BEYOND WORDS, BEYOND REASON

WAYS TO THINK ABOUT HOW ARE DEVELOPS

NEW VALUES FORGE NEW NEEDS
I believe there are two ways to think about the evolving developments of any art form.

The most obvious way is that taste and therefore aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) change when society around its artists changes. As all is always in flux because of new scientific discoveries leading to new technologies which, when exploited, change the nature of production, which changes the nature of work, which changes the nature of relationships**. New values and needs for the arts result from within individuals and groups which consider proper and valid subject matter, and what the style of that subject matter should be, given their new needs and new morality. Often in history these style and content choices are made by minorities of repressive, tyrannical groups or classes who have newly risen to control the state’s levers of power*.

EVOLVING GENIUS
When Rembrandt began his career under the control of the Spanish crown and its army in Amsterdam, he painted in the Baroque style, using contrasting tones and colour, dynamic movement especially horizontally across the picture plain, and a kind of exuberant romantic style that was acceptable to those who could then afford portraits. But once the revolt by the rising Dutch manufacturing and trading class succeeded against the Spanish monarchy, their straight-laced puritanical Protestantism set a tough, down-to-earth realism as the new acceptable way of celebrating and presenting oneself to their community rich burgers sitting in a darkened space, these painting were less histrionic, more stolid and reliable.      

•Above on the left is an early Rembrandt, representing a genre scene: facile, immature.•Centre, Philosopher Thinking is of Rembrandt’s later style, which plainly carries messages about the powerfully emotive use of light for setting the mood and for good story telling.•On the right is a photograph of mine; Ricky Romain, painter, working on his notebooks. Of course, I am not comparing myself to Rembrandt but showing how knowing his work affected my work.This is about the importance of visual literacy for photographers and film-makers.

Rembrandt’s genius, perhaps fostered by the many tragedies in his personal life, was that he could paint faces which revealed the wear and tear of inner conflicts at the same time as he revealed the sitter’s outer world.

•This Rembrandt portrait of an elderly woman is, in conventional terms, not flattering,but its truthfulness, with the self-reflective gaze, is, for me, deeply moving.Also note that the bright side of her face is against the darker background and the darker side of her face is against the lighter background, both of which create a greater illusion of solidity and depth. •On the right is a portrait by me of Cedoux Kadima, a talented artist and teacher.Again, a way of seeing and photographing which arises out of my studying da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt, amongst others.

COMPLICATIONS
This second or evolved style of Rembrandt indicates that changing social realities (political, economic and cultural) interweave and affect each other as they affect taste and aesthetics. It seems that people generally find connecting art to its historical period, claiming that its content and style are a consequence of much greater forces at work in society besides the individual artist’s talent, is a generalization too far. To accept these seeming abstractions calls upon critical thinking which sadly, too many people have not had the opportunity to develop. This is not because people are incapable of it, but because current neoliberal educational prejudice favours memorizing being less threatening to the status quo than creative thinking.

The individual against the background of historical development that changed world history. In present neoliberal culture, the individual has little value except as a consumer.

In the sweep of history and its great excesses of violence, individuals are mostly ignored. It is the huge waves of change, no matter how high and broad, which account for the nature of most people’s thoughts, cares and struggles, and therefore their consciousness. That generalised reading of history is at odds with artist’s private concerns and their connections to their art. Where the artist’s private existence encounters the public domain - that mainstream of history - it is often the point of greatest tension in an artist’s life. But it is that inner drama that drives their evolving styles, and it is the new generations embrace of new technologies that drives formal change in the arts.

ANALOGUE & DIGITAL
Certainly in my life, I was most regarded, well-known and well paid when I directly served mammon. Although I made images in my own time that I cared for, it was, in terms of value to humanity, as opposed to value for corporations, a period of utter uselessness.

A still-life made in an Italian hotel room while on holiday with my wife.

These last 20 years of digital photographic and video development have had a huge effect upon my work, as it no doubt had on others. When I compare 30 year old analogue landscapes of mine to my contemporary digital images, I see changes in the technology have profoundly affected the look and the sense of my images. There are significant differences in softness/hardness of line and tone, of clarity or acutance to see more details more clearly, and now a greater contrast range.

On the left is an analogue image, on the right a recent digital image.The differences in clarity are huge, with greater acutance and a much longer tonal range allowing the tones in the sky, in particular, to be more easily managed.

Combining those changes with the vast and subtle array of controls using file processing software (for me, Photoshop) to create the final image (or print) as opposed to the old darkroom methods, the very nature of my images has changed.

Although I enjoy the new digital ability to render the world even more clearly and faithfully than could my 10 x 8 inch images or my two and a quarter square Hasselblad images, but with the eradication of that slightly muzzy filmic grainy look,

it is as though science has taken control of visual poetry. The struggle today both for myself and for other photographers is to remember that what counts, what makes an image become a beautiful image lies outside the technological development. Sincerity, conviction, a craving for truth and damn good storytelling are still central to my work.

Michael Ignatieff wrote in ON CONSOLATION, “Only faith beyond words, beyond reason, Dante wants us to understand, can truly console human beings. This is what he described as ‘passer del segno’ -  ‘going beyond the limits…”

I don’t think Dante was limiting the notion of faith to having it in a god, but rather in the potential of the human project. Art and artists are often in the vanguard of the human project going beyond the words and the limits proscribed by the current dominant ideology.

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FOOT NOTES

*in Soviet Russia, as now under Putin, the dominant totalitarian Communist Party shackled personal liberty and therefore artistic expression in order to serve the party and the state. They assassinated, jailed, exiled or expelled anyone who refused to accept the party line. In the West, now as in the past, those of us who refuse to propagandize for the neoliberals are not shot in the back of the head, are not imprisoned nor beaten on the streets by inflamed mobs (as happened in China under Mao) but are isolated and ignored. This treatment, on its own, plays a significant role in destroying the marketplace of pluralism (of many ideas to be discussed), which should be the lifeblood of a real democracy.

**A lone peasant farmer has a different relationship to the local landlord and his fellow peasants than a peasant working with others as a serf. They have very different relations to each other as do peasants who have been driven off the land and found themselves as members of a new industrial working class. And so on throughout society.