Photography and Realism

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Title:     Photography and Realism
Author: Israel Zangwill [More Titles by Zangwill]

No artist of the brush can afford to dispense with models; when he draws from his inner consciousness the composition is tame and the draughtsmanship wild. The novelist, though his object is not portraiture, but creation, can as little afford to keep aloof from real men and women. When George Eliot ceased to draw from models and fell back on intuition and her library, she produced "Daniel Deronda." But I would demur altogether to the use of "photography" in literary criticism as synonymous with realism. The photograph is an utter misrepresentation of life, and this not merely because of its false shades and its lack of colour, but because the photographer is not content with literalness. He aspires to art. So far from being a realist, he is the greatest idealist of all. He not only puts you into poses you would never fall into naturally, he not only arranges you so as to hide your characteristic uglinesses, and bids you call up an expression you never use, but he touches up and tones down after you are gone, and treats his pictures, indeed, as though they were actors and he the dresser. And as each photographer has his own style, no two portraits are ever alike. My portraits of Annabel pass as a collection of pretty actresses. Still, if they are not like one another, they resemble one another in being unlike her. The only good photographs I have ever seen of myself were done by an amateur--most of the others might just as well have been taken in my absence. And there is always a painful neatness about photographs: my humble study was once photographed, and it looked like a princely library. Bags come out with artistic interstices, fustian gleams like satin. It is the true Platonic touch, glorifying and gilding everything. Filth itself would come out like roses. No, no, let us hear no more about Zola's "photography."

[The end]
Israel Zangwill's essay: Photography and Realism

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