Aesthetical Values of Photography and
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How is the psychology of art related to photography? When I mention the psychology of art, many people may think it is a type of experimental psychology that studies human perception of color and composition, which would seem to have a natural connection to photography. Interestingly enough, the arguably most well-known psychologist of art, Rudolf Arnheim, is not an experimental psychologist. With the exception of his dissertation and one or two other writings, he has never published an experimental study (Verstegen, 1996). Instead, throughout his career he has "philosophized" a psychology of art. Arnheim, a German immigrant to America, studied psychology at the University of Berlin during the 1920s. At that time psychology was considered a branch of philosophy (Behrens, 1998).
During Arnheim's career, he wrote 15 books and numerous papers on the psychology of art. He conducted research and taught in major American universities such as Columbia and Harvard. In addition, he served twice as the President of the American Society for Aesthetics, and served three terms as the President of the "Division on Psychology and the Arts" of the American Psychological Association. The fact that Arnheim is such a prominent figure in the study of art makes his criticism of photography especially problematic. I hope that this article can give photographers sufficient knowledge to critique Arnheim's viewpoint.
The objective of this article is to introduce and criticize Arnheim's "philosophical/psychological" view of photography. To comprehend his view of photography, a general overview of his psychology of art is essential also. "Dynamic" expression is the theme of Arnheim's theory. In his theory, the more visual tensions an artist presents, the more dynamic expression the work carries. Arnheim believes that photography is not as dynamic as painting because photography is too environment-driven to grasp the essence of a subject or express the authentic personality of a model. In the following, I will outline the fundamental concepts of Arnheim's theory and give a brief critique to some of his views.
Visual Thinking
The Highest Sense
The pursuit of logic and rationality prevails in Western culture. Arnheim (1974) asserted that Western culture is "unsuited to the creation of art and encourages the wrong kind of thinking about it. We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thoughts move among abstractions." (p.1) He insists that visual thinking cannot be conveyed by verbal language. For instance, the entire experience created by a Rembrandt painting could not and should not reduced to description and explanation (pp.1-2).
Arnheim (1979) agrees with philosopher Wittgenstein that words are like the skin of a deep water, [so] we must penetrate beneath the skin. And Arnheim even goes further to claim that humans' highest sense is the sense of vision (p.146). Moreover, Arnheim (1986) is opposed to the notion that intuition is just artists' effortless inspiration while intellect is a kind of serious logical thinking. Actually, he says, intellect is a linear or sequential analysis, while intuition is a synthesis of the entire structure. Intuition enables us to perceive and interpret the relations between various elements of a subject (pp.13-30). *
Theoretical Thinking
Fortunately, Arnheim does not go to the extreme to exclude conceptual thinking from artistic activities. In Arnheim's view (1969), intuition or visual thinking is by no means a sufficient condition for artistic creation. Genuine artwork requires organization, which involves many, and perhaps all, of the cognitive operations of theoretical thinking (p.263). Perceptually, a mature work reflects a highly differentiated sense of form, capable of organizing various components of the image in a comprehensive compositional order. The intelligence of the artist is apparent not only in the structure of the formal pattern, but equally in the depth of meaning conveyed by this pattern (p. 269).
In brief, the work of art is an interplay of vision and thought. The individuality of particular existence and the generality of types are united in one image. Percept and concept are revealed as two aspects of one and the same experience (p.273).
Visual Dynamic
Arnheim (1988, Nov.- Dec.) asserts that the world of sensory experience is not made up of things, but of dynamic force. The key to expression in visual art is the rendering of dynamic forces in fixed images. Expression is the manifestation of life, and life is what art is all about (p.585).
For example, different lengths and positions in line-drawing faces would give different impressions to observers--a face that has long lines in close proximity would seem aged, sad, and mean (see Figure 1a); a face that has shorter, farther apart lines would seem youthful and serene (see Figure 1b). These are the result of perceived contradictions and expansions.
Arnheim (1974) states that these visual forces are physically and psychologically real, not merely figures of speech. Psychologically, the interplay of forces in a picture exists in the experience of any person who looks at it. Since these forces have a point of attack, a direction, and an intensity, they meet the conditions established by physicists for physical forces (p.16).
Figure 1. A mean face and a serene face
Homeostatic Equilibrium
Arnheim adopted the assumption that human mind operates on the infrastructure of a homeostatic equilibrium, and any stimulation from the outside or inside of an organism will upset the balance of that basic state and lead directly to a countermove (1988, Nov-Dec., p.588). For an organism, pleasure results from reductions of tension or a balance of drive. Visual pleasure works in the same way. **
Entropy
Arnheim (1974) also uses the analogy of physics to explain the vitality of visual forces in art. In physics the principle of entropy, also known as the second law of Thermodynamics, asserts that in any isolated system, each successive state represents an irreversible decrease of active energy. The universe tends toward a state of equilibrium in which all existing asymmetries of distribution are eliminated (p.36). Art is but one manifestation of this universal tendency towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems (Arnheim, 1971, p.255).
On Photography
Arnheim built his theory of visual dynamic basing upon mainly painting, sculpture and music. He regards photography as less dynamic than these arts. The characteristics of photography in Arnheim's theory could be described as the following:
Outside In--Environment-Driven
First, the nature of painting does not derive from its subject matter, but from the media in which it is created: the sheet of paper, the canvas, the stone, and the tools and materials. On the contrary, photography springs from the environment. Arnheim describes the difference with this phrase: "Painting and sculpture come from the inside out; photography comes from outside in" (Arnheim, 1986, p.115-116). We might say that painting and sculpture are "media-driven," but photography is "environment-driven."
As a photographer, I believe that photography is not necessarily "outside in." Equipped with three Nikon cameras, eight lenses, fifty filters and some other accessories, I always take the media as the first consideration when I decide what I will do with the subject. Basically, all forms of art are the materialization of ideas. In other words, all arts fall along a media-environment continuum.
Limitations of Visual Dynamic
Because Arnheim believes that photography is from the outside in, it is said to be less expressive in the sense of containing the visual tensions of the subject. Arnheim (1979) asserts that photography, in spite of its authenticity, is not the best tool to enhance visual thinking; rarely will it do the job without the help of other means such as schematic drawings, graphs, etc. Visual education, in Arnheim's view, must be a statement of what is happening. A sequence is shown by visible continuity. Cause and effect are shown by an observable proximity in time or space or both. According to Arnheim, photographs cannot show such things as well as other media (p.148).
Aesthetical visual forms contain directed tensions, or visual dynamic. They represent a happening rather than a being. Thus, a good picture of football players shows intense action, while a poor one makes the figures look awkwardly arrested in midair (Arnheim, 1979, p.75). In Arnheim's view, it is more likely for a painter to create visual tensions, but for photographers, the reality of a physical subject comprises the total course of its existence in time. To render it in the timeless medium of painting, the artist may translate a synthesis of the time sequence into an appropriate immobile image. For that same image, the photographer is limited to selecting a momentary phase of the sequence. Thus, according to Arnheim, a photograph might not carry the most dynamic elements of that event ( 1986, p.117).
Arnheim's opinion might be correct in regard to early photography, but today quite a few cameras are capable of track focusing and continuous shooting. Catching the crucial moment of an event is no longer difficult. Moreover, even a traditional camera is able to record the motion of an image with a long exposure. Once a photographer mounted a Nikon N6006 on his bicycle while cycling at night. His picture reveals a sense of time sequence, and the visual tensions are clearly displayed through the sharp and blurred subjects.
Natural Accident
According to Arnheim (1979), environment-driven photography carries a property of "natural accident." Impressionists, who were inspired by photographs, departed from classic orderliness and stillness in their painting styles and experimented with the composition of natural accident to portray indifference, isolation and unawareness. Nonetheless, the so-called accident was the intent of the artists and under their control.
However, Arnheim does not consider natural accident in photography as successfully controlled as it is in Impressionist paintings. Photography introduces accident into every one of its products. A photo is never more than partially comprehensive to the human eye. Therefore, as a medium of art, photography will always suffer from the inherent compromise, Arnheim argues (p.170).
Particularity
Because photography is said to be environment-driven, Arnheim (1986) considers it an art of particularity rather than an expression of universality. He asserts that painters are inclined to start from a highly abstract level and would reach individuality only by special elaboration. Photography, on the other hand, would have a hard time presenting an abstraction. Instead of stating abstractness positively, it can only arrive at it negatively, by eliminating some of the primary data (p.116).
In photography, the detailed rendering of an individual human body is common. A normally focused shot of a human body displays all the imperfections of the model, unless the photographer searches for the rare specimen of perfection such as a glamorous young woman or a well-built athlete. These images are ideals, like their counterparts in painting and sculpture, but given the difference in medium, their connotation is not the same. Arnheim says:
The photographic documents are not the creations of an idealizing imagination that responds to the imperfections of reality with a dream of beauty. Instead, they are the trophies of a hunter who looks for the unusual in the world of what actually exists and discovered something exceptionally good. (1986, p.121)
Furthermore, since photographs are reproductions of what really happened in a particular time and space, they are not self-explanatory. Their meaning depends on the total context of which they are a part. When photography wishes to convey a message, it must try to place the image into the proper context. Usually this will require the help of the written or spoken word (Arnheim, 1986, p.119).
John Berger also states that photography is an art of "ambiguity." Without the aid of captions, the audience always interprets photos in a way that is completely different from what they really are or what they originally mean. I totally agree with Arnheim that photography is an art of particularity rather than universality. Again taking the human figure as an example, the nude photos of Man Ray and Alfred Stiegitz are quite different. The nudes in Man Ray's album are expressed in the European style while the latter ones are American. Perhaps Ray and Stiegitz did not deliberately embody their arts in certain cultural styles, but the women in their pictures definitely carry those particular traits.
Paralyzing Expression
Arnheim (1979) considers photography an improper medium to express a person's personality. He has said:
The presence of a portrait photographer's camera tends to paralyze a person's expression, so that he becomes self-conscious, inhibited, and strikes an unnatural pose. Candid shots are momentary phases isolated in time and space from the action and setting of which they are a part. Sometimes they are highly expressive and representative of the whole from which they are taken. Frequently, they are not. Furthermore, the angle from which a shot is made, the effect of lighting on shape, the rendering of brightness and color values, as well as modifications through retouching, are factors that make it impossible to accept a random photograph as a valid likeness. (p.55)
This argument puzzles me. On one hand, Arnheim criticizes photography for lacking visual dynamic and carrying disorganized natural accident because it is from "outside in" and the manipulation of media is not sufficient. On the other hand, he says that photography cannot truly express a person's essence because it has too much artist intervention and manipulation. It seems to be contradictory. Actually, artificial procedures in photography such as switching angles and retouching might contribute to a valid likeness. Furthermore, psychologists generally agree that one's personality is situational rather than stable. It is doubtful that we can find one "right" representation of anyone's personality. On one occasion perhaps a snapshot of a natural accident shows an expressive gesture of a person vividly, but at another time a picture taken in a studio setup may manifest his/her essence clearly. Sometimes a painter can reveal the very nature of a person in a particular situation, but a photographer might handle this job better under another circumstances.
Conclusion
When such a prominent psychologist of art as Arnheim is so critical of photography, it is no wonder that even now photography is not highly regarded as a type of fine art. Nonetheless, we should not fully accept his theory without careful examination. His theory of visual dynamic is based on the assumptions of homeostatic equilibrium and entropy, which are believed to be universal principles in the human world and the universe. However, I wonder whether visual forces as a major criterion in art is universal or cultural. I agree with Arnheim that photography is an art of particularity, but this doesn't mean that photography must be from "outside in." In Arnheim's theory, if photography has too much natural accident, it will hardly carry visual dynamic. But if it has too much photographer intervention and manipulation of the subject, it will paralyze the expression of the subject's essence. Perhaps it is the photographer's mission to strive for a balance between these tensions.
Notes
* Although Arnheim's theory is so insightful as to point out the inadequacy of verbal cognition, the dichotomy of visual thinking and verbal thinking still oversimplifies the breadth of human cognition. According to Howard Gardner, human intelligence can be classified into seven dimensions, namely artistic, linguistic, kinesthetic, mathematic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal (Gardner, 1991). I believe that this is a more comprehensive approach to look at human cognition.
In addition, it is debatable whether visual thinking is the highest form of cognition. Albert Bandura (1986) insists that mental image and verbal memory are interrelated but most of our information is stored in verbal form (p.58). Jean Piaget asserts that the development of human cognition progresses from the dependence on sensory input to the dependence on concepts (cited in Hergenhann, 1988, pp.271-288). Some psychologists distinguish field dependent from field independent thinkers. Field dependence refers to cognition based upon a clearly-defined visual object, while field independence is defined as perception without distraction or confusion by the environment. Interestingly enough, field independence is considered the higher cognitive skill of the two (cited in Hettinger, 1988). In short, it is doubtful that the inference that visual sense is the highest form of cognition would be supported by most psychologists.
** The model of homeostatic equilibrium was also accepted by Sigmund Freud and Edward Hull. Today this model is no longer popular in psychology because psychologists found that theories of Freud and Hull are hardly applicable to the real world. It is no guarantee that we can maximize our pleasure even if we make the greatest effort to reduce tensions. John Atkinson (1965) classifies personality traits into two categories, namely tendency to succeed and tendency to avoid failure (p.73). For the former, tensions might be a source of pleasure!
Regarding visual arts, Oriental paintings, in value contrast, color hues and composition, are often less tensed than their Western counterparts. I doubt that visual tensions as the major criterion in art is universal.
References
Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
_____. (1971). Entropy and art: An essay on disorder and order. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
_____. (1974). Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
_____. (1979) Toward a psychology of art. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
_____. (1986). New essays on the psychology of art. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
_____. (1988 Nov.-Dec.). Visual dynamics. American Scientist, 6, 585- 591.
Atkinson, J. W. (1965). The mainsprings of achievement oriented activity. In J. D. Krumboltz (Ed.), Learning and the Educational Process (pp.25-38, 48-66). Chicago: Rand McNally.
Behrens, R. (1998). Rudolf Arnheim: The little owl on the shoulder of Athene. Leonardo, 31, 231-233.
Gardner, H. (1991). Multiple intelligences: Theory and practice. New York: Basic Books.
Hergenhann, B. R. (1988). An introduction to learning theories. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hettinger, G. (1988). Operationalizing cognitive constructs in the design of computer-based instruction. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
Verstegen, I. (1996). The thought, life, and influence of Rudolf Arnheim. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 122, 197-214.
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