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IC w1 Creativity, realism, what is photography?

  • HildeMaassen
  • Feb 2, 2020
  • 7 min read

Updated: Aug 16, 2020


Book: Claude Magelhaes – Evolution of the creative photography 1820-1880

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This book is written by Jan Coppens under his pseudonym Claude Magelhaes. He was born in Eindhoven in 1937 and died in 2000. His father was a well-known and important Dutch expressionistic photographer and he was “the son of” or that was how he always felt. That and the fact that he on his own was responsible for the content of 2 magazines on photography made that he had over 20 pseudonyms, he told me ones. I know he lived in Paris and knew al the big artist (think of Picasso and Man Ray) at the time and made portraits of them. Still wonder what has happened to his photographs. I saw an exhibition of images ones in Gallery Penning 30 years ago but not his portraits. He is know to be a photo historian and he was my professor for 4 years.


In his book Claude Magelhaes (Jan Coppens) compares photography with literature as both being more autonomous than painting. The painter Delaroche would have said hearing of the invention of photography that “from now on painting is dead”. Painting proved to be less autonomous than photography in relation to photography. (Magelhaes, 13)


For literature one of the examples Jan Coppens uses is that of the book Camera Obscura by Hildebrand 1837 (it is a pseudonym for Nicolaas Beets). In this book Beets describes every person so dearly that it is like looking at the photo. Everything that the photographer sees is perceived by a window. The subject is always chosen in such a way that it comes to the fore in its strongest form. As poetry, photography follows a schedule. Analogue the schedule is not as defined as it is digitaly where we have a fixed grid. Hindered by the disipline of the rhyme or by the desire to break out, poets have experimented with other forms.


Nicolaas Beets has a poem in which he did not write the last paragraphs but mainly places dashes in 1843.


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De zwarte ridder - 1843 - Nicolaas Beets

Seeing this I immediately think of the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters (1922-1932). I once heard the Ursonate in the theater (don't remember who was the performer was). In the image you see how it was written down. and in the video you can hear and see a performer; Michael Schmid.


Kurt Switters, Uhrsonate. 1922-1932


The futuristic poems in which the visual aspect of the poem, the design is investigated.


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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 1922

At the moment I am mapping the clouds based on the shape and contrast, making a schedule for them. and I recognize similarities here with the poems.


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Hilde Maassen - mapping the clouds

What if I place all the pixels side by side row by row to step outside the window, the frame of the photographer. Just as the poets investigated how typography can contribute to the experience of the writings, I look for the boundaries between photography and other media. When will we still recognize the photo? is there still some form of apparent reproduction of recognizable objective reality in the end result?

Photography and literature have something else in common; both are a time sign. In the Middle Ages we departed from the clouds, now from the ground on which we stand. Both work from a window; the viewfinder and the rhythm.


For a good poet the rhyme is not a scheme within which his expression possibilities are locked up and for a photographer the frosted glass is never exclusively restrictive. This requires creativity. Prof H L C Jaffé once noticed that a transition has taken place from our receptiveness and the way in which we form our worldview, from a literary to an optical phase, so there is a limit where literature stops and photography begins. Here the trees can really speak and the unspeakable can really be said because the creative process of photography is one of purely inner imagination. Where the writer conjures up images with words, the photographer does so with the optically visible self. (Magelhaes, 16)



Is the photography a representation of reality?


Left: Honore Daumier, Croquet Parisien; photographie, nouveau procédé employé pour obtenir des poses gracieuses -1839.

Right: Honore Daumier, Les Bon Bourgeois - 1839


In these caricatures of Daumier 1839, he makes fun of the photographer and the people who want to be portrayed in non-natural postures. The caption of one of the prints is "patience is a virtue of donkeys". One of the series is called Les Bon Bourgeois which means the well-to-do bourgeoisie. What is clear in these prints is that photographing people is certainly not an image of reality. Due to the slow shutter speeds, people are tied up or are in unnatural positions just to keep it up.


Does photography represent reality?

The discussion as to whether what we see is realistic is of course not new. The caricature above says everything. The question is what is real. Is that all we can see with the naked eye? Then Muybridge's photos would prove that photography is not an image of reality. If we take a picture of a fungus through a microscope, we see something that exists, but when it is photographed, it is blown up and is therefore no longer realistic. Moreover, what just was already over is over and so I cannot check whether it was real.


With the advent of digital photography and the edited images in the magazines, we naturally saw the entire discussion flourish again. Probably because photography then became an accessible medium for an even larger audience and it became much more realistic and clear how to manipulate it.

But it was more about the way in which teenagers, often unconsciously, are exposed to the manipulation of images. Not only photos but also films and games are brought up in the same way. What is the chance of copying behavior?


This advertisement was used by Dove to show what is going on behind the scenes of a photo shoot before we see the advertisement.


I regularly show this to my students, and educators and am surprised every time how flabbergasted they are when they see this video. They really have no idea and take photography far too often for a representation of reality.


So while I am still aware that a photo is not a realistic representation of reality, that apparently does not apply to the average viewer.


Some of the things that make it unrealistic is the fact that the different lenses can give distortions, the shutter speed makes it possible to freeze things that I would normally never see. We can blowup things to unrealistic proporties. The use of light can change the texture. The photo is 2d while the reality is 3d.


Today I went to an exhibition in Galery Zerp in Rotterdam because there was the work of photographer Saskia Boelums who was proclaimed by artist of the year.


Her work is inspired by that of the medieval Dutch masters and we are talking about both the scenes and the light. The new jacket would be the square format of Instagram. (As a Hasselblad user I have long been used to square but time is relative and the Middle Ages are longer ago). I was very curious about how she had taken the pictures because I had never, travelling in the Netherlands, came across a scene like in these photos. Yet I can easily imagine them because we are infused with paintings and poems that make us believe these same, romantic assumptions.


On poem day 2000, the poem "Remembrance of Holland" (1936) by Hendrik Marsman was declared the Dutch poem of the century. The starting lines "Thinking of Holland / I see wide rivers / slowly moving through infinite / lowland (..)" belong to the collective memory.

source: https://literatuurmuseum.nl/verhalen/marsman/de-zoekende-marsman


Marsman lived with his wife in the Mediterranean when he wrote this poem and his poetic memories of the Netherlands were born. So he wrote this from his memory. In the meantime the poem is so well known that most Dutch people can finish the first line. I myself catch myself seeing the described landscape in the picture before me. The ones that I no from paintings, I have never seen them for myself.


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Hendrik Marsman, 1936, Herinnering aan Holland

I hoped for the photographs of Saskia Boelems that they were staged and I was a bit disappointed to come across editing errors in the image that immediately disguised how the work had come about. The depth of field in the background was also far from realistic, regardless of the type of lens you would use. This I could see standing in front of the 1 by 1 meter print. I didn't see it that clear on screen. I really love the use of light and the depicted landscapes and the way they refere to the Dutch landscapes. I recognise them as sus although I never see this kind of landscapes in reality; they refere to the paintings we all know form the middle ages.

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Saskia Boulsums, Landschap, ca. 2019

The two details that gave away the origin.

Back to my work; I used to call myself a photographer and with pride. But nowadays everyone is a photographer and the title has become meaningless. Artist is a better description in that regard, although I always involve photography somewhere in the process and there is always something of the automatic, self-appearing, magical aspect of the light-based writing of the images made. My husband thinks the term lens based media is a better one because it also includes the moving image, but I don't think the use of a lens is always necessary.


Photographic painter would be an alternative because Susan Sontag writes:

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates our perception of it - as it does not, necessarily, in a painting” (Sontag, p.92)


Constructing is definitely something that I do in my work but I am also on the look for a kind of pleasing, beautiful, sublim image. A picturalist could be a name for that.


During the gast lecture of Andrei Nacu I asked him how he would subscribe himself. He was a photographer but uses images of others at the moment. He thought visual artist to be a good subscriptie for what he is doing at the moment and that world also subscribes what I do.


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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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