The hard (and soft) truth

Friday Fragment #5

‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike, but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.’¹ Gerhard Richter

I earn part of my living making photographs. The photograph has long been regarded by many as a certain sort of truth, especially when it superficially looks so precisely like the thing captured. The idea of the photo as an objective truth would be to misconceive or misrepresent; and to risk downgrading the ‘maker’ of a photograph to the ‘taker’ of a photograph. It might also be to misunderstand much of what happens between a creator and his subject, and the manner that light is captured digitally via an electronic image sensor and then revised and manipulated via image editing software. The assumed ‘truth’ of most images stands on very shaky ground. On the subject of shaky ground, another misapprehension made by photographers and observers of photography alike is that all of our images should have a ‘tack-sharp’ focal point. A famous favourite photo of one of my literary heroes isn’t anywhere sharp in focus across its focal plane, but remains one of the most striking portraits I know. When you consider the definition of sharpness as it pertains to flavour – intensity, severity – then you perhaps get a feel for why this shouldn’t always be desirable for the images we create. Softness is sometimes what we see, what we want, and what we feel about the thing we are giving our attention to. Within the photo painting of Gerhard Richter, that I have loved for nearly thirty years, I became aware of the relationship between two mediums, but also of the relationship between truth and artifice. Which is not to suggest that truth or artifice belonged solely or even partially to the photo on which he based his painting, or to the painting created in response to the photo, but that the two enter into a dialogue around our understanding of reality. In one final act of seeming jeopardy, Richter would take a squeegee to many of his photo paintings, dragging it across the surface of the freshly painted canvas. As the blade would smudge and smear the detail, one type of truth would become misted only for another to be revealed more sharply. The blurred line can depict both the definite and the indefinite. The soft edge can democratise, merging that which sits in front with that which lies behind. This painterly and photographic vagueness alludes and adheres to what and how we see, to both the truth and non-truth of what is being represented.²

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1. Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, ‘Notes’, 1964-1965

2. While I’m on the subject of non-truths, ‘Saturday Fragment’ just didn’t have quite the same ring as ‘Friday Fragment’.