I am not a historian, nor even an art historian, but I have an interest in depiction and therefore a history of pictures.
Twelve years ago I wrote a book – Secret Knowledge – about the influence of technology on picture-making. Soe art historians supported me, a few attacked it, but most ignored it, perhaps hoping it would go away. In the years since, I have become more convinced that we are witnessing a fundamental change in picture-making. This has far-reaching consequences for the media and the way we perceive the world. It will mark the end of the old order, which is no bad thing.
Friends tell me how a lot of things – pop music, for instance – are “stuck”. But the relentless march of new technology offers hope. For example, the smallness of new video cameras makes it possible to pack several together, generating different lines of vision and creating a new kind of cubist camera! So now you can create a new television picture that goes way beyond the quaint and ridiculous old notion of “3D” TV.
Such innovations – there are countless others, just look around you – are not only changing pictures, but also the traditional mass media, which after decades of immense power is now under siege or simply falling apart. Broadcasting giants are fighting to hold on to their audiences, and their reputations; long-established publications, such as Newsweek, are abandoning print. This is certainly bewildering, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. It may even be liberating, as it might deliver a break from the way in which we in the west have, for centuries, been conditioned to see the world, in pictures and, later, in the mass media – namely through “correct” perspective.
Art history tells us that Brunelleschi “invented” perspective in Florence in 1420. His perspective picture does not exist, but very good descriptions of it do – the size of the panel and its subject, the Baptistry in Florence. He stood seven brachia inside the Duomo and made the first perspective picture. It was not an “invention” but a discovery of a law of optics.
Fast forward half a millennia and this perspective now dominates the visual world. It is the way we have come to expect the world to be mediated for us.
This was not always universal. It is often assumed that non-western picture-making got perspective “wrong”. But the non-westerners didn’t get it wrong – it’s just that they didn’t use optics. Chinese scroll painters had a very sophisticated perspective, without the vanishing point that had reduced the viewer to a static mathematical point. (If we are alive, we move!).
In my book I argued that the camera obscura was involved in European picture-making long before the invention of photography. Most people seem to think the camera is a 19th-century invention, including “serious” people such as Susan Sontag, who wrote that the camera was “invented in 1839”. No editor asked her for the name of the inventor. There isn’t one of course: the camera is a natural phenomenon, requiring little more than a pinhole. It was the chemical process to fix the image made by a camera that was the invention in the 1830s.
I would say that what a camera does is to make an optical projection of nature. This can be made simply with an eyeglass lens or a concave mirror – a shaving mirror, say. To make a good one, you quickly discover that you need strong light; and strong light casts the deepest shadows. So to make a good projection you need deep shadows.
Art historians have never really explained the appearance of shadows in European art. No art made outside of Europe used shadows. Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Indian – all highly sophisticated image-makers – ignored shadows. Yet they occur in a big way in European art, and in a very big way with the likes of Caravaggio. Whether they offer an accurate reflection is another matter. There is a story about one of the Jesuits who went to China and painted a portrait of the Empress. Her comment on it was: “I can assure you that the right side of my face is the same colour as the left side of my face.”
Vermeer made no drawings, nor did Caravaggio or Frans Hals; Velázquez made only a handful. So how were those pictures constructed, if not with a camera? Art historians have never asked the question, obviously considering it of little importance. Art history seems to have trouble with technology; it has trouble with photography, often ignoring it altogether. Yet it was the photography of paintings that made art history possible.
There is far more of a continuum than is typically conveyed in art history – photography came out of painting, and because of Photoshop is returning to it. All comprehensive collections of photography have “collages” in them. The Metropolitan Museum in New York currently has an exhibition called “Faking it” about photographic manipulation before Photoshop.
This began almost as soon as chemical photography was invented. Very elaborate photographs were made using the same techniques as painters. Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, refers to Matthew Brady moving corpses around in his photographs of the American civil war as a form of “cheating”. But this is to impose a kind of Leica mentality on photography 60 years before small cameras. He was really just doing what a painter would, moving things because the camera was fixed or too heavy.
Human beings are interested in pictures. They can have powerful effects on us, always did and still do. As I thought about what is a correct perspective, I began to see other things – beyond how this applied just in the art world.
In Europe for almost 500 years the Church was the main image supplier. If you wanted to see pictures, you went to a church. There you were not looking at “art” but at vivid depictions of life that would have been just as powerful – if not more so – than film or TV today. In all of this time the Church had social control. When did it begin to lose it? I would say it started in the 19th century and that by the start of the turn of the new century, social control had followed images into what we would call “the media”: photography, films and then TV.
The age of the mass media is also the age of mass murder. That is probably no accident. The terrors of the 20th century – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Mao’s China – needed control of the mass media.
It is this age that is ending. What I would call the old media – TV, film and newspapers – are dying. But so too is a lot we thought would always be with us: the culture of stars and celebrity. The age of the mass media made and perhaps needed stars. One thinks of Charlie Chaplin, the first world star of films, and then those stars created by Hollywood.
The revolution in painting of the early 20th century – Cubism – was really an attack on depiction based on perspective. But in truth that old perspective did not die. The radical nature of Cubism was overshadowed by what seemed even more radical: moving pictures. And yet, in essence, the moving picture was still the old perspective – it used just one camera!
This was not really noticed until the depictive problems of today. These are now being addressed by the triumph of the animated film and new technology that is changing photography.
Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away. Perhaps our celebrity culture is the last gasp of the mass media “star period”. The power of the old media barons is in decline – I am sure Rupert Murdoch knows this – and seems to be passing to the masses themselves, whether they want it or not.
The old media needed stars. In the new media your friends are the stars. Without the old media, how will you get famous on YouTube? Perhaps the corollary to Andy Warhol’s quip about how “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” is that in the future nobody will be famous, or only locally.
Images will continue to play a big part, but we are definitely entering a very different age. Can it be worse than the age of the mass media? Goebbels “marketed” Hitler with new mediums that few understood better than him. He knew film created better propaganda than radio. In film everyone saw the same image, whereas with radio everyone forms their own image.
That kind of power is not possible now. Can governments maintain control when they know the street has a new power which they are forced to accept? It might look like chaos, but new forms of representation will arise. Could they be better?
What all of this has to do with the present world crisis, I don’t know. I simply offer a slightly different view of the history usually ignored by economists, historians and politicians.
The writer is an artist and researcher. His exhibition, ‘A Bigger Picture’, has just opened in Cologne