THE DEBATE: Photography is a lesser medium than paint

Phillips de Pury is an auctioneer's establishment a short walk from Victoria station. The debate on november 1'st 2010 at which about 300 people were present took place in a hall while other smaller adjoining rooms showed a collection of framed photographs, hung on the walls, awaiting auction the following week. There were many by David Bailey yet the one that interested me most was number 2 of a 25 print collection by a deceased photographer called Ian MacMillan who made the famous image of the Beatles walking across a zebra crossing in St.John's Wood that was the cover of their Abbey Road album. It was estimated as having a value of between 3 and 4,00 GBP yet would probably go for more.

The debate saw the 6 speakers sitting behind a long desk facing the audience and flanking the chairman of the discussion, John Gordon, a co-founder of Intelligence Squared, the group responsible for organising the event. What I write is from notes made at the time which miss some points and may construe others yet hopefully relate the substance of the debate.

The first speaker, Michael Mack, a publisher and literary agent, described the evening as little more than intellectual exercise with as much value as the Turner Prize. Photography has credibility but tends to be overdone while there is a kind of guilt attached to its' inherent simplicity. Painters construct, photographers disclose. Digital mediation means photographs don't represent reality. Slipshod snapshots. Photography fulfils the surrealist notion (as proposed by Andre Breton) of elevating the ordinary to the status of art. Artis concerned with intention. Photography elevated painting so much so that painting now owes its' status to photography. Painting will continue to benefit from photography. The interest in images and ideas.

A.A.Gill, who trained in art and worked as an artist, agrees with everything the previous speaker has said, even though he is against the motion rather than for it. The topic is under discussion is both redundant and ridiculous. The subtext for the evening is whether photography is a lesser medium that art and indeed, many use the word art rather than painting which has more complex meanings. Art is about exclusivity, who can and who can't. Photography is everything that art is about, a contemporary form of cave painting. The crux of the argument is, what constitutes art? Who these days has the time to do a large Pre-Raphaelite painting? What about craft? Art is not a craft but singular, not repetitive. Take the skill out of art and you have Photography! The "Decisive Moment" is what Cartier-Bresson referred to the moment in time that marks a photograph. H.C-B liked to draw and paint but was not good at it apparently; his art expressed itself through photography.

Jose Maria Cano, a songwriter and painter, mentions Frieze, an early form of art likened to painting. Came a point when painting no longer represented reality. The art of ideas is conceptual art. Van Gogh not a smart artist unlike Salvador Dali. Art is about intelligence which is difficult to define. 95% of artists today are students! The art of intelligence, intrinsic value. The 1970's American Minimalist artists said "Painting is Dead!" but painting now seeing a revival. Art is whatever you want it to be, shifting definition. Art as expression! Photographers talented but painters put their life into their paintings. Don't look at the Mona Lisa as art but stand 80cm away as Leonardo did! An artist puts himself into the painting.

This was a passionately argued case but I wondered if the speaker was aware of how long a photographer might spend over an image in Photoshop or even setting up a shoot!

Discussion: Photography is inferior to paint

I thought it would be good to know a little more about the old argument concerning the differences between photography and art, here referred to as paint; nowadays, photography is widely accepted as art yet the question hangs around the apparent mechanicality of photography and the skill involved in painting a picture. My interest is not so much in whether one is superior and the other inferior rather the differences in the two mediums and their strengths and weaknesses. It seems to me they exercise different parts of the brain and can not really be measured up against each other. Painting has been going on for thousands of years while photography is about 170 years old possibly more if one accepts the light impressions of Niepce and the Dageurotype, processes that did not however lend themselves to infinite multiplication.

As I see it, photography is much more complex than people generally understand it and the skill lies with the ability to make images according to one's vision which is what paint does in a more simple and direct way. It does seem to me rather typical of painters to consider themselves, or at least their work, superior and a reason why it took me some time to like painting. Photography is younger and not so presumptous.

Here is what the Intelligence2 website about the debate says ...

In the beginning was the challenge: how to use eye, hand and brain to represent the significance of the world to our fellow humans. There followed the sinuous cave paintings of Perigord; the rigid, sparkling mosaics of Ravenna; the stunning Renaissance discovery of perspective. And the fellow humans marvelled at the dexterity of hand and the conceptual ingenuity of eye and brain behind such visions, and glorified them as art. 

But how do we feel now that the machine has interposed itself between ourselves and the world? Now that the dexterity of hand has been replaced by the finger’s click on the camera shutter? Now that the imagination of eye and brain has been confined within the rectangle of the viewfinder? If there is great art here, doesn't it lie in the creation of the camera itself rather than the pictures it takes? Is it not the genius of the scientists who devised the camera’s intricate mechanisms and powerful lenses that we should now marvel at, rather than the output of the adepts who operate the machine? 

Or are we still too much in thrall to the notion of art held by our pre-industrial forbears? Shouldn't we just accept that art has been freed of its ancient constraints, and acknowledge that the finest photographers offer us an interpretation of the world quite as original as that of the great painters; that in the digital age, photography is now the medium that matters?

Henri Cartier-Bresson writes in The Mind's Eye that the argument about art/paint versus photography is an academic one and I concur yet the nature of the photographic medium concerns me and seeing it outlined against that of paint might be quite helpful in developing a better understanding of this nature.