Wild Ocean

David Ryan in reply to Rothko says:

A lot to unpack, so I’ll stick to the question of complementariness.

The “my kid could have done that” quality that so many celebrated modern paintings have (our late Springs neighbor Jackson being the best example) created an uneasy critical relationship with the quality of virtuosity and/or performance in artwork. What can one say to a “photo-realistic” casting of a couple of cans of Ballentine Ale that is then set upon a pedestal in one of our secular cathedrals as if it is to be worshiped? “I’ve seen that joke before” hardly covers it.

I take James’ “It looks like a painting” in two ways, both of which I find flattering to me, the creator of the work.

1) It has a textural quality we associate with the “old masters”. Perhaps I am flattered too much if I imagine Walter Murch would also say that it looks like a painting, and mean that in a complimentary way.

2) That in “looks like a painting” James is saying that I have captured the platonic ideal of a stormy sea; that the image is so idealized one would think you would have to have painted it, and yet I have managed to capture it from real life.

This second aspect speaks to the “f8 and be there” aspect of photography, an aspect that people instinctively understand, that you have to “be there”; that, unlike a painter or novelist, you cannot conjure you world from whole cloth; you have find your world within our shared reality.

Again drawing from Murch, photography is, or certainly can be in a very special way, reality closely observed. That Actuality property — this is what this thing looks like as a photograph — can teach us to see the world in which we live with someone else’s insight. As an essay might provoke a reader to say “I never thought of it that way before”, a “painterly” photograph (often) provokes the feeling, “That’s the way I’ve always dreamed it to be.”Report