire’s writings and the provocative realism of Edouard Manet, a motley group of young French painters decided to rebel. The camera, they believed, was a liar. Its precision was false. Why? Because reality did not consist of static images. Because the camera stops time, which cannot be stopped; because it renders everything in focus, when everything is never in focus. Because the eye is not a lens, and the brain is not a machine.

These rebels called themselves the impressionists. Like the film in a camera, their idiom was light. But the impressionists realized that light was both a dot and a blur. If the camera captured the dot, the impressionists represented the blur. They wanted to capture time in their paintings, showing how a bale of hay changes in the afternoon shadows, or how the smoke of a train leaving Gare Saint-Lazare slowly fades into thin air. As Baudelaire insisted, they painted what the camera left out.

Look, for example, at an early Monet, Impression: Soleil Levant (Impression: Sunrise). Monet painted this hazy scene of the Le Havre harbor in the spring of 1872. An orange sun hangs in a gray sky; a lonely fisherman sails in a sea made of undulating brushstrokes. There is little here for the eye to see. Monet is not interested in the ships, or in their billowing sails, or in the glassy water. He ignores all the static things a photograph would detect. Instead, Monet is interested in the moment, in its transience, in his impression of its transience. His mood is mixed in with the paint, his subjectivity muddled with the facts of his sensations. This, he seems to he saying, is a scene no photograph could catch.

- Jonah Lehrer