ragman

8 Canvas:

Firstly let me note with some distinction that the word canvas is derived from the Latin word for cannabis – as hemp was popularly used to make canvas. Perhaps that indicates something about the addiction we find photography to be.

Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other functions where sturdiness is required. It is also on fashion handbags and shoes and popularly used as a painting surface, typically stretched and as the surface for application.

All photographs are the result of a canvas, not a camera. Edward Steichen believed every photograph to be a portrait, and firmly insisted that a portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

I just like the term canvas, as it stretches and solidifies the Stieglitz connection of photography with art, ‘the camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work a miracle’.

It reminds us that we are artists and that our captures should end up as finished works whether on a site such as Redbubble, or Photobucket, or Flickr; or on a card or on a canvas, and it suggests our commitment to completion.

Whether negative or digital file, it is a sketchbook not a blueprint it is the first scrapings on the canvas. Thereafter follows manipulation and design and depending on your viewpoint it will be ~ masterful or misbelief, pure or pretentious, accuracy or assumption, alchemy or an art.

Man Ray asked ‘Do you change your working methods completely when switching from one artistic medium to another?’ “Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.” Man Ray believed that some of the most complete and satisfying works of art have been produced when their authors had no idea of creating a work of art, but were concerned with the expression of an idea.

My final point about a canvas is that it is fixed; once completed, it is has a status of being static; still; still as a canvas hanging on the gallery wall; and rather appropriate I believe as photography takes an instant out of time, grabbing a moment of life by disabling it from going forward by holding it still; enabling the viewer to go back to it over and over again and find even further still within it.

Canvas relates to art, and our photography is art. Edward Steichen in High Fashion: the Conde Nast years; stated: ‘Take good photographs, and the art will take care of itself’ He went on to say ‘If I take a photograph, i would stand by it with my name, otherwise I wouldn’t have made it in the first place’

I see too many images on sites such as Redbubble etc; which if people were to hang them in a public exhibition, they wouldn’t put their name to! We ought to adopt the the Steichen attitude and philosophy; that if we post our image, then it is on public exhibition, and we do put our name to it; it is published on-line, and we do of course expect that someone will purchase our art as a print or poster or calendar; then it should do so with a manner of, and as a mattter of pride!

It is also the thought of the canvas that it is a piece of art, and yet people would steal or copy it; or worse still, enter images that are not theirs on the web. I wonder if in previous days would we have produced a canvas, and have the gall to bring in as an entry to that exhibition.

So do we take a photograph, or make a photograph; I close as usual with these quotes from the greats which hopefully convince us they we do indeed make a piece of art and place it on a canvas.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ~ Ansel Adams

I start with no preconceived idea – discovery excites me to focus – then rediscovery through the lens – final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print pre-visioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure – the shutter’s release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation – the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera. ~ Edward Weston

You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you; you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes. ~ Ernst Haas