I have four quotes for you, all taken from an essay called “Where the Rabbit Warms Its Belly: On the Relationship between Photography and Painting in the Digital Age” by Thomas Wagner that is in the book “How You Look at It: Photographs of the 20th Century” (which I got for $2.50 (!) from Daedalus books many years ago).
The first quote introduces the two that follow. The second and third quotes stand in opposition, and I will give them without comment for you to consider:
1) “Wolfgang Kemp has identified two conflicting attitudes to the problem. Did that wealth of detail — which was no less than the saturation of the images with particles of reality — conform to the criteria for a work of art which were valid at the time [19th century], or did photography’s capacity for faithful detail discredit the medium in artistic terms?”
2) “The painter Eugene Delacroix could state definitively: “Great artists concentrate our interest by excluding extraneous or senseless detail.” He sees photography’s infinite capacity for detail as unartistic. He understands the unity of a picture to be the product of the artist’s selection and transformation of his material. Art only comes into being when the viewer’s eye is guided and ceases to wander aimlessly from detail to detail, for this concentration and blurring corresponds to the way we perceive nature.”
3) [now referring to John Ruskin*] “… Ruskin thus calls true details “talkative details,” which communicate something about the history of the objects and are therefore significant signs and not random, trivial marks. Ruskin also subscribed to the thesis that nature disposes of an endlessly detailed and at the same time informative language, which the artist must recapture, “if necessary, against the demands of the picture.”
It is such “talkative details” that structure the space of redundancy, and not the artist’s arbitrary interpretative intrusion in his material. The detail is therefore what is attractive in a mostly uniform picture space, a charming and inevitable fact that eludes the viewer’s control. Detail, Roland Barthes stresses, is “something” that rings a bell, that produces “a tiny shock” in the beholder.”
*Mr. Ruskin apparently was not quite prepared for *all* details. Scroll down this page to find out what caused him more than “a tiny shock”.
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One last quote from Mr. Wagner’s essay (somewhat unrelated to the above), near the end where he is rounding up his discussion of manipulated photographic images, “It is not what is depicted that strikes terror, but that it is possible to depict it.”
