My Best Impression

Impression Sunrise, 1872 via wikipaintings

In 1872 Claude Monet (unintentionally) created the Impressionist movement with his work, Impression Sunrise. Painted in the harbour of Le Havre, the artwork attempts to capture the fleeting 'impression' of a sunrise. It was painted quickly with the intention of translating the visual, physical 'effect' light has on a landscape, but more specifically on our individual perceptions of colour. It was criticised as unfinished. It was ridiculed as amateurish. Yet, it began a painting revolution, a reassessment of painting that claimed perception was more evocative of reality than was the precise mimicking of nature.

So, this morning it came to me that I would like to recreate my impression of light, landscape and perception. I was walking though a park in South West London just after sunrise. Although I instinctively reached in my pocket for my mobile, I had no camera to capture the moment (I had consciously left my phone at home). Without my camera I was able to actually experience the moment. I let go of the need to document and realised that whenever you take a photo of something you find yourself saying to the viewer 'oh, this photo doesn't do it justice.' That's because with the quick capture of a camera-phone we rarely capture our perception of the moment, our subjective experience, the impetus that drove us to take the photograph in the first place.

My thoughts turned to Monet. When he re-created his perception of these fleeting moments of light he did not do so to reproduce the presumed exactitude of vision, rather he intended to paint through the subjectivity of his temperament. Therefore, the precision is inherently flawed, but the finished work is far more emotive and revealing of his experience (he reveals his interest, himself as an artist, by what he chooses to focus on).

I am no painter, but I would like to try to re-create my impression of sunrise through what I can do as an art historian, write.

Impression, SW Park, London, 10 December, 2013, approx. 8:00

A dense layer of white fog clings to the frost-lined green grass. The cold damp gently embraces and encloses all life in its scope. As it rises from the ground it transitions to a smokey blue dew, fading as it reaches the tips of bare, needle-thin tree branches. Its heaviness returns to enhance the gray sheet of clouds and, together, they diffuse the early morning sun, making it glow and glisten like a soft, breakable, orange yolk. The whole of the light is what I have always imagined late autumn to be.

Not as good as Monet, but worth the experiment.

Invisible Photography

Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida[1]

Unlike painting or sculpture, mediums in which we can clearly see (in most cases) the shift between world and re-presentation, we rarely notice the media of a photograph; the frame (paper or screen) does not break the ‘reality’ of the image. 

Naples, Italy 1960

For example, in the work surrealist-cum-photojournalist, Henri Cartier-Bresson, we marvel at the 'decisive moment' he is able to capture rather than the literal 'nature' of the photograph: light captured through a lens, impressing itself through bits of chemical and metal solution.

Photographs ‘annihilate’ their medium; they are no longer the sign, but the thing itself.[2] A photograph is an image of what never really was, yet the essence of the photograph is to “ratify what it represents,” certificating presence, and authenticating the existence of a certain being (whether photographer or photographed).[3] The photograph is not of a subject, it becomes the subject, the being/the moment it has captured. 

Montmartre, Paris c.1931

When reading a photograph we give primacy to subject and narrative over form and media. We take for granted that it is, like any other art form, a construction after nature, not nature itself. As the medium of photography finds itself based more and more in the virtual, its medium becomes invisible. Photography becomes reality.

Mexico, 1934

The aesthetic action of the 'click' is subjective, filling the photograph with its captor’s presence and authority. The purpose of photography is to dominate what is seen, within a frame, controlling its fleeting existence. Presuming invisibility, we permit the photograph to frame our perception of reality.

For more on Henri Cartier-Bresson, check out this amazing exhibit at MoMA. And incidentally, I had no idea Cartier-Bresson knew Barthes, but I should have. . .here is his portrait of the author:

Barthes, 1963

---

[1] Barthes, 6.

[2] Ibid., 45.

[3] Ibid., 85, 87, 107.