Respecting Art, Respecting Photography

Carlo Evidente wrote this on his Facebook page:

"Photographs are kind of imitation. a great painter captures a true likeness. the camera helps an amateur come close."

It got me thinking (and I only became aware of that fact that the quote was actually lifted from a video game, Alice: Madness Returns), so I dashed to make a response. Here's what I said:

Not necessarily. Depends on vision. If you mean the painter "creates" something directly from his vision, what does it make of painters who use photos to draft their scenes? Are they cheating?

Many painters start their paintings with something from reality. Even Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were known to have used the camera obscura to "trace" their subjects. Yet, they've never been accused of being "lesser painters."

Anyway, I think that it also has something to do with interpretation. An intelligent person always interprets a scene, not just project it. Hence, a painter (i.e., an artistically intelligent person) sees a scene and paints it THE WAY HE SEES IT. It could be how you and I also see the scene (i.e., our visions coincide), or very different from how we see it. Either way, we judge the painting not by how faithful it is to the actual scene but from how good the rendition is. In art, interpretation is more important than the truth. An artist's "vision" is his/her version of the truth, and the artwork is the performance (i.e., his/her interpretation) of that "truth".

We deride photographs (as art) not because they are intrinsically ugly (i.e., the truth within a particular photograph is ugly) but because it seems rather "easy" to perform/interpret the truth/"vision of truth" in the final output.