Isafjörður region, northwest Iceland, September 20, 2023.
To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary, Matthieu Ricard is offering a series of blogs on photography. An invitation to share wonder, celebrate the beauty of the world, and continue the quest for light that has guided him throughout his sixty-year journey.
“Photography is an art; it is better than an art, it is the solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.” — Alphonse de Lamartine
“A few words on the question of whether photography is an art or not: I have never understood the question.” — Ernst Haas
Having lived through the era of photography’s invention, the great painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) signed in 1862 a “Protest by great artists against any assimilation of photography to art,” which did not prevent him from writing a little later: “Photography is better than a drawing, but one mustn’t say so,” adding elsewhere: “There are not two arts, there is only one: that which has as its foundation beauty, eternal and natural. Those who look elsewhere are mistaken, and in the most fatal way.”
Aren’t these two art forms simply complementary? As Man Ray pointed out, “I photograph what I do not wish to paint, and I paint what I cannot photograph.” Within the Dada and Surrealist movements, Man Ray became famous for his photographic work, yet he considered himself above all a painter—an assertion that Henri Cartier-Bresson liked to repeat about him, more or less mischievously.
Art has been defined sometimes as the creation of visual or sonic works admired for their beauty, their uniqueness, or their capacity to stir emotions; sometimes as an individual and singular experience, a vehicle for transcending ordinary reality and a means of generating aesthetic experiences capable of enriching our lives; sometimes as an instrument of social and political protest aimed at transforming society, or even as a cry of alarm.
Even though he claimed not to understand the question, Ernst Haas nevertheless wrote on the subject: “You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within yourself, you can also give it back. You can transpose that feeling into a painting. A painter can do it. A musician can do it, and I think a photographer can do it too. That is what I would call dreaming with your eyes open.”
Faced with the immense diversity of definitions of art and, ultimately, with how little importance such classifications may have, what matters most is that the images of talented photographers have the power to inspire, to move, to motivate, and to fulfill those who contemplate them.
“Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction,” Ernst Haas also said. Indeed, as Henry Holmes Smith—photographer and art professor—remarked: “The question, ‘What was really there?’ becomes as irrelevant as asking what Monet’s lily-pond really looked like to Mrs. Monet as she bicycled past…” In the end, the result is the ultimate criterion of a photographic creation, and as Ansel Adams also emphasized, “There are no rules for making a good photograph; there are only good photographs.”
You can find this entire photographic project in Lumière, published by Éditions Allary.
Matthieu Ricard donates all of his income—royalties from his books, photographs, and lectures—to development projects run by the Karuna-Shechen association, which works to reduce poverty and empower the most vulnerable women, men, and children. In this way, every reader becomes a direct contributor to solidarity through their purchase.