I’ve heard people suggest that rule-based judging might derive from the "art school experience," where elementary and beginning students were taught simple (perhaps simplistic) ways to construct acceptable compositions. I imagine it helps place new students on a fast track and keeps them interested.

This kind of teaching in fact might go back to "workshop methodologies" such as has been employed for centuries – where apprentices were trained in the techniques and styles of the workshop master, creating a strong impetus to pass the shop traditions from one practitioner to the next. It was important to keep alive methods and customs that had proven successful and worked well. In such situations "technique" and "style" may have been synonymous.

But this doesn’t answer the question of how one set of styles and practices (or "rules") became dominant and turned into a prescription with which to acquire aesthetic value and quality workmanship. And it doesn’t explain why another set, a previous set, as we shall see, was so quickly abandoned.

To approach these issues we must take a look at a book of fundamental significance to the development of modern art history: Heinrich Wölfflin’s "Principles of Art History." In short, the author, writing at the beginning of the 20^th century, limited himself to defining stylistic differences between the art of the Renaissance and that of the Baroque in Western art. For those to whom these terms may be new, generally speaking, we give the 15^th and 16^th centuries to the Renaissance, and the 17^th and 18^th centuries to the Baroque. We will examine some key differences soon.

It is my premise that Wölfflin analysis of so-called "Baroque" stylistic principles was taken up by others who crossed the line separating Wölfflin descriptive method from the prescriptive methods used by teachers. What Wölfflin said was done, others said should be done. Thus what he read out of the art of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, could well have been translated for student painters into sets of guidelines, both "do’s" and "don’ts," and at some point was adopted as a strategy for creating successful photographic images in what amounted to a derivative of the baroque style. And these "guidelines" so adapted, evolved into the so-called "rules" taught to budding photographers.

Wölfflin attempted to make sense and bring some degree or order to the way we thought of how artistic style changed from the Italian Renaissance to the Baroque period. To accomplish this he embraced what might be termed a "formalistic" and "comparative" approach – thus describing the differences in form, composition, structure and handling that separated the artists of the Renaissance, from the workers in the Baroque tradition of Western Art. Here is an introductory example taken from his book.

Agnolo Bronzino (b. 1503, Florence, d. 1572, Florence)
1544, Eleonora of Toledo with her son, Giovanni de' Medici,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Oil on wood 115 x 96 cm
Briefly, in the Bronzino portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (painted in the mid 16^th century), the subject occupies a space of absolute clarity with not even a hint of air. The opulence of her dress and its damask weave is not obscured by any shadow, and is as resplendent as it is idealized into a state of perfection. As your eyes pour over the dress, eventually you realize that there is a head attached to it and a person inside. There is no human expression, no cognizance that she is aware of anything. The background is nearly devoid of depth and is designed not to interfere with the sitters. What you do know, is that Eleonora is elegant, aristocratic and wealthy, and, just as importantly, is the mother of a son, the young Giovanni de’ Medici. The picture tells us a lot about her station in life and very little, if anything, about her personality. And that is its purpose.

Diego Velazquez (b. 1599, Seville, d. 1660, Madrid)
1656 Infanta Marguarite Therese
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Oil on canvas 105 x 88 cm
On the other hand, the 17^th-century Baroque portrait by Velazquez, of the Infanta Marguarite Therese of the Spanish court, is intimate by comparison. She exists in a palpably real space, swathed with real light. She directs her gaze out of the canvas at us, and thereby leads us into her environment. Note the pattern on her dress. Velazquez won’t allow it to grab our attention. It is elegant, no doubt, but is muted by both color and light. The dress and her arms point the direction for our eye to follow. As our attention climbs and rests on her bright face, we see it framed by her golden hair. The background tells us that the space is real, but the curtain is drawn to close off one side, and an impenetrable darkness takes over the other.

Nickolas Murray, Marlene Dietrich, 1930 (Carbro Print)
Here is a photograph of Marlene Dietrich from 1930. It seems a world away from the Spanish Princess, but it is easy to tell that the formula for portraiture used in the Dietrich photo (given a proper allowance for time and purpose) is not all that distant from its 17^th-century predecessor. Our attention may begin with her dress – a night-gown, perhaps. After checking to see if it offers any degree of transparency, we follow its subtle hints and eventually conclude our journey on her face and its awareness of us, the viewers.

It is important to remember that Wölfflin classified period styles without saying one style is better than another. To him and to historians in general, "style" is linked to expressive intent which differs from time to time and place to place. But our own competition judges frequently use "rules" to accomplish just what Wölfflin seemed to oppose – to attribute VALUE and QUALITY to the style of photographic works. Not that "value" and "quality" are unimportant, but analysis of relatively crude stylistic formulas offers only a shallow way of assessing it. It seems foolish to say that the style of the Baroque is superior to that of the Renaissance. It is like comparing apples and oranges, as we say.

In a photograph you should not be forced to select a "Baroque" stylistic element to express an idea perhaps more suitably stated by adapting a Renaissance stylistic device.

To me this shows an inability or unwillingness of judges to view our works within the broader perspective of what has occurred and is occurring in the visual arts. It is as if to say that our preferred style is better than what preceded it – without acknowledging the influence and benefits that other stylistic systems, including modern art, have rendered to contemporary photography and its practitioners.

Moreover, it ignores the truth about how styles change from one period to another. This change is not like leaving one room, shutting the door and entering another. Rather, some styles change gradually, others come and go like a flash in a pan. Creators sometime purposefully reach back to what had been abandoned or functionally lost and revive them. Sometimes we’ll call this effect a renaissance; sometimes we dub the results "retro," or "neo-something-or-other." Sometimes they are inspired by the recent past. Photographers too, are susceptible to this process. But in all cases we turn to the past because we’ve discovered in it something we value, something we regret having lost, and something we want to recapture – and to do it on our own terms.

Andre Gallant, [Apple Tree], from "Photo Impressionism," 2001.
I don’t have an example of a revival in photography to show you, but if you attended the Amherst conference last summer you might remember, André Gallant, who is obviously influenced by the look of late 19^th-century Impressionism, but his "Photo Impressionistic" images (as he calls them), as beautiful as they may be, do not attempt to describe either nature or society in the manner of the impressionists. Thankfully, they do something else. His response is a technical recreation of what moved him so; the purpose, he says, is beyond impressionism; he aspires to a truth that is beyond observation – rather like some of the post-impressionists. I’m showing you his photo of an apple tree. This beautiful image is yet another photo that may not be treated kindly by judges.



Some in the audience probably have already jumped ahead of me and noticed the coincidence that Wölfflin thesis was published at about the same time European art was dramatically transforming itself. If Wölfflin was concerned with changes of style and composition, no doubt he was inspired by the newly developing European interest in art as an expression not only of form but as a force for synthesis – most apparent in the development of post-impressionism (which preceded him), leading to the so-called abstractionist tendencies of Cezanne, and then, from there (to be brief), to the creation of several breeds of Cubism, and onwards towards "abstract expressionism" where "form" either becomes an end in and of itself or a pathway to non-objective expressive content; or to surrealism, which is based principally (it seems to me) on conceptual, rather than visual principles.
 

I should add, parenthetically, that Wölfflin, himself, was very cautious about his effort to define the change of form as the crucial and singular distinguishing element of artistic evolution. He had to make it clear that "form" or "style" was an embodiment of the expressive will of those who produced art, and emblematically or, perhaps, metaphorically, encapsulated the "zeitgeist" or the spirit of the times. Put another way, it stood for the values and beliefs of the cultures and civilizations that made art. During his time it was a truism that art distinguished between national, religious and personal styles as well as beliefs. And if that is truly true, as times change, temperament and values change, and these forces prompt styles to accommodate themselves to the needs of a changing environment.

Wölfflin method was to demonstrate that the transition from Renaissance culture to Baroque culture required the invention of different modes of expression and that such "modes" of expression "lie at the root of the representative arts throughout the centuries" [paraphrase – Wölfflin, p. 13].

As I’ve said, this paper proposes that the formulation of certain pictorial modes of expression ultimately inspired development of a collection of procedures that have evolved, willy-nilly, into the "guidelines" and "rules" taught to amateur photographers through our pedagogical traditions and competitive events. I do not mean to imply that the "rules" sprang directly out of Wölfflin work; there were probably numerous published and unpublished intermediary steps and sources, as well as, perhaps, sources parallel to Wölfflin.


Perhaps, we should pause for a moment to discuss the meaning of the word "amateur," since our culture supports two potentially conflicting understandings of the term. Historically, the word "amateur" refers to someone who practices a discipline – usually an art, but also a sport – and does so merely for the love of the thing itself – without expectation of remuneration and generally without any participation in a related commercial enterprise.

From this we have come to accept the term "amateur" as an indication of a quality of work that is not up to so-called "professional" standards; we say "amateurish."

But lost in this distinction is the fact that the "professional" practitioner generally works at the behest of others, while the amateur has himself as a client, and, as such, works in an atmosphere of greater freedom and lack of necessity – except, of course, for those artists driven to create by the thrust of personal need and a thirst for excellence. The hierarchical presumption (i.e., professional over amateur) does not automatically imply a better quality of performance – what it does imply is that the professional gets paid and produces a commercial product aimed at achieving a definable goal according to specified standards – as set by his patrons or sponsors.

Our society often values those who make money over those who don’t – no matter what the quality of their work. So while there may be many tests by which professional success is gauged, the few institutional means of judging "amateur" achievement typically use "competition" as an arbiter. People who are developing their personal style look to competition winners for suggestions, and frequently emulate them. This is not to say that competition is the only means by which amateurs absorb style, but it is the means with the broadest scope and greatest depth with which to establish relative rank and have influence on others. In this regard we understand that Judges wield considerable power.

By publishing and announcing only those works selected as winners by judges, other works -- perhaps better and more interesting works -- tend to remain unknown to the audience.

By and large, we find that the best fine-arts and professional photographers today tend not to produce rule-based works – not that they ignore elemental compositional principles (it is in their blood, of course), but that they seem to feel no necessity to employ them systematically. Of course I’m ignoring those photographic enterprises (such as wedding photography or run-of-the-mill portraiture), where tradition and expectation is so ingrained that rule-based production is a prerequisite.

I suspect that the adoption of rule-based creativity is a phenomenon that helped give modern amateurs a standard against which to claim a level of proficiency that would be respected and understood by their colleagues, thus transforming them into ersatz professionals. As such, the guidelines thrive in an in-between world in which, on one hand, they serve as useful contrivances and on the other hand as inhibiting methodologies.

Fine arts photographic education often ignores the existence of "rules" and "guidelines," substituting other criteria instead. For instance the first lesson one student had to learn was how to produce a series of works that were conceptually consistent.

=====

Wölfflin's book depends upon the reader accepting an hypothesis of the nature of change, so a side-bar about theories of evolution in the arts might be in order. Searching back to my own undergraduate years I recall several theories that have been put forward to explain how art transforms itself between periods – the motives that inspire change. I'll summarize.

In no particular order, the first suggests that art and artists strive to reach goals of verisimilitude, such as mastery of reproducing nature, or space, motion, emotion or animal locomotion.

Greek Kouros (left)
Kouros from Anavysos,
540-515 BC, Athens, Nat’l Museum.




(right)
Polykleitos – Doryphorus (Spear Bearer),
450-440 BC Roman Copy, Naples.

 

And while this may aptly seem to describe how some individuals set their personal aspirations, and what seems to happen in historical time, it fails as an explanation, because were such goals were ever to be reached, talented artists could and would hit a dead end, and there would be no improvement ever again. The key is to understand a style's expressive intent.

What has changed is what people need, and need breeds the varying forms of art. We must ask what purposes and ideals are served by efforts to be realistic, and what ideals (etc.) are operative when other goals (like abstraction or expression) are operative.

When photography first emerged as a technique, people feared that there would be no role left for painting. Yet the creation of photography only disproved this thesis because as we well know, no two photographers will render the same subject the same way. Moreover, this posture seems to say that art must progress and evolve in a Darwinian sense – but, if anything, as above, this would be a dead-ended Darwinism.

A second theory suggests that artistic evolution emulates the biological or botanical cycles, best described by observing the natural cycle of plant and animal life: "budding, blooming, and decaying." This analogy is often used to explain the so-called growth and decay of civilizations but it is often also used to describe the cycle of personal styles from youthful to old age, as well as the evolution of individual styles. Indeed, the analogy seems to make sense when you look at works from outside their context of creation, without peering into the mechanisms to which art reacts at it changes – such as variations in religious or philosophical motivations – as in "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." Moreover, to see a cycle in process the observer must stake out a position he defines as the "high-point" of a style which causes observers to compare every manifestation within the style to an arbitrary reference.

Roman Sculpture from the Republic (1^st C. BC)
(left)


Roman Sculpture (probably 3^rd C. AD – Plotinus) (right)

I’m just showing these now because they represent different expressive motivations; we’ll return to these soon.

A third premise derives from Hegel’s theory of political and cultural evolution – described neatly as sets of evolving reactions and fusions, and known universally by the phrase "thesis, antithesis and synthesis." This means that each manifestation breeds its opposite, which, in turn, is merged with its source -- which generates another opposite -- and so on.

Fourth: There is a Darwinesque theory of artistic evolution, which in a way can be called "survival of the most fit." The variant I prefer differs from the original "dangerous-world" form in that it does not necessarily look forward in a predetermined progressive manner, but rather builds upon the results of what might well be accidental, even chaotic changes. Such changes cause some creations to be more poorly predisposed to survival and others more disposed to be successful, so that those more fit ultimately establish an evolutionary direction, which can be defined only in retrospect. At the most rudimentary level, this theory suggests that there is no internal will to evolve. The theory is not very popular since it is passive and takes the thrill out of the battle for survival (i.e., no exciting movies). But it might be considered as a tentative model for some elements of artistic evolution – one in which creators find new and unexpected expressive uses for ordinary materials or unrealized methods when opportunity permits.

And this leads to the theory that advocates that change is due to finding adequate forms with which to express new ideals. It doesn’t imply a direction for change; it just promises change and encourages investigation of those opportunities to produce suitable imagery. Some experiments don’t work, are abandoned and become lost in time, while others prove successful and ultimately come to typify an epoch. And then there are people like Leonardo, who seemed to know what he wanted before he could produce it.

Continued on Judging03.htm
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