“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” (Benjamin 29)
We never got to talk about this quote in class last week, and I wanted to touch on it because this idea came up in another class I had last week. Photography is a fairly new form of art that came about in the seventies. Photography was around long before that, however it was never really used, or perhaps accepted as an art form until then. Renaissance paintings are “uncritically enjoyed” because they were created by people we revere and consider masters of art. Art in this form is considered conventional. “The truly new [form of art; photography] was criticized with aversion” probably mainly because it was seen as something that anybody can do. Essentially anybody can take some snapshots and call them art, yet it is not solely the photograph that is the art. It is the vision and the creativity that went into taking said photo that makes it something that cannot be reproduced by another. A similar photograph can be taken, but never the same one. The image that appears through the lens can be duplicated, but what lies in capturing the image cannot.
On a similar note, going back to Benjamin’s idea of the original, in order to take a photograph one must look through the camera lens, (then depending on whether the camera is digital or not) take the negative and produce an image on paper. This is the third step in making a print. Depending on how that print is developed the end result will be a photo resembling what you originally saw through the lens. The print may be over developed, or underdeveloped, or otherwise altered at the time it was taken. So by the end of this process is your print really what was originally seen through the lens? Now if the photograph was taken digitally, that opens up a whole new box of options one can use to alter an image. My point is that to end up with a print the original scene has been altered and reproduced, so how can you end up with something that is original? I think maybe it is the idea that is what is original.
I know that Benjamin was refereeing to film here, but I thought that this still applies to photography…
Monday, September 29, 2008
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