Cezanne

This is my belated post on the Cezanne reading.

As I'd recently seen his work at the Barnes Foundation as well as the work of many of the other Impressionists Barnes collected, I found this article particularly interesting.Cezanne was Barnes' favorite artist and he purchased a world class collection of his paintings well before Cezanne was considered the master he is today. (Albert C.Barnes was an eccentric Philadelphia-based millionaire, who established one of the premier collections of Impressionist art, and was among the first serious collectors of African art as well. He once kept the collection in his home and let people see it according to his whim. After his death, a legal battle ensued over his billion-dollar collection, culminating finally in the erection of a museum to house it that Barnes never wanted built..)

The explanation of Cezanne's work as an illustration of what happens when the human eye sees an image was fascinating. As someone who is nearsighted, Cezanne's take on the world is much as I see it without corrective lenses. (That led me to wonder if he had any vision problems.) That Cezanne's work duplicates in some fashion the complicated process of sight made you look a little deeper into his art, as he simply painted what we see before it shapes into the sharp focus and detail that we count on to make out images.


As it relates to photography, I believe it is simply about seeing things differently, learning to view them not necessarily in their 3D and now HD sharpness, but in the visual cues that shape what we finally see. Although we are not conscious of that process - it happens far too fast for us to break it down into parts as the author does - we should be aware in shooting photos of all of the elements that can shape a picture from impression, to light, to color, to the subtleties of what we might unconsciously perceive in a glimpse, in the background or in just one detail. That kind of vision is necessary for good photography and in the best pictures, its usually that one detail that makes an image so unforgettable. That detail is captured just by the unique vision of the photographer who may not even know what he's "seen" until the photos are curated.