When Charles Baudelaire — in “The Salon of 1859” — rambles against the degeneration of art, he explains that the problem with bad art is how it only tries to copy, only tries to realistically represent the world around us. Good art, on the other hand, while also inspired by the world around us, contains more: it contains the crucial addition of the artist’s imagination. This is also why Baudelaire is so passionate in his opposition to photography as art — in his view, photography leaves no room for the artist’s imagination; photography is too accurate to be beautiful. He writes:
Our exclusive taste for the true (so noble a taste when limited to its proper purposes) oppresses and smothers the taste for the beautiful.
And he winds himself up as he continues:
If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the masses, its natural ally.
When Baudelaire wrote this, photography was still in it’s infancy, and the public’s understanding of it was also in it’s infancy. Even a sophisticated critic like Baudelaire failed to understand what the American photographer Diane Arbus — creator of the most wonderful documentary images — much later pointed out: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
Photographer Richard Avedon, yet more to the point, agreed with Baudelaire on the accuracy of photographs, claiming that “all photographs are accurate.” But then he added the most important caveat: “None of them is the truth.”
Sources:
- Baudelaire, Charles, and Patrice E. Charvet. Selected Writings on Art and Literature. London: Penguin Books, 2006.