Theory of film : the redemption of physical reality (1960)

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PHOTOGRAPHY 7 of the person portrayed without the disturbing interference of "accidental" detail.30 Similarly, Henry Peach Robinson encouraged the use of any kind of "dodge, trick, and conjuration" so that pictorial beauty might arise out of a "mixture of the real and the artificial."31 Small wonder that the champions of realism and their adversaries engaged in a lively debate.32 This famous controversy, which raged in the second half of the nineteenth century, with no clear-cut solution ever being reached, rested upon a belief common to both schools of thought— that photographs were copies of nature. Yet there the agreement ended. Opinions clashed when it came to appraising the aesthetic significance of reproductions which light itself seemed to have produced. The realists, it is true, refrained from identifying photography as an art in its own right— in fact, the extremists among them were inclined to discredit artistic endeavors altogether— but strongly insisted that the camera's incorruptible objectivity was a precious aid to the artist. Photography, as a realistic-minded critic put it, reminds the artist of nature and thus serves him as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.33 Taine and even Delacroix expressed themselves in similar terms; the latter compared daguerreotypy to a "dictionary" of nature and advised painters diligently to consult it.34 Those in the opposite camp naturally rejected the idea that a medium confining itself to mechanical imitation could provide artistic sensations or help achieve them. Their contempt of this inferior medium was mingled with bitter complaints about its growing influence, which, they contended, lent support to the cult of realism, thereby proving detrimental to elevated art.35 Baudelaire scorned the worshippers of Daguerre among the artists. He claimed they just pictured what they saw instead of projecting their dreams.36 The artist-photographers shared these views with a difference: they were confident that photography need not be limited to reproduction pure and simple. Photography, they reasoned, is a medium which offers the creative artist as many opportunities as does painting or literatureprovided he does not let himself be inhibited by the camera's peculiar affinities but uses every "dodge, trick, and conjuration" to elicit beauty from the photographic raw material. All these nineteenth-century arguments and counterarguments now sound oblique. Misled by the naive realism underlying them, both sides failed to appreciate the kind and degree of creativeness that may go into a photographic record. Their common outlook prevented them from penetrating the essence of a medium which is neither imitation nor art in the traditional sense. Yet stale as those old notions have become, the two