Ok, so we both agree that portraiture is a form of art.
What was the "subject" of a traditional painted portrait?
The idea or ideal of the person in the artist's mind. It is not identical with the person whose portrait is being painted, but a visual concept thereof.
So, you are including in your definition of art, that the "artist" must somehow change his "ideal" and version of reality...otherwise it is not truly art? What about the type of paintings where the artist speciffically tries to portray reality as realistically and true to the subject as possible?
Would you agree that painters were, in this process, producing a likeness of their subjects?
No. Not necessarily, and Scruton covers this. Besides, a photograph is not a 'likeness' in the same sense. It captures photos bounced from the object before the lens.
.
What speciffically about the likeness portrayed in a creative portrait, composed, lighted, framed and processed speciffically to convey the photographer's "ideal of the subject" separates the type of "likeness" a photograph conveys verses a portrait painting?
Our vocabulary is inadequate to distinguish all the concepts consistently.
A photograph is not a likeness; it is an image. A painting, a very realistic painting, at first glance appears to be an image (by which I mean an
optical image)...but it's not. An image is 'of' something else. A positive lens makes a 'real image', i.e. it focuses light rays to a point, producing an inverted, reversed image of whatever it is pointed at. (Virtual images can only be seen by the eye, and are not used to produce photographs; they are produced in viewfinder systems.)
Real image - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virtual image - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Words such as 'likeness', 'image', 'picture', etc., are vague and not always used with precision and consistency. A photograph does not 'resemble', it is not a 'likeness'; it is not a 'picture'; it is, rather, an optical image, light focused by a lens, collected and frozen by the sensitive material used.
It is the result of the direct action of photons. A painting is nothing remotely like it, except that it is two-dimensional.
Their livelihoods threatened, portrait painters were up in arms when photography was invented, and tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to stem the tide of photography as a means of making portraits by criticizing the sharpness and clarity that it achieved. The painters kept it up, and eventually photographers accepted the lie that photography was in some way 'inferior' to painting. As a result, various late-20th century photographers began making 'painterly' photographs, in which the intent was to make photographs look as much as possible like paintings, like 'art'. This was Pictorialism, whose influence lasted for about 35 years, until the F/64 group rejected it. The irony was that the sharp photographs produced by this group were also intended to be 'art'. But at least they recognized that photography was not well served by the fuzzy, dreary products paraded as 'art' by the Pictorialists.
How ironic. It was not the
style that was the problem;
the error was the notion that photography was a form of art and that photographers were artists just like painters.
Pictorialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But in any event, we have one kind of photographic style rejected, and another one adopted, but still the practitioners thought of themselves as making 'art' and wanted to be called 'artists' rather than photographers. It all reflects an inferiority complex which to me is inexplicable.
Photography has had its own unique name, photography, which from the beginning has kind of handicapped it.
There is a certain cache associated (rightly or wrongly) with being called 'artist'.
It's time we let that go.
Now, as an aside, paintings can indeed present a portrait in a way that a photograph can never do. But that does not make photographs 'inferior' to paintings, because the reverse is also true.
![[No title]](/data/xfmg/thumbnail/32/32183-06800ba86381f42976d75297ee6b5942.jpg?1734161047)
