Victor Dima

“Art is not construction, artifice, the meticulous relationship to a space and a world existing outside. It is truly the “inarticulate cry,” as Hermes Trismegistus said, “which seemed to be the voice of the light.” And once it is present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence.”

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind (in The Primacy of Perception, p.182)

In and Out of Focus. E-P1 and Panasonic Summilux DG 25mm @ f1.4, 1/4000

In 1960, less than a year before his death, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote his most direct essay on the subject of painting: Eye and Mind (L’Oeil et l’esprit) (hosted on Thimothy Quigley’s website and found in The Primacy of Perception, which is where I came across it.) Curiously enough, Merleau-Ponty never wrote about photography directly, although he does mention it at times. In this particular essay, there is a brief passage (p. 185) explaining how photography’s mechanical vision of the world fails by being too exact, too scientific. That more or less sums up his point of view. And yet so much is revealed about photography in the way he talks about painting, that I can’t help but wonder if perhaps (and very likely a product of the time) Merleau-Ponty simply skimmed over the subject because it wasn’t “high art.”

Eye and Mind opens with a very unashamed bashing of science. Merleau-Ponty probably disliked nothing more than he disliked the cartesian “objective” view of science: that which sees with the mechanical eye of the observer, falsely claiming universal truths. Well, maybe the Americans. He probably disliked the Americans as much as he did science. To Merleau-Ponty science is of no interest because it doesn’t take into account the observer: how can you explain the world if you try to exclude yourself from it? What can it teach us about life, when Being is completely removed from it? It is in these very first pages that it becomes apparent how Merleau-Ponty felt about photography: it is after all a mechanical endeavor that exists only by virtues of chemistry and optical science. It does nothing more in his eyes than fix a moment in time by a chemical process: as descriptive and cold as science can be.

And yet, his love of painting reveals perhaps a misunderstanding of photography, and I feel a misreading of this essay is in order, as to fully appreciate his words from a photographic perspective. When Merleau-Ponty talks about quality, light, color, depth, he must surely address all visual arts even if in this particular essay he is focusing on painting, on Cezanne. He sees painting from a polite distance I feel, by almost denying its materiality, the materia prima that is oil on canvas: an alchemical composition perhaps too close to science for his liking (for an in-depth look at the alchemy of painting, James Elkin’s What Painting Is is a great read.)

“The painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost mad, because it is complete though only partial. Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to have at a distance; painting extends this strange possession to all aspects of Being, which must somehow become visible in order to enter into the work of art. When, apropos of Italian painting, the young Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he could hardly have been more mistaken; painting evokes nothing, least of all the tactile. What it does is entirely different, almost the inverse. It gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a “muscular sense” in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the “visual givens,” opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man in his house.” (p. 166)

Merleau-Ponty was perhaps a polite visitor in a museum, and I wish he would have touched a Cezanne and its dry crackling paint, and not just seen and “lived” in it from a distance.

In order to paint, the artist must not only incorporate the world but release it and project it (transformed as it has been) on a blank canvas. “It becomes impossible to discern what sees and what is seen” (p. 167) for the surface of a painting is nothing but layered matter. What we see in a painting is the complex relationship between the world, the painter and the viewer. “Man is mirror of man” (p. 168.) And this is a point photography cannot make in the same sense, because it must capture what the photographer incorporates of the world without being recreated and transformed by the photographer’s body. The type of transformation here is key.

And yet the image is composed. The camera is held, pointed, directed. The shutter is clicked. The vision of the photographer is expressed through decisions made. And most importantly, the body must be there, looking and incorporating. While a painter can recreate in a studio mountains from memory, the photographer must see the mountain in order to capture it. The photographer’s transformation of the world occurs at that decisive moment when the shutter is triggered. While the camera records (coldly, scientifically) what the photographer sees, the camera does not record autonomously. The photographer sees, incorporates and decides to record an image particular to a moment, an interaction of Body and World. The photographer’s decisions, composition, choice of subject, etc. signify in my eyes a similar transformation of what is seen and what is subsequently recorded. And the photograph in return is “made” by that vision and not, ultimately, by the mechanical recording.

“Our organs are no longer instruments; on the contrary, our instruments are detachable organs.” he says. “This philosophy still to be done is what animates the painter — not when he expresses opinions about the world but in that instant when his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cezanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting.’” (p. 178) How does a photographer make you see what they see and not what they are looking at, if not through manipulating the instrument, the camera. This, I feel is the key element of that transformation of information. The photographer sees through the object that is a camera, a lens, a viewfinder, and not because of it.

Merleau-Ponty goes on to explain that “The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely ‘physical-optical’ relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible.” The famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare taken in 1932 captured a moment in time that is hard to describe as a mere “physical-optical” relation to the world. It is a gesture anticipated by Cartier-Bresson, captured at a particular moment and above all which describes more than just a man jumping over a puddle. Once captured, that image became more than the sum of its parts, in the same sense that a painting is more than the sum of its brush strokes. And while the argument could be made further, that a painting’s subject can move back and forth between brush stroke and representation, can the same not be said about that black figure jumping over (and reflected in) the water, the geometric circles broken on the ground and those triangular roofs in the background? Between abstraction and representation, between blurred grain and image?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

Towards the end of the essay, Merleau-Ponty finaly addresses photography directly. He believes that paintings can suggest movement in such a way that photography can’t. Whereas a frozen picture of a horse in the air is an accurate description of the movement of the horse, it fails to evoke it. And while that may be partially true, I can think of many photographs that evoke movement as well as any painting could. Similarly it can be argued that photography can anticipate a movement and show a moment of tension preceding the movement significantly better and truer to life than painting could (paintings are often theatrical in representing gesture, especially older paintings before the invention of photography.) But the point I’m trying to make is not to distance and separate the two. In fact, since the invention of photography I believe more and more painters have used it to better freeze a moment in time so that they could later incorporate it and transform it in their work.

“The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the “metamorphosis” [Rodin] of time. This is what painting, in contrast, makes visible, because the horses have in them that “leaving here, going there,” because they have a foot in each instant. Painting searches not for the outside of movement but for its secret ciphers, of which there are some still more subtle than those of which Rodin spoke. All flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself. But whether or not one is, depending on the era and the “school,” attached more to manifest movement or the monumental, the art of painting is never altogether outside time, because it is always within the carnal.” (p. 186)

It is in those words that Merleau-Ponty’s view of photography finally condenses: it freezes the moment but destroys the overlapping time, which I feel is perhaps partially true in a sense, but limits the understanding of what photography can be. I can think for example of time-lapse photography, or a 30 minute exposure portrait, to say nothing of double-exposures and other creative ways of fixing light to a surface.

My reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is not intended to pick painting or photography apart, but to see at which point they converge and just how much they have in common. They are different mediums, and as such a different approach is needed for both, but there are also similarities. Particularly of interest to me is how the world is seen and transformed through art, and what that teaches us about the world in return. I believe Merleau-Ponty said more about photography than he intended to in his essay, and I only wish he would have held photography is as high regard as he did painting. His is a truly great mind, and I would have loved to know what he had to say on the subject (had he appreciated it more, of course.) Photography is all about perception and light: how we see, live in and incorporate the world, and all of these concepts were dear to Merleau-Ponty.

“This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is – this is vision itself.” (p. 188)

NOTE: The linked PDF contains a different translation of the Eye and Mind essay than what is presented in The Primacy of Perception. I have copy-pasted some information from the PDF and I have typed some from my notes based on the book. The quotes provided therefore come from two different translations.