Photography in questions

 

 

When the time had come to celebrate the 150th birthday of photography, Jean Dieuzaide entitled the 166th exhibition at the Château d'Eau like a big question mark :

"Toi, Photographie, qui es-tu ?" (You, Photography, who are you ?)¹

Even though the interrogation was twofold, as the exhibition was partly related to a very mysterious (scientifically defined) photographic negative : the Turin Shroud, the more general implied meaning of the question seems odd for a world-famous 70 year old photographer owning one of the first photo-galleries in the world. But when you think attentively about it, the question is not so odd, and in fact, the odd thing is that nobody asks it ; for unlike other very talkative mediums (even an abstract painting is noisy with the things that emanate from the artist's subjectivity), photography has no voice, or rather, it has no human voice .

"All the arts are based on man's presence", said André Bazin, "only in photography do we delight in his absence"².

Facing such a mystery, only poets can be competent and in the very first days after photography was given birth, they expressed themselves on the subject :

Alphonse de Lamartine, one of the great XIXth century French poets, felt this very strongly . After condemning it for a while, he "underwent a complete conversion" and claimed that "photography is the photographer"³.

From then on, the really fundamental question was stated : on which side does photography incline, on the subject's side or on the object's side ⁴ ? or, more awkardly put, is it window or mirror ⁵ ?

Baudelaire, on the other hand , while he privately loved collecting photo-portraits by Carjat or Nadar, publicly denounced the "bourgeois" use of photography⁶ and especially the fast-growing commerce of pornographic daguerreotypes.

The way XIXth century artists and poets questioned this medium is very different from the way we are used to questioning it today, if at all. Poets now (the few surviving ones) no longer have the public audience they had at that time, even politically⁷. The "poetic principle"⁸ proclaimed by Edgar Poe and Charles Baudelaire has long been despised by modern phenomenology.

At that time, and until a quite recent past (maybe, in France for example, until that time when Jacques Prévert and Robert Doisneau were good friends and a Goverment Department of Culture was not yet created), every new photograph produced an astonishment, a sort of juvenile excitement due to its magical aspect which many photographers do not feel any more, by sheer lack of simplicity.

As Gisèle Freund says, "A new consciousness of reality, an unknown appreciation of nature were revealed (the French word "révéler" has two meanings : "to reveal", and the chemical action of the developper disclosing the image of a negative or positive photographic emulsion). Through the technique of photography a world was revealed which, until then, would have remained unnoticed. The Camera got closer to the everyday realities of the visible world, which all of a sudden took on more importance"⁹.

All of a sudden man was forced to believe (at least) in the things he had under his eyes. With the irruption of photography, one might say that a certain kind of primary scepticism as regards our knowledge of the sensible world was definitely eradicated. The day-dreaming pantheistic tendencies of romanticism directly imported from Germany (based more on a kind of natural mysticism than on true poetic intuition) received an eye-opening shock.

Photographic images had such presence that on-lookers dared not stare too long at the portraits which seemed to look at you¹⁰. Photography, with its unbearable objectivity, appeared, 220 years after Descartes' dream as if to say : "Wake-up ! the world you're looking at with its flying reality is not pure fancy. And what is more, even without colours, (the proper object of sight), not only does it still make sense, but it also reveals by this means its inner mystery called "poetry" - it's up to you to find it..".

XIXth century texts on photography are also interesting in that they show how, from the very beginning, photography was a source of conflicts. The most serious conflicts opposed photographers on one side and painters, draughtsmen and engravers on the other.

The rivalry went so far as to be brought to court¹¹ and had not only an economic but also a deontological and a philosophical background. The case is still going on nowadays and probably will go on forever for various complex reasons, one of them being that the heart of the debate is pervaded by the very old opposition of matter vs spirit, artificially created by materialism. We must not forget that before being historical, classical or dialectical , materialism is theoretical and has metaphysical implications.

Comparing painting with photography is right when the comparison is limited to the field of perception, taken materially : a photographic print, as well as a painted canvas, is a fixed image, so they are both perceived in the same way and the comparison stops here. But as this question has many important extensions that will be developped more thoroughly in the next articles, let us tread a new path .

What if it were compared with music ? Many photographers do : Marc Riboud compares a good photograph to the right note in music¹². For Eva Rubinstein taking photographs is like interpreting a music which is everywhere, offered to everybody¹³. These reactions are normal as all the arts "constantly aspire towards the condition of music¹⁴".

If we accept the idea that music consists of emitting a form¹⁵ expressed by sound, and that photography consists of receiving and capturing a form impressed by corporeal light on a light-sensible material, then photography can quite accurately be compared to some sort of music in reverse.

It is with such a disposition of mind that we will try, in the following series of articles, to bring out a certain number of unasked questions, searching as deeply as possible through the three actors in presence :

The man as a photographer,

the things to be photographed,

and between them, a funny box called camera obscura.

This magic box, able to capture a luminous form and produce mysterious developments once improved by modern technology, was invented at the time when Aristotle wrote his "de Anima", with his still unchallenged theories among which those on the sense faculties and the nature of light are not the least.

Indeed photography does stir up a tremendous number of questions, more especially so to the philosophical spirit, and particularly when considered under its creative and poetic aspect .

And there is a good reason for this because photography is , very roughly speaking, a kind of materialized look containing both the most undoubted objectivity a material picture has ever had and the most simple and fascinating form of externalisation : to press the button or not to press the button.

Now there is a snag :

We have been definitely and comfortably settled in the "Civilisation of the Image" for 2 or 3 generations now, our Western eyes continually gorged with pictures, and this has provoked a sort of psychological choking of our intellecting and judging faculties. It is hard for us to imagine the world without any photographs. It is even harder for us to imagine that photography could well not exist. Still, (and this has to be stressed), one cannot objectively reflect on this modern invention without making this preliminary effort of imagination. It is now about time to close our eyes, sit back and think over the questions.

What questions ? Some of them are more or less contained implicitly in the excellent investigation of the photographer's intimate world made by Frank Horvatt¹⁶. The first question we should ask ourselves (of which only the poetic mind can actually be conscious) should be : what in photography rejoices the mind ?

What do we actually "take" when we take a photograph? And what do we communicate in a print? Is phenomenology the only possible discourse on photography and is it compatible with poetical realism ? Where does ontology come in?

Where does the creative principle of photography reside : in the pictures to be produced, or in the free will of the photographer, or elsewhere ? In other words, as a great poet¹⁷ from southern France says," In photography, who is playing the leading role? the subject (the photographed thing), the sense of sight, the machine (camera) or the chap (photographer) ?"

When creative photography is considered, can we really talk about "free creativity of the mind "? And by the way, is photography really an art, and if it is, can it be considered as a plastic art or a fine art ? What is the formal object of photography ?

Is it philosophically correct to consider light, the photographer's material, as a completely corporeal substance ? Why on earth is black and white photography more expressive than color photography ?

And indeed, Why is it so difficult to take a good photograph ? What is a good photograph ?

Now Jean Dieuzaide cries out :

"You, Photography, who are you ?"

 

 

 

 

MUSIC IN REVERSE (2)

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL SNAGS.

 

 

 

 

            We will never end questioning ourselves on photography because we will never end questioning reality. Still, one must admit that it is an odd thing. By the way, is it really a "thing" ? Could not we better talk of a vivisection of the visible reality ? For indeed it has to do with "life", being taken "from life" ; this apparently still and harmless thing called a photographic picture is a prickling of life, or more precisely of "intention". As Claudel puts it rightly, "an intention that offers itself to our attention" ¹⁸.

A photograph is also an image/picture, the being of which is abstract if taken materially and concrete, real, if considered formally (materially and formally are here taken in the thomist sense). An image/picture which is also a sign, the worst of the signs will say Roland Barthes ingeniously¹⁹, wholly determined by its intentionality .

As such, not only the pracice of photography but also any photograph as object of perception is facing a great amount of snags that only a few of the best photographers are really conscious of and also some unknown but peaceful amateurs who practice it in the secretness of their heart and of their darkroom.

For 150 years, this big ship of photography which is no more than the merciless intersection point where our will and our intelligence are in the same time confronted to the visible and fleeting reality, and as if solicited by it, makes its way in troubled waters, often in our stormy "collective unconscious". She (the ship/photography) tacks through amidst a great number of snags which all have the peculiarity to be the emergence of one single body the paternity of which France has the sad privilege to claim : Descartes' idealism.

The reason why photography gives more trouble to the french brain than to anyone else is not to be found in the fact that France has given it to the world quite pompously, as the french always do, but in our Cartesian heritage.

 

The Cartesian heritage

The heritage of René Descartes is heavy to bear.

It would be fastidious and boring for the reader, and to be frank, for me too, to explain here where the cartesian position concerning the activity of the sense faculties is wrong. We can refer to the excellent analysis of Jacques Maritain on the subject²⁰. Still one should know that if for the schoolmen we first communicate with things by our sense faculties, the sense being an animated organ, and secondly by our intelligence and by the ideas, for Descartes on the contrary, the senses have no cognitive value, they have only a pragmatic one. Ideas are not only means but already things. The thought reaches the ideas as if they were or screens that it discovers in itself²¹. At short, we only know our ideas, the thought reaches directly only itself. So, the cartesian obviousness leads straight to mechanism. It mechanizes nature, violates it, annihilates all that makes things symbolize with mind, talk to us. "Universe becomes dumb".

The question is then to know if we are who give their meaning to things or if the things give their meaning to us.

We will better understand the subtleness of the problem in this ambiguous definition of a photograph by Régis Durand : "a thought made sensitive"²² the question is indeed to know wether this thought is quietly settled in its immanence, whether what I am looking at is existing out of my mind and in the end, wether what I see on this photograph has existed and is communicable without reference to the photographer's thought or not.

Because, let us put it straight : has cartesianism so phagocyted (i.e. eaten from inside) our intellect as to make us believe that photographing the real consists purely and simply in tracing it off ? that is to say (let us be precise), to draw it with our hand on a transparency , in other words, when the image is disclosed in the developper bath, am I allowed to say that this picture is the fruit of MY thought ? or that I made it with my own hands ? (We will see elsewhere how Salvador Dali had a deep view of this contradiction).

We are here at a cross roads where one must show good sense.

Of course, nobody ever pretended that a photograph is able to tell everything about reality. All visible reality contains some parts hidden to the senses, parts of mystery, of "chiaroscuro". The ancients' wisdom -from Aristotle until the decaying of scholasticism - owing to a philosophy of nature distinct from metaphysics, would acknowledge in things a mystery of relative intelligibility, of ontological obscurity . It is then as absurd to imagine that a photograph has an absolute power of revelation, nearly supernatural, as to assert that it has nothing to tell us any more.

 

Objectivity / Subjectivity : the heart balance

The photographic world (those who practice it and those who talk about it), if we contrast it at the extreme zones, can be devided into hard-idealism and soft-idealism. The reason for it is that the act of taking a photograph can in many ways be compared to the act of knowing and most of the time, we misunderstand this activity. We insist on the word taking , rather than producing or making a photograph ; because there is a world between the two.

The whole of modern idealism is based on the wrong idea that knowing a thing consists in making a picture of it, in representing it.

For the ancients, on the contrary, knowledge is not, in itself, a transitive activity, an act of production, but an immanent one. Knowing is actually, allways after the ancients²³ take, capture, posess, even seize, sometimes embrace, grasp the real, having it for oneself, not physically but morally, spiritually.

Well, two opposite mistakes can be done about the connections between the sensitive knowledge and the intellectual one.

At first, we can realize that tere is a complete difference between the sensation and the intellection, but exagerate this difference so far as seing no more that the abstract, object of the intelligence, is achieved in the sensible. We admit the universal but we deny it any ground in reality and we consider that, psychologically, the concept cannot be derived from the image and sensation through abstraction. This is Kant's position. This is also the position where find themselves unconsciously, those who to day are blocked on the notion of "conceptual photography", feeling less and less at ease in classical photography.

This is what I would call "hard idealism", leading easily to a kind of intellectualist dogmatism when applied to photography.

The positive side of this attitude is that it does not feed on illusions or sensations only and is often more apt to judge the things of the mind and subjectivity in the field of creative photography.

Secondly, we can realize that the content of the concept is achieved in the sensible (or perceptible world) without seing the difference between the abstract mode of the concept and the concrete mode of the image. Consequently, the qualitative distinction between reason on one side, imagination and sense faculty on the other, will be denied ; the concept won't be anything but a transformed sensation or an average image. This is the empirists position²⁴. It is also a position where unconsciously find themselves those who imprudently found all their hopes or quest of absoluteness and truth in the things of sense. It is the place of many unsatiated desires, of a kind of natural mystique, also of a mystique of light, that can be full of truly spiritual riches.

I will call this position "soft idealism", leading to a sort of sensualist dogmatism when applied to photography. The positive side of this attitude is that it is more apt to judge what makes the intrinsic aesthetics of the photographic medium, and to understand what is often called "the soul of black and white".

Strangely enough, this relation between theories of knowledge and common trends in creative photography, has found in the past a rather accurate illustration through two big photo exhibitions in the 50's that are now mythical monuments of the history of photography :

The Family of Man, set up by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, which we were glad to show in Toulouse this year - and the exhibition called Subjektive Fotografie , set up by Otto Steinert in Saarbrucken, Germany, in 1951.

These two exhibitions can be considered as two doors opening our Civilisation de l'Image and on the big question of pure objectivity or pure subjectivity in photography.

Is there a link between the philosophy that subtends each one of these exhibitions and the anglo-saxon empirist or sensualist theories (Locke, Hume, Berkeley) on one side, and the German intellectualism and idealism (Kant, Hegel) on the other ? It is plausible.

My feeling is that it is equally vain to defend pure objectivity or pure subjectivity in creative photography. A great photographer, as were André Kertész, Josef Sudek, Henri Cartier-Bresson all their work through, is not in the first place concerned in discovering the Absolute in his photographs nor in letting off his neurosis.

Likewise in musical rendering, the creative room of the photographer is the "elsewhere".

His creative sky is more vast, less narrow than his navel, and higher, lighter and less crushing than matter.

So where is it ?

ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD²⁵, would have said with one voice Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Anywhere out of THIS world.

 

 

MUSIC IN REVERSE (3)

"I looked, I saw, I did"²⁶

 

When we consider the history of creative photography, we are surprised to notice that the greatest photographers were also the least preoccuppied by the question of photography as an art, considering photography only as photography thus joining the ranks of many a common amateur photographer for whom the question is still less disturbing, the only big question for Mr.X being to find the cheapest mini-lab nearby in order to give as many more colour prints of Paul & Nancy's wedding to the family. For Mario Giacomelli²⁷ and Eva Rubinstein²⁸ photography is beyond speech and if any speech is added, the mystery turns flat, poetry is changed into vulgarity.

Both of them have a similar attitude facing the photographic act²⁹. As Kertész, Doisneau, HC-B or Boubat often did, (and finally as Mr X does) they explain their part as a very humble participation to something exceptionnal happening simultaneously under their eyes and in their heart and in its communication through the medium of photography.

To this very straightforward attitude, there are roughly three natural opponents :

First, the big photo industries : they tend to underestimate the creative capacity of photography because they have no other aim but to sell their products - there is nothing wrong in it. We know the motto: "Press the button and we'll do the rest", it is the best way (we will see it later on) to expel the factive part of photography. But willy-nilly, this attitude as far as the years 1920-50 are concerned, suits us since it allowed millions of B&W negatives to reach us, which wasn't possible with colour films commercialized after the 60's. The preservation of our photographic collective memory has been scandalously scorned by the film manufacturers as over 90 % of film consumers unconsciously buy colour emulsions, not knowing that their permanence to light do not exceed a few dozen years. It is also possible that the above-mentioned consumers are only living for the present time, without the slightest care to forward their image to their descendants , but this is another story ... One must not forget that, had it not been for the worldwide campaign led against RC (plastic) black & white papers by a few courageous photographers behind Jean Dieuzaide, 20 years ago, today every young photographer should have to make his own bromide or bromochloride baryta coated paper to produce a vintage print. Moreover, what will be left of photography when the electronic image, in the next decade, will have completely hypnotized modern man, his eyes and brain definitely devitalized by sophisticated computers for he will then be resolutely and totally in the grasp of materialism ?

The second natural opponents are some of the Photo Galleries in Western capitals and a special kind of collectors : they tend to overestimate it because from the 1980's onwards, Fine Art Photography started to appear on the art market. The concepts of "uniqueness" and "scarceness", together with the sacred principle of "non-reproductibility" gave new criteria for the evaluation of a photographic work, thus opening the new age of modern photography : materialism and mercantilism.

There is more in a few lines taken from an auction sale catalogue of the Hotel Drouot than in a hundred pages of philosophy on the subject :

June 5, 1992 public auction sale of modern and contemporary photographs at the Hotel Drouot, Paris³⁰ :

n° 89. Eugène Atget. "Escalier du Grand Trianon", circa 1905, (albumen process) - reserve price : 1800 FF

n° 20. Robert Doisneau. "Le regard oblique" circa 1950 - (modern silver print)- reserve price : 2000 / 2500 FF

n° 14. Henri Cartier-Bresson "Palais Royal", Paris, 1960 -(silver print) reserve price : 6000 / 8000 FF

n° 80 . Joël Peter Witkin. "Bruja", 1988 -(silver print) reserve price : 25,000 / 30,000 FF

The third opponent is the intellectual "diktat" imposed on the artist by Hegel. For him "is beautiful only that which finds its expression in art, inasmuch as it is a creation of the mind ; natural beauty deserves this name only if it is related to the mind" ³¹.

This theory leads to a double reduction : transcendantal beauty is reduced to esthetic beauty which itself is reduced to the beauty of the work of art. Furthermore, "in what we call nature, external world , the mind has difficulties to find and recognize itself"³² , which is true to a certain extent but can in no way be set up as a rule and especially so in Art.

The Hegelian spirit considers that our mind cannot turn towards what is not itself, towards what exists independently of it, without failing to its dignity and irremediably suffering alienation.³³

This state of mind is the worst of servitudes for a photographer, a genuine mental and affective prison, where he has no other way out but to put his eyes in his mind.

My ideas only can be a source of creativeness. They have become so hypertrophied that sight, the most noble of the sense faculties capable of the maximum cognitive power has no other function than just to check wether my ideas and the world outside (eventually the picture taken) are on the same wave-lentgh. These three factors have serious consequences for photography in general, not only creative. I often come across young talented photographers who are shameful to show their classical black and white portfolio. Today, simplicity needs some heroism.

This is not the place to analyse the psychological drama of modern art. It has been deeply studied by René Huyghe, of the French Academy in a brilliant study titled : "The Signs of the Time and Modern Art"³⁴ . This outstanding art historian was specialized in the psychology of plastic arts, and was the first to have used the expression Civilisation de l'Image³⁵ 40 years ago. But every art historian is now ready to admit that the causes must be found at the end of the Middle-Ages³⁶.

Against the intellectualism of an art reduced to discursive reason, and to invention, compelling the artist to stick to an intellectual family and oppose each new theory as a negation of the previous one in an endless quest which Maritain accurately called "chronolatry"³⁷, photography intervenes as an act of affirmation which Juan I Jong very rightly stresses³⁸ . When he takes a picture -purely and simply- the photographer is alone to assert himself with all his strengths and weaknesses, all by himself, without referring to a predetermined discourse.

Against a philosophy of art dominated by the so called notion of concept, previous to any experience where the artist is more anxious to adopt an attitude than to express himself³⁹, the photographic act appeals to intuitive reason.

This affirmation, as an act of the will, and of judgement, where deep unknown parts of the self can come into action, is the essence of photography. It is like allowing two worlds (subjectivity & objectivity) to join, to meet, to fuse (Lucia Radochonska talks of a mating act) on a piece of light-sensible emulsion. Therein lies the mystery.

 

 

Intuitive reason and discursive reason.

The ancient greek philosophers made a distinction between discursive reason and intuitive reason. Rational discourse is a chain of conceptual statements (judgements) tied together by logical connexions leading to necessary conclusions. On the contrary, the intuitive functioning of the intellect is characterized by a certain immediateness. The intuitive cognition bears on a thing present, whereas the abstractive cognition bears on a thing absent.

In this respect, intuition has a certain superiority over imagination : the fact that you are imaginative does not prove that you are intuitive. Images (or phantasma), says Aristotle⁴⁰ are wrong most of the time whereas sensations are always true (talking of "the illusion of the sense faculty, The Philosopher argues that in this case, our judgement is to be blamed, but not the sense in itself).

Well then, if we accept the idea that photography is the simultaneous activity of a sense faculty (sight) together with intelligence, then its natural creative field is more dependent on intuition and emotion than on imagination⁴¹.

The word "intuition" can be applied either to the intuition of the external sense, or to the creative intuition peculiar to the poet, or to the purely intellectual and cognitive intuition and lastly to the metaphysical intuition (intuition of being) by which the intellect is directly connected to the real⁴² .

The photographer is concerned with all of them (or nearly all of them), in as much as taking a photograph means, simultaneously : seeing, thinking, and feeling, the best definition having been given by Henri Cartier-Bresson : "it is putting the mind, the eye and the heart on the same line of sight"⁴³.

Photographing then, indeed could be more than a banal and casual act, it is both the act of the sense of sight and of the intellect all together in one single intuitive action. Photographing is, in the full sense of this latin word : "INTELLIGERE", (intelligate, if there is such a word), which means etymologically : "intus legere", "to read from the inside".

Of course, photography can also be considered as a pure activity of the eye, a mere way to express one's ideas, without refering to anything spiritual, but this is another question where the notion of intentionality and concept comes in, which will be encountered later on.

 

 

MUSIC IN REVERSE (4)

Photography in its causes ⁴⁴

 

We believe that we know something really, says Aristotle⁴⁵, and not as the sophists do, who are misled by appearences, when we believe that we know its cause, know, besides, that it is truly its cause, and that it cannot be otherwise.

The very delicate question of causes in photography is so far reaching that it could well monopolize the debate. Before fully immersing ourselves in the question, we feel it necessary to situate the level of our discourse by distinguishing two orders of things : that of ontology and that of phenomenology.

 

BEING AND PHENOMENON

Photography is (for some time yet) a certain approach to reality. Ontology and phenomenology, which refer respectively to being⁴⁶ and to phenomenon, to being and to appearance, are the two ways that present themselves to man (reasonable animal) for approaching reality. They will then play an important part in our reflexion.

Let us look at this simple question : what is it that differentiates painting from photography ?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, who understood many essential things about photography saw one very important one clearly : it is that photography has nothing to do with painting. One "makes" a painting, he said , whereas one "takes" a picture⁴⁷ , and elsewhere : We work in terms of reality, not of fiction, and must therefore "discover", not fabricate⁴⁸. We can even consider, without going too far, that H. C.-B. is one of the rare well known photographers to have undestood "formally" the ontological difference between photography and painting. For there is a gap between seeing this difference "materially" and being "formally" conscious of it⁴⁹. Indeed, for the modern mind unaccustomed to scholastic subtleness, this could seem obscure. Nevertheless, if you ask the next passer-by why or in what way photography is different from painting, you'll be looked at queerly and probably get answers like :"It goes without saying", or : "Because it is simply not the same thing" ; but, and this is why there are many photographers but very few Cartier-Bressons, practically none of them will answer : "Because one 'makes' a painting whereas one 'takes' a picture."

We will come back at greater length on this exacting, "nearly ontological attitude facing reality"⁵⁰ of H.C.-B.'s, often compared to Zen mysticism, which it would be interesting to study in the light of James Arraj's work⁵¹.

Now we will see how, because of this lack of rigour, a purely phenomenological conception of photography, because it is preoccupied only with the appearance of things, has made it possible to intercalate between photography and painting an illusory mode of being, a pure object of representation, which, being proper to neither of them, is condemned to float between their respective objects.

The fruitfulness of the notion of phenomenon is such, says Etienne Gilson in "Painting and Reality"⁵², that the analysis of the phenomenal being has no end. Any object can become an object of experience in an infinite number of different ways ; the analysis of its various phenomenological modes of existence (those of paintings) can well be carried out, not frutlessly, but endlessly. This is what makes the grandeur and misery of phenomenology. It starts as a philosophy and ends up as literature.

 

 

CLASSICISM AND MODERNITÉ

Well, we are here at the exact point that separates what I will call conventionally, "classical photography" (referring to classical music, with which it has certain analogical complicities), for lack of a better adapted concept, from a practice of photography that I will call "exploratory", being a practice of chronic daring and unsatisfaction, sometimes called erroneously "plastician photography", which it would be more honest to call "plastician approach using photography". We will come back in further articles on photography as a plastic art and particularly about an exerpt by Jean Claude Lemagny titled "plastic in spite of everything" in his latest book : "Shadow and Time"⁵³.

These attempts, insofar as they explore this mysterious field which is the relation between subject and object, between the ego and things, between the sense faculties and knowledge, insofar as they wonder how to situate photography adequately in the field of art creation, are legitimate and worthy of respect, as attitudes of research.

 

PHILOSOPHY THAT SKIMS-OVER THE PAGES

But one must be conscious of the principles on which an approach is founded and what they are tending towards.

For a few decades now, Hegel has reigned over every field of art. In order to avoid all controversy, this particular philosophy of art has been maliciously named "contemporary" ; nevertheless, people don't know that the whole structure of this temple called "modernity" is based upon one single idea : that of "pure object" (phenomenal).

Jacques Maritain, in "The Degrees of Knowledge"⁵⁴ explains the defects of such a theory :

"A 'pure object' (if that notion were concievable) would introduce nothing but itself and would always suffice and nothing more ; thought would have only to skim over the pages of the objective world like a picture book. (...) The irremissible ambiguity of this notion comes from the fact that in order to think it, one has simultaneously to face some being (when one THINKS : an object), and to put this same being aside (when one thinks : A PURE object). In fact, going back and forth from one side to the other of the contradiction gives the mind the illusion of conceiving this totally imaginary notion."

How does this affect the photographer ?

This question has been partly dealt with in Music In Reverse n° 3 about the Hegelian theory of art.

As a matter of fact, the problem is relatively simple and consists purely and simply for the photographer in positionning himself in front of reality and to know if this reality which is there, before his eyes, is just a pure object of experience or if it is something else, if this real thing has consistency.

For the ancient Greeks and the scholastics, the object of intelligence is being and for them, being is not simply a figment of the imagination or a subjective notion.

It is fully that which is real, in all its intelligible reality, the real thing with everything which determines it.

Let us be clear : our aim is not to criticize creative subjectivity, on the contrary. We acknowledge that things are better in the mind than in themselves⁵⁵, but provided that we affirm with the ancients that nothing is to be found in the intellect which does not come from the senses.

All our ideas, including the idea of being, indeed do come from the senses, thanks to the sui generis action of that intellectual light called agent intellect which actualizes the intelligible in potency in the sense object.

To affirm that being is superior to non-being is thus already, even before opening one's eyes, having an attitude of confident curiosity and openness before reality.

So, when our photographer walks out in the open or steps in his studio, even if his intention is to take a picture of a piece of cheese in order to illustrate an advertising campaign, he is unavoidably facing a real thing to be photographed, something having some strength or resistance ; in other words, being. Because he is in direct contact with the sensed reality, the photographer has a privileged (I would say "nearly automatic") contact with being.

 

REALISM CONTESTED

But you may answer that a photograph is not reality, that as it is a "pure imprint", it does not contain any being, that it is just a plain ordinary picture which exists only for the eyes that contemplate it ; and along with Sartre you will admit that "... if I see Peter in the photograph, it's because I put him in it⁵⁶". Well then, you will also admit, without getting cross about it, that if I drew whiskers on your girl friend's picture (that photograph you so carefully keep in your wallet), it would be of no consequence, since I don't put your girl friend in the photograph.

Of course, things are not as simple as that.

After all, Sartre's theory (which introduces the very interesting question of sight as an active or passive faculty) is only partly wrong for in the photograph, Peter has no natural or entitative being, but concluding that Peter has no being at all unless I put it in, means making my look not only the measure of all things but also the generator of all things, which is the exact definition of solipsism⁵⁷. I am afraid that we cannot endlessly pretend to ignore the gap between those two approaches to photography :

One, recognizing that the photographic emulsion is indeed a sensitive material, also acknowledges its intelligible content. This approach arises naturally from the traditional theory of knowledge founded on the senses, called "realist conceptualism" (or moderate realism), because it maintains both the distinction of concept and image (or sensation) and the presence in the image (or sensation) of a real basis for the concept.

The other is eager to "desensitize" the photographic emulsion, making it "pure" matter or a "pure" mechanical transfer. This is absolute subjectivism and idealism, that can be recognized in the following statement : "Photography (or a photograph) is nothing but artifice : it doesn't refer to reality but to its representation, its interpretation by man".⁵⁸

I willingly admit with Etienne Gilson⁵⁹ that there is snobbery in the intellectual attitude which despises realism, still, as it is clearly declared today that "the legendary objectivity is hard to kill"⁶⁰, then we too shall endure.

 

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS⁶¹

For the sophists, Heraclites and his heirs Hegel and Sartre⁶², being has been found too inconsistent and non-being only has weight and value (and yet it is not from lack of warnings⁶³).

Non-being then surpasses being, or more precisely being is only inside the thought and answers to the nothingness of things, it is nothing but a subjective form that the mind has produced in itself while reasoning about the objective non-being. You will tell me that it means having being proceed from nothingness. Assuredly...

Hence those beautiful conclusions that we all know : everything started from nothingness ; becoming is the only true existence ; the more comes from the less, what passes is real and what stays is an abstraction⁶⁴. For the ancients, if being is firstly intelligible, it has an other property, and not the least, which is permanency ; and in the praise of folly sometimes preached by a certain very trendy stream of the so-called 'modernité', these two properties are banished from works of art.

What are the consequences for the photographer ?

Just what H.C.-B had understood : if a photographer takes a picture, he must be conscious that there is something there to be taken and his awareness or not that this thing is being makes no difference. On the contrary, if he takes a picture with the feeling that he makes it, with the intimate conviction that all creation proceeds from nothingness, when he goes out with his camera or enters his studio, he has in his mind (more or less consciously) that he must call something into being. For him then, taking a picture or making it is the same thing and in that case, photographing or painting are formally, ontologically, identical. Taking pictures is no longer the intrinsic condition of photography but an aleatory, secondary and extrinsic aspect of it. The latent image thus has no reality neither material nor immaterial. The creative emotion will no longer be situated before reality but before the (purely material) object-image still to be made, still to create.

At this point, we are precisely in a materialistic conception of photography.

 

THE THEATRE OF REALITIES⁶⁵

But there is something more serious :

The human being having lost his quality of "being" (but then, what is left of the human ?) he is nothing but the actor of a gigantic farce in which, with a monstruous egocentric arrogance I put myself in the role of the only spectator watching this poor world playing on the stage (or on TV), since I am the measure of all things, my gaze dominates all things.

Such is indeed the hidden defect of modern phenomenology which dares to dismiss the ancients' wisdom for "the Sciences of Man".

For phenomenology, the object of intelligence is no longer the intelligible being of the things we perceive, but a pure representation. In order to compensate the void caused when being is put aside or expelled, new concepts based on "pureness" are invented; words like pure object, or pure phenomenon of perception, or pure subjectivity⁶⁶ will be used.

As we said elsewhere⁶⁷, the universe being dumb, our photographer is so to speak compelled to force reality in order to have it say what he himself intends to express. Psychologically, to use an image which does not seem too strong, it is a sort of spiritual rape.

This is the opportunity to renew our acquaintance with an old principle taken off the dusty shelves, which used to be common to science and the plastic arts : "submission to the object". Jacques Maritain, in an interesting commentary⁶⁸, shows how this question can become easily obscure in the case of art. After reading it, we should be able to situate the object of creative photography halfway between the object of science and the object of the plastic arts.

 

WHAT BECOMES OF LOVE ?

All things considered, the worst of the defaults in the idealist and phenomenist attitudes in photography is their lack of love. Barthes clearly saw the necessity of love as the fundamental rule in all photography : "I think that contrary to painting, he says, the ideal future growth of photography is the private relationship, that is to say a photography that takes in charge a love relationship with someone⁶⁹". But, unlike Barthes, I will extend this love relationship well beyond this simply human relationship, to all the created world. I see this relationship of love, friendship, and sympathy with the real world which is so lacking in the frosty, jansenist positions of modernity, as a personal, intimate relationship, without which Doisneau's photographs, Pierre De Fenoyl's or Ansel Adam's landscapes, photographic Haïkus by Kertész or Cartier-Bresson or fashion photographs by Mr Horvat would not be possible.

After St Augustin's (supposed) saying, "love and do anything you want" seems to be the only way.

And where can love be situated if not at the very root of being ?

And isn't it because the sense of being has been lost that today, love cannot be understood but below the belt ?

In designating being as the first principle of realist photography, that is to say, (let's not be afraid of tautologies) of a photography having recognized in the intelligible and sensible world its sufficient and necessary material, we give to the photographic act the value of a veritable "ontological affirmation" (using a famous jesuit's formula⁷⁰, similar in many respects to the act of affirmation which Juan I Jong speaks of in Pa Chih Men⁷¹.

So, this "thing" mysteriously present in the latent image which has been captured by the photographer, this seized thing is indeed being, whatever the photographer's intention, emotion or creativeness.

But, you will tell me, when a photograph has been taken gratuitously, almost blindfold, without any intention, how can it still contain being ?

Precisely - and this will be the subject of our next article - for the aristotelo-thomist tradition, not only can all that which is sensible, and hence all photography, be qualified as being, but also it can rightly be called "intentional being".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC IN REVERSE (5)

 

THE CAUSES OF PHOTOGRAPHY

 

           

In the preceding article concerning causes, we posed as the first principle of photography the recognition outside of oneself of an existant reality which provokes the photographic act and determines its formal content.

We want to penetrate more deeply into this universe of causes to better understand the originality of photography when contrasted with other forms of expression and communication.

As Barthes wrote in the first lines of La Chambre Claire, we are seized with respect to photography by an "ontological" desire, and we want to know what it is "in itself", by what essential trait it distinguishes itself from the community of images⁷².

           

In fact, we should have begun with that thought. What does it question?

If we accept, therefore, the idea (which is really not a poor idea) that to photograph is to collect (one could perhaps also say to recollect, or to pluck, or even to welcome) something from outside of oneself, then the question is to define as well as possible WHAT this something is, and HOW all this procedes.

But we are obligated to state that modern criticism, confined to a theory of knowledge inherited from Descartes and Kant, considers this "pure phenomenon"⁷³ as a simple effect of nature⁷⁴, an obviousness about which there is nothing to say, an attitude leading inevitably to the extreme statement that a photograph conveys no sense⁷⁵.

                       

1) Criticism of the criticism

It is interesting to retrace the steps of the last twenty years of photographic criticism.

The first reflex was to compare photography to writing.

This conception had the merit, in the seventies and eighties, of being founded upon the formal and intelligible character of the photographic sign. In this glorious period (which is still not too far behind us) photography fascinated us for its abundance of meaning. We were nourished then by the Roland Barthes' studies in semiotics and the ascetic rigor of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs. The voracity with which we explored the photographic sign carried the inconvenience of understanding photography only through its various applications or readings, and of neglecting its factive part, and, therefore, its authentically "plastic" aspects. We frequently mocked then the sentimental character of the pictorialists. Unsatisfied, and reacting against the formalism which preceded, we decided, after digesting Barthes too quickly, to compare photography to painting. We began then to denigrate the French School of Henri Cartier-Bresson, which we had adored the day before, freeing ourselves from "pure photography", using the sign indirectly, creating fragmented images. In this unbridled period we knew the great joys of creativity, although they were often infantile. The exploration passed from sign to technique. We rediscovered early techniques, artistic prints. We became conscious of a certain material beauty of the photographic process and of its creative possibilities.

Today, more and more unsatisfied, our quest has found its limit; henceforth, photography will be compared to sculpture⁷⁶.

This conception, materialistic, nihilistic, denies any intelligible character in photography in order to exalt in it a photographic material, considered as the ultimate foundation of creative photography. The extreme intellectual position which follows is a form of photographic puritanism, tending to reduce all the art of photography to the pure aestheticism of the grey scale, a bit as if one were to reduce music to a pure exercise of scales⁷⁷.

Music in Reverse tries to climb back up the slope along which earlier criticism was allowing itself to be lead astray, and to give back to photography a more precise definition by putting forth the principles that govern it.

Whether idealistic or materialistic, modern criticism refuses to explain photography in itself and to respond squarely and rationally to the question, "What really happens when I take a picture?" It does not resist responding because it is unwilling, but because, lacking a suitable critical approach, it simply is unable.

Phenomenology, we have said elsewhere⁷⁸, considers only effects. The question of causes is totally alien to it. It is therefore much more at ease judging plastic arts than photography, for "the existence of the artist is the primary cause of the existence of the work of art, as in his existence is held its possibility.⁷⁹" We will see that for photography it is not so simple.

 

2) The causes

Let us try to consider this clearly with the help of Aristotle's famous example⁸⁰. We were aided by Theodore De Régnon's imposing work, The Metaphysics of Causes⁸¹.

A worker (efficient cause) has a certain objective (final cause). A model comes before his eyes or imagination (exemplary cause). He then takes some gold, some silver, some fire, some wood (material cause), and he modifies this material to produce a certain form (formal cause).

Among these causes we distinguish the extrinsic causes which are outside of the effect (efficient, final, and exemplary causes), and the intrinsic causes which are within the effect (formal and material cause).

We also distinguish the principal cause, the seat of intention, the cause which contains in its proper nature all the activity necessary to the production of the effect, from the instrumental cause, through which intention acts.

In photography we must not confuse:

-the cause of the image, which is this "effect of nature" being produced naturally in the camera obscura as it is also in the eye of every sentient or sensitive and living animal. This obligates us to distinguish photography, a natural image, from every other image made by the hand of man, artificial images, recalling one of the first principles of Aristotle according to which "Art is a principle in other things; nature is a principle in the thing itself"⁸². This image (be it pinhole or retinal) is nothing other than the thing itself existing according to another mode of existence, the intentional mode⁸³ (this principle has been denied since Descartes throughout the Cartesian-Kantian system).

-and the cause of the photograph, which is divided into two distinct acts:

what one calls commonly "the photographic act", which is the act of "taking" a picture, or of "seizing". It is an act of free will of the photographer. And one other part:

-"the artistic act", which is the physicochemical transformation of photosensitive material.

We are clearly limiting ourselves here to an extremely schematic view of the question. Each of the stated causes merits enormous development.

a. The extrinsic causes

The EFFICIENT CAUSE is that which makes a being what it is.

First difficulty. Many would be tempted to show the photographer as the only true efficient cause. It is a question of showing the causes of the conditions sine qua non, the effective causes from the determinant causes. By the principle of union between cause and effect, we give the name of cause only to that which influences efficiently the production of an effect⁸⁴. As a general rule it is the efficient cause which introduces the form into matter. Well, in photography, the principally principal and immediate efficient cause is THE LIGHT, cause of the pinhole-image and the photographic image, as it is also the cause of the image produced in the eye. The photographer is only the cause of the stop of the image and of other, posterior choices. He is, therefore, a secondary cause.

But (2nd difficulty), an objection of Aristotle, the photographic image having a natural cause, this cause must be classed among univocal causes, that is to say among those which are of the same nature, of the same kind, of the same degree as their proper effects. In the same way as fire begets fire, the photographic image is a luminous effect produced by light itself. Well, univocal causes are not total causes. They are, says Father de Régnon, either improperly stated causes, or causes which, in their operations, serve as instruments in superior causes⁸⁵, which is the case of light.

The modern intellectual has much difficulty in developing an exact idea of what light is, and for a very good reason, for we would know a great many things, insisted Louis de Broglie⁸⁶, if we knew what a ray of light is.

But, you say to me, what about the camera itself? and the chemical process? These are not properly spoken of as causes. They are perhaps conditions sine qua non, or even determinant causes, but they are not the causes themselves.

The EXEMPLARY CAUSE is the idea of the effect itself such as it would be produced. Here again there are difficulties.

The model (which is to say, the thing photographed), the other origin of the photograph, intervenes in two ways. It intervenes extrinsically insofar as it is idea (as in painting), but also intrinsically insofar as it is form.

Plato and Aristotle⁸⁷ were opposed on this question of ideas, and, unconciously through them, are there two opposing conceptions of photography.

For Plato, things that we see and touch, and which are individual, changing and perishable... being not Ideas, these things are not Reality... he holds them as weakened and deceptive images of Reality, as objects of opinion... and as inconsistent as shadows passing upon a wall. Consequently man, a captive of the body and of the senses, is comparable to a prisoner enchained in a cave, on whose walls he watches the shadowed reflections of the living men passing by above⁸⁸.

Aristotle, commenting on his teachers famous illustration, demonstrated, thanks to this admirable analysis of abstraction, which commands all philosophy, that our ideas are not innate, as memories of what we would have seen before birth, but that they come from the senses through the effect of the activity of the mind⁸⁹. This is what we call the realism of Aristotle.

We will see that creative photography, when it is well understood, takes a bit from both conceptions.

In painting the idea is born and remains in the painter's mind, taking its form in his work.

All his work consists in bringing into being in the work a form which approaches as closely as possible that of the idea.

In creative photography, if we give the fullest meaning to these two words, taking form, the process is more complex.

The photographer, if he is creative, has already a certain idea of what he is seeking. This idea, hidden in the depths of his preconscience, is not conceptualizable. It is like a musical melody in the virtual state, with neither notes nor lyrics, or like an unfertilized egg. The fertilization occurs when the photographer finds (sometimes without even having looked) a situation he recognizes. We can then speak of a poetic knowledge. Jacques Maritain defined it as a knowledge through affective (emotional) union, or through an affective connaturality⁹⁰ (a little like a mother recognizing her child).

All the work of the photographer consists in bringing to term this idea that is found virtually, potentially, on standby⁹¹ in the creative preconcious, and found formally in the visible reality.

We will not say much about FINAL CAUSES, for they are entirely determined by the notion of intentionality, which we will discuss in our next article.

We can, however, with Theodore de Régnon distinguish three different kinds of ends:

            -the end of the operation (finis operationis): the work toward which the operation is leading (to obtain a fixed image by means of photography).

            -the end of the work (finis operis): the result that the work must realize through itself (to be a good likeness, to be intelligible).

            -the end of the worker (finis operantis): the good, the desire for which excites the photographer to produce his work.

After the extrinsic causes, we should now penetrate the causes intrinsic to photography.

b. The intrinsic causes

We are now concerned with defining the compound which constitutes "intrinsically" the being of a photograph.

Aristotle, to explain his system of the world and of nature, leaning upon the notions of act and potency, takes the example of sculpture, in which, matter (in Greek hylé), from the hands of the sculptor, receives form (morphé), which simultaneously informs and gives being to act, and which draws out a statue. From this comes the name hylomorphism given to his system. Understood thus, nature is a sort of immanent art in matter, and, consequently, art is a sort of nature extrinsic in matter, working on it from the exterior⁹². It was in this sense that Aristotle was able to say that art violates nature⁹³. With photography, for the first time, the matter that the artist uses is sensitive. Art no longer violates nature. It is in this sense that, with Man Ray, we can state that photography is not art (1930s), or better, that Art is not photography⁹⁴ (1974, two years before his death).

Photography, whose image is natural, not only does not escape this principle of form/matter, but it even gives the formal principle a particular originality.

Let us return to the causes.

The MATERIAL CAUSE is the sensitive surface (film or paper), or rather the emulsion (silver halogens), as the surface (celluloid or paper) is only the support of sensitive material.

It is important to insist upon the fact that this material is sensitive. There is there a process analogous to that of the functionings of the sense of sight.

What seems to escape the materialist option is that the photograph does not begin with the negative. There is a total continuity of action of light through the lens, into the sensitive crystals and then through the negative transparency, from the moment when the photographed object reflects the light until the last fracture of a second of exposure upon photographic paper. And the fact that this last touch of light is furnished by the lamp of an enlarger changes nothing about the question.

Taking a photograph is then not taking an impression⁹⁵, in the rigorously material sense of the term. The silver salts are not impressed like wax under the pressure of a stamp. The emulsion, which will not stop repeating, is not an inert matter, but a sensitive one (as if all would be simpler if it were not sensitive!). The action of the stamp and that of the light are not of the same order.

Matter receives form. The FORMAL CAUSE is therefore the luminous, intentional, and immaterial form received by the sensitive material.

With Aristotelian realism, we have seen that "the intelligible, instead of being transcendant in things, as Plato thought, is rather immanent in these things, and is, therefore, one of the constituent elements of reality itself, of this reality engaged in becoming sensible. That is why these Platonic Ideas become for Aristotle Forms, and this substitution of the word form for the word idea is of capital importance⁹⁶".

We know (perhaps sometimes without understanding it well) the celibrated scholastic principle: "the soul is the form of the body". Well, in photography, there is a phenomenon analogous to this substantial union of soul and body: namely that the form, at first luminous, immaterial, intentional (and intelligible, full of meaning), communicates itself, revealing itself in the darkroom, is fixed by a physicochemical process, and becomes inseperably and substantially united to the metallic matter in the same way as the soul is united to the body.

And insofar as this whole process eventually reaches the mind where it is retained by the intelligence, when it is realized without color, making it already a first form of abstraction, as color is the proper object of sight, we can say to some degree that it is "spiritualized". It is necessary to see, perhaps there, what was fittingly called "the soul of black and white"⁹⁷.

We understand better the commonly held connection that the form of a photograph corresponds to the form photographed.

Any photographer who does not recognize that "in nature, form and sign are at once one and the same thing⁹⁸" has no other choice than to search outside of things for a meaning to his activity in order to give a sense to his activity.

The artistic trends using the photographic process, at times violently, that we find today are a research in the autonomy of the purely material artistic act, which would like to free itself from the formal part of photography, that is to say from its intelligible being.

Whatever the manner of working, plastic (preserving a certain formal idea), or puritan and nihilistic (denying any formal notion), everything is happening as if one wanted to liberate the body from the soul...

It is exactly the dream that Descartes had in his hut on November 10, 1619. A crisis of adolescence, of emancipation... which continues to this day.

 

3) Photography is a double effect of nature and will

The genesis of all photography can also be reduced to the conjunction of two effects: an effect of nature and an effect of will.

"Aristotle said already... that all operations and all actions derive from one or the other of these two principles, natures or will. To which he added that all operations caused by a nature are determined, whereas all operations caused by a will are free. Man alone has a will, he alone is free. All this remains true in Sartre's doctrine, with this modification of decisive importance, that, according to him, man is not a nature, but uniquely a will. If he is not a nature, he wants to be one, and the hard roads that he must follow in order to overcome all the determinisms of nature are precisely "the roads to freedom"⁹⁹.

In this double nature resides the properly subversive character of the photographer underlined by Roland Barthes. No other work of human art (understood in the large sense) has this originality of taking, of seizing, of capturing outside of the artist its formal character, in fact, the form itself.

Many will contest this, saying that there is a third effect, that of our imagination. With Maritain we would say that "the distinction between poetry of imagination and poetry of discovery does not seem valid. For there is no poetry without discovery, and it is a discovery beyond the given appearances, therefore a discovery of imagination¹⁰⁰".

This double effect which constitutes the intrinsic originality of photography allows us to recognize in photography a process of double revelation, entirely specified by its intentional character, which will make the object of the next and last article of Music in Reverse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC IN REVERSE (6)

 

SEND ON THE MUSIC

 

In our preceding article, we saw that a photograph can be reduced to the conjunction of two effects : an effect of nature and an effect of will. Well these two effects correspond very exactly, in the eyes of the scholastics, to the two forms of intentio with respect to the two orders of knowledge and of will with their own peculiar characteristics : formal and static on the one hand, dynamic on the other.¹⁰¹

 

Photography and Intentionality¹⁰².

The Thomist philosophy of knowledge relies upon the distinction of entitative being from intentional being. This notion, the most difficult of the scholastic notions, is explained to us by Jacques Maritain in The Degrees of Knowledge : the intentional manner of existing is that manner according to which the artistic virtue, for example passes into the hand and into the paintbrush of the painter. The entire painting is the work of the paintbrush ; there is nothing in the painting which is not really caused by the paintbrush, and yet, the beauty and the intelligible magnificence, the spiritual worth with which the painting is charged, exceed all of what is capable, in its conjunction with the material universe, the proper, inherent causality of the paintbrush. A causality higher than its own, and subordinated to it, must therefore pass through it.

Consider closely all that is entitative, or existing secundum esse naturae (according to the being of nature), in the paintbrush, and you will not find there the painters' art, but only the substance and qualities of the paintbrush and of the movement through which it is moved by the hand ; the art, however, does pass through it. Consider closely all that is entitative in the transmitting medium of sensible qualities. There you will find only the properties and the movement, undulatory and other, that the physicist would recognize ; you will no more find there the quality than the soul under the scalpel ; the quality passes there however, secundum esse intentionale (according to intentional being), for the sense will perceive it when the wave or vibration reaches the organ¹⁰³.

Here then is the question : the photographer is a painter deprived of his paintbrush, his colors, and his canvas, and therefore deprived of his hands (we will see later how Salvador Dali understood this originality well) ; his genius does not consist in creating a form in material but in capturing, in seizing a form in life itself, under a certain light, a light both objective and subjective, corporal and intellectual.

If then there exists in photography something, let us state a principle, of the spiritual order and which elevates this discipline above simple mechanics, classifying it among the poetic arts, then we must admit that this something is not of the physical and material order (if that were the case, then, as Jean-Claude Lemagny very justly affirmed, all would be reduced to a grey scale - it is then at this level that my critical thinking must be exercised¹⁰⁴), but of the immaterial and intentional order, in the richest and most philosophical sense of the term, that is to say something that is at once of the cognitive order (from the side of the object) and of the volitional order (from the side of the subject). In this is contained all the nobility and difficulty of the act of creative photography.

Truly creative intentionality, upon which is based the artistic worth of a photographic work, and which renders it recognizable because it is lovable, unlike that in the plastic arts, is not found in the instrument or in any kind of artificial technique whatsoever. It is the error of the materialists who put all their hopes for creativity either in technological breakthroughs - filters, optics, etc. - or in what they call the "photographic material", that is to say in the grey scale.

The intentional foundation of all creative photography is found then simultaneously in oneself and in things. It is situated, exactly as Maritain had said of creative intuition, at the root of the creative act¹⁰⁵.

 

The movements of the appetite and of the intelligence.

There is, at the moment when a picture is taken, a double intention, a double revelation : a revelation of things and of oneself in a double, intentional, tendential movement uniting on the film¹⁰⁶.

Movement of things toward oneself : it is the proper movement of knowledge¹⁰⁷ which has an infinite capacity to receive intentional forms (one could also say that everything is photographiable).

Movement from oneself toward things : it is the proper movement of the appetite, in the scholastic sense of appetency (from the Latin ad-petere, "to go towards", "to stretch"), which has as its object the good in general (bonum), situated in things. The scholastics distinguish three sorts of appetites : the living world has in common the natural appetite, which is that capacity to grow in being. We share with the animals the sensitive appetite which brings us towards some sensible, useful goods, to reproduction and to food, both acting here as objects of desires guided by the judgement of the senses.

Men, reasonable animals, have even another, intellectual appetite, the will.

The photographer is confronted in a sort of drama of judgements which are contradicted in him : sense judgement, aesthetic judgement, judgement of presence or of reality, judgement of reason, as well as the bundle of emotional factors.

Photography can then become, as Guy Le Querrec said, the art of not pressing upon the button, that is to say the art of mastering an emotion which must not be only subjective, ordinary, and brutish, but intentional and creative¹⁰⁸.

The exploration of the mysterious universe of the intentional shows us that the genesis of all creative photography is raised out of a process of immense complexity whose formal originality is infinite.

To deny this double intentionality of photography is an irremediable amputation of its creative possibilities (we are not even speaking here about material aspects such as the treatment of the negative or the positive, equally rich in creative possibilities.

 

Intentional or spiritual ?

In photography (creative or other), everything is intentional, and has therefore the value of a sign. In the texts of Avicenna (an Arabian philosopher who influenced medieval scholastics), the word represented by the Latin "intentio" is the Arabic term "ma'na", meaning "signification"¹⁰⁹. But if for our Cartesian minds it is easy to understand from the side of the knowing subject, the intentional character is much less easy to understand from the standpoint of the known object.

Intentionality is nevertheless the key to sensate knowledge (which we share with the animals) as much as to intellectual knowledge (properly human). For the majority of the great masters of medieval philosophy (Arabs, Jews and Christians), the notion of intentio had already come into everyday language and was intervening at once in the theory of instrumental causality and in that of light¹¹⁰.

To better grasp this mode of existence of things, it suffices to lean attentively upon the image produced upon the ground glass of a large size camera. Our first reflex will be to make of this a "projection" and unconsciously a complete system of projectors, screens etc... is set, and our cinematographic habits come to corrupt our judgement.

In order to better understand, it suffices, as we have done at the Château d'Eau Gallery, to go inside a giant camera obscura and to contemplate from the interior the image which is produced by the effect of the light. One realizes there that if this form (or image) is in fact corporal, it is not any less immaterial.

If we want to be more precise in these terms, the music, because it emanates entirely from the interior of the subject, is with good reason called spiritual¹¹¹. Photography, because it has also (and above everything) a relation to the object, must be called intentional.

Another subversive characteristic of photography : indeed, whereas all other arts have habituated us to conceive only of a creative subjectivity, we are with photography for the first time forced to recognize outside of ourselves a creative objectivity. This is what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the recognition of a fact and which formed the foundation of this theory of the decisive instant.

 

Photography, A Work of the Mind ?¹¹²

We have, in the photographic world, come to consider with satisfaction that for the last twelve years photography has no longer been considered a minor art. Nothing is less true.

If our civilization of the image has perfectly integrated cinema among the works of the mind, the (French) dictionary of proper names still lists on the average only two or three photographers for every twenty cineastes. Nevertheless cinema is to photography what literature is to poetry, qualitatively.

It is true that this question of knowing in what way a photographic work can be considered a work of the mind does not have a convincing response, and, from this point of view, the history of photographic criticism is far more interesting than the history of photography itself. Tossed about between painting and cinema, photographic criticism has never succeeded in establishing its own marks. It is even the painters who must remind us of the ontological nobility of photography, which is really not very surprising, as painters have always understood photography better than have the photographers themselves : Salvador Dali, in a little known article of 1927 entitled Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind¹¹³, affirmed in his imagery-rich Catalan language (the same Catalan that my great grandfather spoke) that "when hands cease to intervene, the mind begins to feel the absence of the fingers' troubling efflorescence : inspiration is disencumbered from the technical process (...) The new form of spiritual creation represented by photography assigns to their proper places all phases of the production of the poetic act (...) Let us be content with the immediate miracle : to open our eyes and to be an adroit apprentice in learning to see well. To know how to see is a way of inventing. (...) Photographic imagination, more rapid and agile in its windfalls than the muddled processes of the unconscious !

Photography, captor of the most subtile and most uncontrollable poetry".

The painter Delacroix wrote in his Journal, May 25, 1853 :

"Indeed, that a man of genius might avail himself of a daguerreotype, as one must, and he will be elevated to a height that we have never known".

 

Music In Reverse

Photography is "an intention that has been brought to our attention¹¹⁴".

In this formula of the French poet Paul Claudel, each word is worth the weight of gold. What is then music in reverse ?

In music, being, intentional or spiritual, is that virtue which is communicated from themusical phrase written by the composer, read from the interior by the musician with the intelligence of the heart (which is the intelligence of the artists and of the poets), transmitted (if it is a guitarist), by his fingers upon the strings and through each resonance of the instrument up to the ear of the listener.

In photography, intentional being runs exactly in reverse. The smile of my sister Christèle upon this photo has actually communicated itself from my sister to the photographer who caught it in a fleeting instant...

In the same way as the musician, in order to interpret well a score, must know it from the interior, sympathetically, so also must the photographer, if he wants to be creative, know from the interior, with similar sympathy, the things that he photographs. And to return to a formula of a Portuguese commentator of Saint Thomas, love passes on to the sphere of the intentional means of objective grasping¹¹⁵.

 

 

 

Musical Aesthetic

Music and photography have a similar exigence which raises them, in the intentional and sensible order, above other disciplines because they are less bound. The photographer like the musician, is in reality less bound to the universe of ideas and to the words or languages which express them, less linked than the painter and the sculptor to forms drawn out from matter, less linked than the architect to the conditions of usage of the created thing. It is in the musician (and the photographer) that the metaphysical requirements of poetry are verified in the most limpid manner. It is with him (and the photographer), that when it is missing, its absence is most noticed.¹¹⁶

And it is precisely when the photographer is more linked either to the words and discourse with which he garnishes his work (in the case of that photography called conceptual) or the conditions of the image's intended usage (in the case of advertisement photography or purely illustrational photography) that this photography - as photography (and not as plastic work) - loses all quality of "creation of the mind", in the sense intended by Dali. And yet this is not to say that Cartier-Bresson, because he carried very haughtily this spiritual requirement, has the monopoly on creative photography.

A photographer practicing fashion, or advertising, or architecture, or news photography, to the extent that he is less linked to what is outside of him, realizes better the conditions of creativity of his photography (Horvat, Sarah Moon, William Klein etc. are all testament to this).

So the photographer, to be creative, must not photograph things only by their common names, that is to say simply record them. He must not even be content to photograph them by their proper names (millions of tourists have photographed the Eiffel Tower by its proper name), but he must learn to photograph them by their given name or Christian name (only Kertesz and several others have photographed the Eiffel Tower by its given name). Here again Dali enlightens us :

"(Photography is) ESSENTIALLY THE MOST SURE VEHICLE OF POETRY and the most agile process for perceiving the most delicate transfusions between reality and surreality.

"The act alone of photographic transposition implies already a total invention : the recording of an UNEDITED REALITY. Nothing has come to give as much reason to surrealism as photography¹¹⁷".

We are in a Baudelairian perspective where things correspond, where nature, far from being mute, unveils its superabundance to the poetic soul :

Nature is a temple where living pillars

Occasionally let out confused speeches ;

Man passes there across forests of symbols

Which observe him with knowing looks.

Like diffused echos which from afar are lost

In an obscure and profound unity,

Vast as night and as brightness,

The perfumes, the colors, and the sounds respond to one another¹¹⁸.

Saint Augustine wrote a Treatise on Music. Saint Thomas Aquinas would have been very able to write a "Treatise on Photography".

Indeed, if one admits that music exists first in the human soul, then it rises quite naturally out of the Platonic and Augustinian critical structure. By contrast, if photography, connected primarily and above all to the visible, is not only an adhesion to but is even caused by the real¹¹⁹ through a principle of natural translation, then the realism of Aristotle, completed by the cosmological dynamism of Saint Thomas, illuminates each photographic work with a particular light.

So, Plato and Aristotle, these two men who represent equally precious and rarely united qualities, who did, so to speak, divide humanity as Goethe said, could well be situated at the extremes, at the very limits of the creative possibilities of man.

We had first begun Music In Reverse by recognizing that photography is a perpetual questioning. Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre divided the major part of these questions. If for the Sartre of The Imagination, "the look exhausts the image in one blow, for Barthes, by contrast, it is photography which drains that which looks at it¹²⁰". It is this total opening to the being of a photograph which makes Barthes seem so agreeable to us.

We know things above all in their primary existence : the system of their secondary existence is a magical territory of which many parts remain unexplored, which perhaps holds back some marvellous surprises¹²¹. The difference between an illustrational photograph and a creative photograph issues forth from this faculty which we have to explore things in their secondary, intentional existence, and which makes of us another thing than a sum of animal sensibilities. From this comes the difficulty of authentically creative photography, and it is not surprising that in our materialist west, some artists who had perhaps fled painting in a spontaneous burst for photography are now returning so agressively to painting, meanwhile jumbling the genres, creating a confusion unprecedented in the history of art. Photography is indeed the only artistic discipline in which one can notice (above all during the last twelve years) such denying, nihilist and scornful attitudes.

It remains then that the final question, coming at the end of this theoretical discourse, is to know the profound reason for the disgust that we all have, that I myself have experienced at one time or another when faced with the disconcerting simplicity of photography, and to understanding the meaning of the disgust.

If one were to dig into this question in all its profundity and with the necessary delicateness, at the origin of this disgust one would ultimately find only some wounds from love.

To seek unflaggingly the lost image and sometimes, at the least expected moments, to find it, is (in a certain way) the end of moral life. Such is also the end of creative photography, as it is of all poetic or creative intuition. In either case, a certain grace is needed.

End

Post-Scriptum : Many other questions remain to be treated, among them that of knowing if it is legitimate to speak of Photography in general when considering a photograph in particular. It is the eternal question of the universal denied by Barthes at the beginning of La Chambre Claire (pp. 16-17) which separates us from him, and from many others.

Frédéric Ripoll, Toulouse, May, 1994

 

NOTES

1 .Monography n°135 published by the Galerie du Château d'Eau, Toulouse - France, April 1989.

2. André Bazin - Ontologie de l'Image photographique - in : Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ? - ed. du Cerf, 1981 - p.13

3. Lamartine quoted in André Rouillé's top study : La Photographie en France - Textes & Controverses : une Anthologie 1816 - 1871 - ed. Macula, 1989 - p. 250

4. Subject = the photographer ; object (materially speaking) = the photographed thing.

5. Xavier Vallhonrat quoted in : Frank Horvat's Entre Vue, ed.Nathan, 1990 (french edition p.250) ... Photographer Publications, Taipei - Taiwan 1991 (Chinese edition, p. ?.)

6. ibid. note 3, p. 325 sq.

7. The French poet Lamartine sat at the French Parliament from 1833 to 1851.

8. "An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful (...) We have still a thirst unquenchable (...) This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry - or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods - we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not(...) through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those devine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses .(...) It has been my purpose to suggest that, while this Principle itself is, strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty, the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the soul - quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart - or of that Truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason".

The text of this lecture given by Poe in 1844 can be found in :

Jacques Maritain : Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry - Princeton University Press, 1953, 2nd ed. 1981 - p. 200 (from : Edgar Allan Poe : the Complete Works, New York : The Lamb Publishing Co. 1902).

9. Gisèle Freund, Photographie et Société - Coll.Points (Histoire) Ed. du Seuil, 1974 pp.71 - 74.

10. Walter Benjamin, Petite Histoire de la Photographie in "L'homme, le Langage, la Culture, Ed. Denoël 1971, p 63.

11. André Rouillé : La Photographie en France - Textes & Controverses : une Anthologie 1816 - 1871 - ed. Macula, 1989 - pp 398 sq.

12. Entre Vue, ed.Nathan, 1990 (french edition p.162) ... Photographer Publications, Taipei - Taiwan 1991 (Chinese edition, p. .?..).

13. ibid. p.116 (Chinese ed. p. ?).

14. Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays (New York, 1936), p. 55

15. The Aristotelian notion of Form does not mean external form but, on the contrary, the inner ontological principle which determines things in their essences and qualities. (J.Maritain, Creative Intuition...p.161)

16. ibid note 5.

17. Joseph Delteil , preface to the Monography n° 73 on the exhibition of L.-F. Bacou's photographs at the Galerie du Château d'Eau. December, 1982.

18. Paul Claudel, l'oeil écoute- Oeuvres Complètes, La Pléiade, p. 395.

19. Les cahiers de la photographie, édités par l'A.C.C.P. et Contrejour, 1990, n° 25.

20. J.M. :Le Songe de Descartes, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. V p. 159 sq.

21. The theory of screen ideas, which reifies the ideas, making of them not a means any more, but a screen, an obstacle between the mind and the thing, does not conduct only Cartesianism but also the whole modern idealism, even some attempts against idealism (Bergson, Blondel). It lets only two choices : "behind this thing-idea, there is no thing" (Berkeley, Hume), and : "behind this thing-idea there is some thing but about which we cannot know anything" (Kant) - (J.M. : Réflexions sur l'Intelligence et sur sa vie propre, Oeuvres complètes, volume III, p. 42)

22. "What moves me then, is not coming from something sensationnal or from pure geometry, but from a thought made sensitive" - Régis Durand : "The thinking look", éditions de la Différence, Coll. Essais, Lieux et objets de la Photographie, Paris 1988, p.11),

23. Joseph De Tonquédec, Les Principes de la Philosophie Thomiste. I/ La Critique de la Connaissance, editions P. Le Thielleux, Paris 1956, p.4)

24. Cahiers de philosophie de la nature, IV- Roland Dalbiez : Vues sur la Psychologie animale, p. 99 . Paris, Librairie philosophique Vrin, Paris,1930)

25. Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poëmes enProse, nrf. Poésie/Gallimard, 1973 - p.146. The title comes from Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood, which Baudelaire translated in Brussels. Poe had already used the formula in The Poetic Principle.

Baudelaire and Poe have often insisted on the deeply realistic meaning of this motto. "Anywhere out of the world" does not mean necessarily Anywhere out of the reality.

26. This motto pronounced by Kertesz at the end of his long photographic life is also the title to an article about him by Douglas Davis published in Newsweek, 6 Dec 1982 pp. 142,144.

27. "these things are felt but not spoken of, they are beautyful things becoming acts of cowardice if they are told" (EV p.103)

28. "thank God, there are still mysteries, otherwise, there would be no more art"(EV p.117 )

29. Eva Rubinstein : " We do not take the photographs , they take us" (E.V. p.116)

Mario Giacomelli : " People ask me : 'How do you manage to do these photographs ?' What people don't understand is that 'I' didn't choose to take the pictures, but it is the pictures who chose me" (EV p.108)

30. Catalogue published by Maîtres Beaussant et Lefèvre, Auctioneers, 46, rue de la Victoire - 75009 Paris.

31. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction à l'esthétique, Paris, Ed. Aubier Montaigne, 1964, p.12.

32. ibid. p.39. It is important to notice that when giving to "nature" the dimension of "the external world", Hegel clearly marks his idealistic position. "Nature" here means not only birds, trees and romantic landscapes but all the world outside of my own mind, or the extra-mental world.

33. On this subject, cf. Retour à l'être, III.Le mystère de ce qui est un mystère de beauté and Annexe II, Les deux écoles - Miscellanies by Fr. Heinz Schmitz published by the C.I.R.E.P. (Independent Center for Philosophical Studies and Research), Toulouse - France

34. René Huyghe, Les Signes du Temps et l'Art Moderne - editions Flammarion , Paris 1985.

35. This expression can be translated litterally by "Civilization of the image" but more accurately by "Civilization of visual communication"

36. ibid. note 8, p.30

37. "The epistemological chronolâtry is an obsessionnal fixation on the passing of time. Not to be 'trendy' is the She'ol" (Jacques Maritain, Le Paysan de la Garonne, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1966 p.26)

This modern phenomenon is also depicted by Konrad Lorenz (famous Austrian ethologist) under the name of "Neophilia" in : The Eight Deadly Sins of our Civilization , (in the French edition :Flammarion - Paris 1973)

38. Juan I Jong Photographs, Pa Chih Men p.5 - Photographer Publications, Taipei, Taiwan .

39. Very tough judgement on the modern artist made by Luis Fernandez, art critics, friend of Picasso, early in 1935 in Les Cahiers d'Art [ René Huyghe, Les Signes du temps et l'Art Moderne p.103 - ]

40. De Anima III, 3, 428a, 10.

About the relation between intelligence and imagination, cf. : Jacques Maritain, "Approches sans entraves" ed. Fayard pp. 259-260 - or : Complete works, Vol XIII

41. "Imagination" here is understood in the sense of "pinning" an image on to the real, which must not be mixed with "creative imagination" . Charles Baudelaire, in a letter to La Revue Française, where his critics were published, makes an interesting note on this point :

"... after having sent you the letter where I had written "as Imagination has created the world, It rules it", I dipped into "The Night Side of Nature" and I came across these lines ... " By imagination, I do not simply mean to convey the common notion implied by that much abused word, which is only fancy, but the constructive imagination, which is a much higher function, and which, in as much as man is made in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by which the Creator projects, creates, and upholds his universe". I am not at all shameful, Baudelaire continues, but on the contrary very happy to have met this delicious Mrs Crowe from whom I've always admired and envied the faculty to believe, as much developped in her as mistrust in others "(Baudelaire, Complete works, II la Pléiade, pp 623-624)

42. Jacques Maritain, "Approches sans entraves" ed. Fayard p. 372 - or : Complete works, Vol XIII

43. HC-B often stresses the importance of intuition in the photographic act :

"the composition cannot be but intuitive" (Images à la sauvette, Ed. Verve, Paris 1952 )

and : "without the participation of intuition, sensibility and understanding, photography is nothing" (The World of H.C-B, Thames and Hudson 1968, London)

44. Note to the reader :

Music In Reverse is an essay on an ontology of creative photography. It is not a metaphysical study. The object of metaphysics is being as being. We try and scrutinize the mode of being proper to photographs following a medium path, under metaphysics and above phenomenology. Creative photography having to do with the things of nature, with objectivity, inasmuch as they awaken in the photographer a creative emotion, our field of reflexion will be first that of the philosophy of nature, in the medieval sense, the notions of which, such as form and matter, body and soul, must not be taken for those of metaphysics, like act and power, essence and existence.

But photography does not obey the same operative rules as the plastic arts'. The part of agibilia , the things we do interiorly (or immanent activity) in photography is as important as the part of factibilia, the things outside of us we can produce (or transitive activity) in painting. We will then be inevitably led to use notions taken from metaphysics and moral philosophy.

45. Aristotle : Posterior Analytics, Book I, Chapter II

46. "There is no satisfying translation to the (latin) word ENS. ... I mean that when the translator says in English BEING, we are aware of a rather different atmosphere". (G.K. Chesterton : St. Thomas Aquinas, Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd, London, 1943, p.121)

47. Introduction to : The Europeans, (in English) Simon & Schuster - New York, and Verve, Paris - 1955.

48. The world of Henri Cartier-Bresson, (in English) Thames and Hudson, London, 1968.

49. A clear explanation of the distinction between formal and material ways of expressing oneself can be found in Jacques Maritain's "Eléments de Philosophie - Complete works (in French), Vol. II, p. 246-7.

50. Jean Clair's introduction to "Henri Cartier-Bresson", (in French) Collection Photo-Poche published by the Fondation Nationale de la Photographie, Paris 1982.

51. James Arraj : "God, Zen and the intuition of being". published in english by Inner Growth Books, 1988, Chiloquin, Oregon, USA.

52. Etienne Gilson, Peinture et Réalité, Vrin, Paris, 1958, p. 22 (in French).

53. Published in French by Nathan, Coll. Essais et Recherches, Paris , 1992.

54. Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, complete works, (in French) volume IV, p. 443.

55. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.18, a.1, ad 3m.

56. Jean Paul Sartre, L'Imaginaire, cit. in Foulquié, Dictionnaire de la langue Philosophique, P.U.F. "Intentionnel", p. 376.

57. "Solipsism : doctrine implied in the idealistic theory of knowledge and reality. The solipsist says : there is nothing but me". (Foulquié, Dictionnaire de la langue philosophique, P.U.F. p. 685 col.2)

58. Vis-à-vis, "Revue trimestrielle d'art photographique", n°11, Spring 1992, p. 12.

59. "The first step on the way to realism is to realize that one has always been a realist ; the second step is to realize that, whatever one does to think otherwise, one never succeeds in doing it ; the third step is to discover that those who claim to think otherwise, do think like realists as soon as they forget to play a part." ( translated from the french in : E. Gilson, Le Réalisme méthodique, p. 87 - Cit in Foulquié : Dictionnaire de la Langue Philosophique, "Réel".)

60. Vis-à-vis, "Revue trimestrielle d'art photographique", n°11, Spring 1992, p. 12

61. Sartre has chosen the word "being" as the only irreducible term in "Being and Nothingness". It is difficult to fix precisely the meaning of this word all along. The word is often used in ambiguous ways, the context is vague (...). Despite coalescing and interferences, I could isolate about twenty different meanings of the word. (R. Champigny, Le mot "Etre" dans "l'Etre et le Néant", Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, in french, avril-juin 1956, p. 155.)

62. "...(in Sartre), the idea of setting up an ontology through the phenomenological method and to speak about being without considering metaphysics was vowed to illusion from the beginning. By the sole fact that phenomenology puts extra-mental reality into brackets, it leaves out all ontology. (...) While staying inside phenomenology, he thinks he can reach being, "the being of phenomenon" as he says : here is the original and irremediable ambiguity ; for if we're dealing with WHAT is beyond the phenomenon and independently of the mind, we are beyond phenomenology, and fully in metaphysical ontology ; if on the other hand, we're dealing with what the phenomenon IS, AS phenomenon, then we are in phenomenology but outside ontology ; and if we talk about what the phenomenon IS, AS BEING IN ITSELF, we are simply in absurdity".

(Jacques Maritain, La Philosophie Morale, coll. La Bibliothèque des Idées, Gallimard NRF, Paris 1960, p. 465)

63. First of all, we must decide wether our point of departure will be being or nothingness. Long ago Parmenides, indicating the two ways, showed where they led to ... " Learn, says the goddess, what the two paths to knowledge are. One starts from the principle that only being exists, and that nothingness doesn't ; this is certitude, truth. The other starts from the principle that being is not, that nothingness is necessary. I tell you that this path goes contrary to reason. For you can neither know, nor reach, nor express what is not. Saying and thinking bear on being. Being is, and nothingness is not".

(Théodore de Régnon, s.j., La Métaphysique des Causes, Ed. Victor Retaux, Paris 1906, I. Principes de Logique, p. 99 sq.)

64. ibid. p. 100.

65. The subjective distinctions brought out by Henri Van Lier between "real" and "reality" , in Walter Benjamin's wake, are interesting and deserve much comment but can be understood only subsequently to the primary notion of being.

(cf. Henri Van Lier, Philosophie de la Photographie, Les Cahier de La Photographie hors série, 1983, p. 139, publiés par l'A.C.C.P, Lasclèdes, Brax, F - 47310 Laplume)

66. These obsolete, nominalist, relativist and subjectivist notions, born of idealist philosophies, are countered by modern physics which, from Einstein [do not take "relativity" for "relativism"], to Louis de Broglie, and from Meyerson to Planck, acknowledges that "the times when philosophy and positive sciences looked at eachother suspiciously must be considered as gone" (J. Daujat, Physique moderne et philosophie traditionnelle, ed. Téqui, Paris, 1958, p.49) , and that the "cartesian ideal of representing the physical world through figures and motions seems to have failed ". (ibid. p. 111)

67. Music In Reverse n° 2, Photographers International n°8, p. 84.

68. "The word "submission to the object" which is clear for science, becomes easily obscure for art. The formal object of art is not a thing to be conformed to, but a thing to be formed. Saying that art should be submitted to the object means saying that art should be submitted to the object which is to be made as such or to the right rules of operation thanks to which this object will actually be what it is meant to be. (Who is failing in this submission ? Academism with its recipes, pseudo-classicism with its clichés and its mythology, wagnerism with its cult of effect".

(Jacques Maritain, Frontières de la Poésie, Complete works, volume V, p. 700-701.)

The same rule can be applied to creative photography.

69. Roland Barthes : "La Chambre Claire", Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980, p. 78.

70. "The ontological affirmation, that is to say the affirmation of an order which does not depend on thought but measures and rules it is thus for thought a true a priori condition (...). Without this affirmation, mental activity is reduced to an inconsistent unfolding of phenomena, which I don't even have the right to affirm as "phenomena" because the least affirmation, even one which bears on pure appearance or non-being, places itself on the level of being and of truth. If there is no truth, it is true that there is no truth."

(Joseph de Finance, s.j., Etre et Agir, Ed. Beauchesne & Fils, Paris, 1955, p. 31)

71. Pa Chih Men, Photographs by Juan I Jong, 3d cover-page.

72. Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire, Cahiers du Cinéma - éditions de l'Etoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, Paris 1980 p.13.

73. see Music In Reverse n° 4.

74. cf Jean-Claude Lemagny, L'ombre et le temps, ed. Nathan, collection Essais et Recherches, Paris 1992, p. 352.

75. ibid. p.317 sq.

76. ibid. p. 287seq. and 298. The comparison with sculpture, which is created through the elimination of material, is more appropriate than a comparison to painting. A painting is created through the addition of material; in a photographic negative, however, the image results from the elimination of unsensitized silver through the action of the light. But the comparison stops there.

77. This attitude, when pushed to its extreme limit, leads to total blackening in the work of Bernar Venet, edition Marval, Paris 1990.

78. cf La musique à l'envers n° 4, Photographers International n° ??

79. Etienne Gilson, l'être et l'essence, Vrin, 1962, p.308

80. Aristote, Physique, II, 3, 194 sq.

81. Théodore De Régnon (french jesuit, 1831-1893), La Métaphysique des causes - 2° édition par Victor Retaux, libraire-éditeur, Paris 1906.

82. Aristote, Métaphysique, 1, 3, 1070a.

83. cf our next article.

84. "And so we call the principal cause the cause to which we can attribute the effect simply and without further explications. The sculptor is the principal cause of the statue. The chisel, however, is only the instrumental cause. We distinguish the immediate cause from the effect of the mediate cause. In a locomotive the fire produces immediately the pressure of the steam, and mediately the movement of the pistons. We call total the total cause that which produces its effect through itself alone, and the partial cause that which is unable to act without the assistance of another cause of the same order. The sun is the total cause of the heat received by the earth." (Theodore de Régnon, work cited, p.177)

85. ibid. p.190.

86. French physician (1892-1987), Nobel prize in physics (1929).

87. cf Aristote, Métaphysique, Livre I, chapitre VII.

88. Jacques Maritain, Introduction Générale à la Philosophie, Complete Works, vol. II, p. 76 All this does not question the exemplarism of Plato, who had divined the transcendental and divine value of the beautiful, the good, and the true.

89. ibid. p. 85

90. About the 4 forms of knowledge through connaturality cf. Jacques Maritain, Quatre essais sur l'esprit dans sa condition charnelle, Complete Works vol. VII, p.160; Situation de la poésie idem vol.VI, p.870 seq., L'intuition creatrice dans l'art et la poésie, idem vol.X, p. 243-246.

91. "In the poet, the soul rests more available to itself and keeps a reserve of unemployed spirituality.(...)This deep unemployed reserve of the spirit, being unemployed, is like a sleep of the soul; but, being spiritual, is in a state of virtual vigilance and vital tension." (J. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Princeton University Press, USA, 1981)

92. Etienne Gilson, Peinture et Réalité, Librairie philosophique Vrin, collection Problèmes et controverses, Paris 1958, p.167.

93. Aristote, Métaphysique (V) 5, 1015, a. 26 sq. - cf.: Joseph de Tonquédec, s.j., Prolégomènes à une philosophie de la nature, ed. Lethielleux, Paris, 1956, pp. 30-33.

94. Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester, England, 1992, p.20.

95. There is a study to be done on the materialist glossary of JCL in L'ombre et le temps (op. cit.):"a luminous imprint at a distance", "a flat luminous moulding" (p.287), "a luminous tracing upon nature"(p.322).

96. Jacques Maritain, La philosophie de la nature , Complete Works, vol. V, p. 831.

97. An advertisement used by Kodak several years ago.

98. "We are always tempted to search in form another sense than that of the form itself, and to confuse the notion of form with that of image, which implies the representation of an object, and above all with that of sign. Sign signifies in the same way that form is signified."(Henri Focillon, Vie des Formes)...Focillon was entirely correct in his refusal to assimilate form and sign, but their distinction is the result of an effort whose history is at the heart of the history of modern painting since Ingres and Delecroix, a difficult effort, completely in favor of art, and if it could be said, against nature, for in nature form and sign are at once one and the same thing." (E. Gilson, Peinture et Réalité, Librairie Philosophique Vrin, Paris 1958- p. 281 note 76)

99. Etienne Gilson, L'être et l'Essence, ed. Vrin, coll. "Problèmes et controverses", Paris, 1962, p. 358

100. J. Maritain,...Complete Works vol. VII, p. 1150. Maritain continues "...That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry." This is also true for photography.

101. cf. Joseph Marechal, s.j., preface to A. Hayen : L'intentionnel selon St Thomas., Museum Lessianum - 2^e édition, Desclée de Brouwer - Bruges, 1954. p. 11.

102. [Most of the problems concerning intentionality] "are linked to one question whose subject is now dated : the influence of the sun and other celestial bodies in the active organization of the sublunar world ; let's be precise : - in the making of compounds from the elements, - in the emergence of organic life (spontaneous generation and equivocal generations), in the normal transmission of life (...) - in the production outside of us, and the transferal of intentional species to our sense faculties, - well, in the main degrees that plain matter goes through in order to reach to the sense faculties". (ibid, p. 10)

103. Jacques Maritain, Les Degrés du Savoir, oeuvres complètes volume IV, p.470.

104. Jean-Claude Lemagny, L'Ombre et le Temps, (in French) ed. Nathan, coll. Essais et Recherches, Paris 1992, pp. 284 et sq.

105. "... And we concluded that at the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, a kind of experience or knowledge without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are obscurely grasped together. (Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Princeton University Press, USA - 2nd edition 1981, p. 116)

106. "We are moved by photography simultaneously on two levels : that of our recognition of reality and that of an inner recognition". (Javier Vallhonrat interviewed by Frank Horvat in Entrevue, ed. Nathan Image, p. 251)

107. cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, I, q.16, a.1.

108. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, pp. 120 sq.

109. H.D. Simonin, o.p., La notion d'intentio dans l'oeuvre de St Thomas d'Aquin, in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 1930, p.446 note 3.

110. Hayen : L'intentionnel selon St Thomas.(opus cit.) p.140

111. "Spiritual is opposed to physical but does not mean intellectual. Considered generally, the word means a change in the order of knowledge as opposed to the material change. Another equivalent is intentional, but this word implies, in addition, a connection to the object". (J.Webert in Somme Théologique de St Thomas d'Aquin,Ia q.75-83, ed. du Cerf 1961 p.358)

112. The word "esprit", "espiritu", in our mediterranean languages (French, Spanish or Italian), comes from the Latin spiritus, derived from the verb spirare, "to blow" and means at the same time : God (the first spirit of all, and more specially in christianism, the third Person of the Christian Trinity : the Holy Spirit). It means also the angels or the devils (pure spirits), the souls of the dead persons, but also "reason", the intellectual gifts, humour, and the moral dispositions. Generally speaking, we say "spirit" about God and the reasonable man - we usually talk about the animals' soul, not about its spirit (or mind) (cf. Paul Foulquié, Dictionnaire de la langue philosophique, P.U.F., Paris, 1962 pp 228-232) . The analogical usage of the word "spirit" originates in the Christian anthropology by which the union of soul and body leaves to the soul his spiritual value. The English language makes the distinction between "mind" (from the Latin mens, intellectual faculty) and "spirit".

113. La fotografia, pura creacio de l'espirit, article published in L'Amic de les Arts, n°18, Sitges (Catalunia) september 30, 1927 and in extenso in the catalogue of the exhibition 4OO obres de 1914 a 1983 Salvador Dali, Centro Cultural de la Caixa de Pensions, Barcelone, June-july 1983.

114. Paul Claudel, L'oeil écoute - Oeuvres complètes, La Pléiade. p. 395

115. John of St. Thomas, quoted by Maritain in Creative Intuition... p. 122.

116. Jacques Maritain, Frontières de la Poésie, oeuvres complètes vol. V p. 797.

117. Op. cit. p. 97

118. From the poem Correspondances by Charles Baudelaire (exerpt).

119. See Music in Reverse n° 5.

120. Jacques Leenhardt, Présence du sujet dans la photographie , La recherche photographique n°12, juin 92, p. 27

121. Yves Simon, Introduction à l'ontologie du connaître, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1934, p.39.