Charles Baudelaire : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Charles Baudelaire / Ron Rothbart
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| 説明 | Industrialism gave us the camera, a new, mechanical way to make pictures. Painters and their audience were ambivalent about this new technology. Perhaps the most scornful critic at the time was the poet Baudelaire. For Baudelaire, the machine was the enemy of the soul, the camera a direct threat to the "divine art of painting." It substituted "exactitude" for imagination, the banality of everyday life for the dream. "I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trival."Baudelaire championed a subjectivist aesthetic. Imagination and dreams, he argued, are the true source of art. Painting was in decline, in part because of the bad influence of photography. "Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees." In his critique, Baudelaire was reacting to the art movement known as realism or naturalism and to the industrialization of French photography. (Discuss realism/naturalism here.)Photography had emerged as an elite art pursued by a few creative individuals for a few wealthy patrons. But now, said Bauldelaire, it was succumbing to "the great industrial madness of our times." It was becoming a mass production industry that catered to middle-class tastes, including a taste for gadgetry. The stereoscope, the first 3D imaging system, had turned looking at photographs into parlor entertainment. A "thousand hungry eyes were bending over the peepholes of the stereoscope as though they were the attic-windows of the infinite."Baudelaire was right to recognize that photography was the product of industrial capitalism and would be shaped by it. Today, large corporations cater to a public obsessed with the latest gadgetry by manufacturing very sophisticated photographic equipment for a global market.But Baudelaire also had his blinders. The distinction he drew between imagination and external reality was obsolete even in his own time. Already, a new group of painters was emerging that would make great art "from what one sees," but with a twist. A number of them were interested in photography, among them Baudelaire's friend Manet. Initially dismissed as "mere" impressionists, these painters represented external reality subjectively. The photograph above is by Etienne Carjat, whose iconic portraits of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dumas, and Rossini refute Baudelaire's contention that photography could only be a servant of science, never an art. Why is this photo art? Because the Baudelaire we see is not the "real," merely factual Baudelaire but rather a mythological, god-like figure. This photo is in the public domain.Baudelaire "proudly distributed his own portrait as a business card to his friends" according to this review of Baudelaire : L'irréductibleAntoine Campagnon: www.slate.fr/story/94799/baudelaire-poete-moderneFor related texts, see:Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20baudela...The Industrialization of French Photography after 1860www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/hd_infp.htmARTISTS and Photographywww.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/artists.htmCharles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, Woodburytypewww.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/64.677.4Manet, Baudelaire and Photography www.amazon.com/Manet-Baudelaire-Photography-Book-1/dp/077... |
| 撮影日 | 2010-08-14 12:28:46 |
| 撮影者 | Ron Rothbart , El Cerrito, California, USA |
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