I was quite taken by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s suggestion that photography is a collaborative project. Written in 1857 for the London Review, her portrayal of the photographic project as “unfinished” points at a desire for images to not merely present facts, but also interpretations:
But while the ingenuity and industry—the efforts of hundreds working as one—have thus enlarged the scope of the new agent, and rendered it available to the most active, as well as for the merest still life, has it gained in an artistic sense in like proportion? Our answer is not in the affirmative, nor is it possible that it should be so. Far from holding up a mirror to nature, which is an assertion usually as triumphant as it is erroneous, it holds up that which, no matter how beautiful, ingenious, and valuable in powers of reflection, is yet subject to certain distortions and deficiencies for which there is no remedy.
Eastlake suggests that the popularity of photography has to do with “the hunger for facts,” and it is those scientifically betrayed facts that mark the lack of artistry. Without artistic convention, there is no art. Photographs are merely “accurate falsifications.”
The science therefore which has developed the resources of photography, has but more glaringly revealed its defects. For the more perfect you render an imperfect machine the more must its imperfections come to light: it is superfluous therefore to ask whether Art has been benefited, where Nature, its only source and model, has been but more accurately falsified.
Eastlake’s standard is clearly a human one. As William Blake quipped, “Where Man is Not, Nature is Barren.” For Eastlake, the appeal of photography must be explained in human terms.
If the photograph in its early and imperfect scientific state was more consonant to our feelings for art, it is because, as far as it went, it was more true to our experience of Nature. Mere broad light and shade, with the correctness of general forms and absence of all convention, will, when nothing further is attempted, give artistic pleasure of a very high kind; it is only when greater precision and detail are superadded that the eye misses the further truths which should accompany the further finish.
In Eastlake’s estimation, technically imperfect photographs with an absence of any pretension to art provide “artistic pleasure”—however, the increasing precision and accuracy unaccompanied by the “further finish” of an individual artistic talent render the photograph distant from human experience. Convention, then, is both the friend and enemy of artistic practice. Accuracy, however, is cast as photography’s worst enemy—for it places it complicit with facts rather than feelings. Eastlake preserves the romantic taste for raw wildness, but reserves for Art the cultivation of that wildness. The collective talent of photographers has not caused a net gain in the creation of art.
