What has painting found beyond the garden of mimesis, whose gates photography would fling open for it? Freed — to use Jean Cocteau’s expression — from the function of faithfully imitating reality, on what did “no longer figurative” art build its own identity? Setting aside, of course, the problematic relationship with the public that has characterised and continues to characterise contemporaneity..
One of the paths along which to seek an answer is the one that leads to matter. The matter of pigments, laid down by brushstrokes that would become increasingly thick and carriers of meaning in themselves; and the matter of supports, which would emerge ever more visibly after centuries in which the Albertian paradigm of the window had imposed the pursuit of a transparency that asked the canvas and the panel to conceal themselves, so as to give the eye the impression of looking directly onto reality as if through the thinnest of glass.
Photography, for its part, almost immediately displayed and amplified a virtual nature; already after the near-instantaneous decline of the daguerreotype, it became problematic to define and identify the physical identity of a photographic image. It is no coincidence that Ansel Adams, in comparing the relationship between negative and print to that which binds a score to its performance, ended up likening photography to music — the artistic discipline most fraught when it comes to defining an ontology.
And Kertész’s answer is disturbingly elliptical: behind the glass there seems to be nothing but darkness — a deep, black point where light does not reach and therefore cannot impress its designs. A darkness that today has become even more evanescent, deep, and mysterious, sealed within the impenetrable and fragile clean rooms of our hard drives or in the capacious, impalpable, and elusive labyrinths of the internet. In short, if it is memory that we ask of photography, perhaps we would do well not to delegate to it our entire capacity to remember — since it may be nothing more than a fragile pane of glass suspended before the darkness of amnesia.
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English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.