The
Art of Disconnection
Niall Benvie
Let's hear it for Epson! Now that photographers are able
to produce their own archival prints with ease and economy, this company
and others like it has allowed many to make the transition from mere 'photographer'
to 'fine artist'. For surely someone who offers 'fine art prints' of their
work for sale is, by implication, an artist. In the field of wildlife and
landscape photography, this is an interesting title in view of a long-standing
prejudice of the British art establishment which considers even serious
landscape and wildlife painting too inherently romantic in its approach,
frivolous in its content and, heaven forbid, sentimental in its intellectual
stance, to merit the accolade of 'art'. It is fair to assume that these
prejudices extend into the 'craft' of nature photography, whatever the intent
of its practitioner.
About a decade ago, I sat on a panel at a BBC Wildlife Magazine
nature photography symposium trying to debate these very questions with
Jeffrey Boswell, Tom Mangelsen and a representative of a London photographic
gallery. Since galleries today play at least as significant a role as the
academies in defining 'art', it is fair to consider him as part of the 'establishment'.
He was adamant that the sort of work show-cased in the (now BG) Wildlife
Photographer of the Year Competition was in no form art and never could
be. It has taken me 10 years to understand why this is a fundamentally flawed
idea and how someone could come to believe it. Along the way, I've also
grown to understand what separates the picture with sentiment, from one
which is just sentiment.
I should say at this point that the majority of my own
work remains sentimental. Its effect, if not its intent, is to invoke
a warm feeling rather than to provoke consideration of events beyond the
frame. These are Metaphor-Lite sight bites. While it is easy to say what
art isn't - I'm founding my argument on the belief that sentimentality
is the antithesis of art - saying what it is, is much harder. These are
days when charlatans shamelessly parade intellectual banality and kindergarten
technique as 'work' (ironically or otherwise) to the gullible. Tat has
become a tradable art-commodity. Art history is bunk. The word, in short,
has become so devalued in the public mind, its meaning so diffused, that
it slips easily through the net of definition.
So, in pursuit of my original line, let's say that a work
of art allows the viewer to take their sentient response to it into a larger
context. A successful image doesn't stop where the frame starts; it inspires
other thoughts, lines of enquiry and different ways of thinking. That larger
context may be provided by the creator's accompanying words, and the scope
of its success is enhanced by the understanding of the content by the viewer.
In short, the image engages the viewer at an intellectual as well as a limbic
level: the picture's content is more than the sum of its aesthetic parts.
But what is content without a viewer's ability to recognise
and interpret it? It seems to me that 'art' as it is generally discussed,
is exclusively anthropocentric: if the work fails to comment on the human
condition, it is inadmissible and dismissed as sentimental. But what if
the content acknowledges the primacy of natural process and comments on
relationships within the natural world and between it and us? Is this
really any less valid? Might it be the that ignorance of the natural world,
or unwillingness to acknowledge our place in it, on the part of a metropolitan
based art establishment deeply nervous of empathy is the real reason that
such work is not labelled 'art'? Blinkered as it is, does 'the establishments'
opinion really count?
Perhaps it is for nature photographers who want to do
something other than make feel-good photos to take a lead in defining
and explaining their agendas. But we have to be candid in distinguishing
between illustrative and 'art' photography : just because a photo has
that elusive transcendent look of otherness - because it 'looks like a
painting' - makes it automatically art no more than painting a cucumber
yellow makes it a banana. I take the view that it is the intent of the
photographer, his or her consideration of the content and context rather
than merely the aesthetic components of the picture that determines if
the picture has artistic merit. Two pictures may, in pictorial terms,
look similar, but the one that was made only in response to light, line,
form, texture and colour, when the contents perform as subject matter
for the photographer's creative satisfaction rather than having an independent
status as a subject connected to the world about it, is sentimental. I
think too that it is disingenuous for photographers to ascribe content,
to claim a particular intent, after a picture's conception. While painters
make discoveries and gain insights about a subject during the time a work
is being executed, photographers can do this only by engaging with the
subject before releasing the shutter. It seems that the possibility that
we may do this doesn't occur to nature photography's detractors.
We can, of course, be our own worst enemies. Is it any
surprise that collectors fail to take seriously photographic prints when
many 'fine art' prints are sold for give-away prices? Clearly, their creators
lack confidence in their images: maybe they are too worried about them
fading after a few months (not a concern now with Epson's 2000 series
printers). The lack of credibility as purveyors of fine art is compounded
by questionable claims of 'Limited Edition' print runs. If I was ever
to buy such a thing, I would like to be assured that the means to produce
any more after the stated run was complete no longer existed. All identical
slides, negatives and scans would have to be destroyed to ensure the run
was truly limited. Any other way denies the buyer the exclusivity that
such a promise implies. Nevertheless I continue to see on the printed
page images sold as 'limited edition' prints. We have to decide if an
image is for selling as art prints or for publication if serious collectors
are ever to be attracted.
It would be easy to conclude from what goes before that
I am aggrieved at the lack of recognition for serious landscape and nature
photographers and the way their work is dismissed by galleries. In fact,
I care far less about that than how such a state of affairs reflects more
generally on the diminished status of natural history in education, that
it has become acceptable for educated people to have little or no knowledge
of the non-human world around them. This has not always been so and Britain
in particular has a fine tradition of producing natural historians whose
interdisciplinary appreciation of the natural world, usually gained at
first hand, cannot be matched by lab based scientists specialising in
one or two species. And it is not just the art establishment that is metropolitan
based. As a nation, we are too and the 'countryside' is for most a place
of recreation rather than a place of living and study. Most depressing
of all is the denial to so many children of mud-on-the-boots natural history
tuition, of the opportunity to learn about the nature in the field as
part of a formal curriculum. There is no doubt that children know much
more today about 'the environment' than when I went to school, but as
indoor entertainment becomes the norm, it is questionable how much they
know about their environment. Perhaps seeing it through our photographs
and hearing about it from our mouths is better than nothing and that this
is a new front that we need to open if we want concern and interest to
be converted into pro-environment lifestyle choices.
