Rippling like an electrical current through Charles Baudelaire’s essay On Photography is a palpable dismay, occasionally condensing into scornful, even spiteful anger. The mass appeal of photography, he argues, is the refuge for the failed or lazy painter, and has done much to impoverish French artistic genius. One of the principle issues for Baudelaire is photographic promise (as he saw it) to represent the exact reproduction of Nature, a claim he is keen to dismiss. He writes “I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.” He describes photography as an industry and one accessible to the masses. Part of Baudelaire’s disgust is rooted in a sense of elitist exclusivity, with painters and sculptors at the pinnacle, and baser forms of “art” or pseudo-art relegated to the status of indus
trial madness. The degrading tendrils of mass consumerism have infected what he perceives as true art, which in time will diminish the observer’s ability differentiate between the ‘ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation” and mere reproductions of Nature.
The obvious problem with Baudelaire’s hysterical takedown is that he leaves little room for discussions of photography as art in its own right. A similar argument could be made for how the advent of television did much same for the novel, but television is also capable of producing remarkable and novel experiences. I’m naturally suspicious of any argument that leans too enthusiastically towards an exclusionary and elitist understanding of art. Modern art is surely a rejection of exclusivity, but then by dent of an artist’s success it quickly becomes exclusive. A lot of photography does seem to be fixated on high definition reproduction of a subject, which would seem to be the natural extention of Baudelaire's concerns. This screen-saver effect is overtly commercial, but we do need to be careful about criticizing art on the basis of its marketability, since artists also need to eat and will produce work that will sell. Having taught undergraduate literature courses for a number of years it’s easy to see how genres are crafted by experts who select and deselect or otherwise ignore texts that don’t appeal to their ideological preferences. The cult of the author or artist is another constraint. I'm drawn to the idea of creating fictional spaces in my photography rather than seeking hyper-detailed reproductions. I think this is what draws me to black and white photography, since it automatically refocuses the eye by removing the familiar contours of colour. Where Baudelaire's argument continues to resonate with me is his discomfort with like-for-like reproduction, even though I would counter by saying that not even photography can capture the entirity of the moment, and a dozen different photographers with same equipment, subject and conditions would produce uniquely different photographs, each stamped by some unique part of themselves.
Experimenting with fictional landscapes and fictional spaces is proving to be a very enjoyable approach. Over-exposure produced an ethereal effect. The window of the shed is discoloured and home to multiple layers of dusty spiderweb, plus the reflected image of the garden. The interplay of the webs, the light and the reflected image produces something quite tantalising alien yet familiar. This image has inspired me to look at different ways of overlaying or overlayering images of nature with human-made structures, creating a portal effect where imagined and real worlds collide.