Monday, October 3, 2011

Quartz in the cave. Cuarzo en la cueva (Is photography a representational art?)


This is not a picture of a quartz, but rotating it and passing the image through smooth filters, I´ve seen a quartz inside the walls of an ancient cave. I´m interested on this type of exercises of taking a photograph and try to see if there is something else I can achieve from the original. That brings us the question if Photography is a representational art or not.


¨It does not matter, therefore, how many aesthetic intentions underlie the act of photography. It does not matter that the subject, its environment, activity, or light are all consciously arranged. The real question is, What has to be done to make the resulting image into a representation? There are images which are representations (paintings) and images which are not (mirrors). To which class does a photograph belong? I have argued that it naturally belongs to the latter class. Photography can be made to belong to the former class by being made into the principal vehicle of the representational thought. But one must then so interfere with the relation between the  photograph and its subject that it ceases to be a photograph of its subject. Is that not enough to show that it is not just my ideal of photography which fails to be a mode of representation, but also that representation can never be achieved through photograph alone?¨
Roger Scruton. Photography and Representation. Arguing about Art. Second edition. Page 211. London, 2004

2 comments:

  1. What better defines photography is it is a faster-than-painting art; representative or not. At first sight representative.

    ReplyDelete

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