Holga Blog

If I traveled back in time in a souped-up photo booth and spoke to my early camera-wielding self, my advice would be: “listen to your art teacher”.  Alas, as a confused teenager, art classes seemed to consist of trying to get sketches to be at least semi-recognisable. Meanwhile my photography was still focused on things and scenes I stumbled randomly upon, objects which seemed to possess some unknown magic that I thought would look good on paper.

However, I now propose that all of you, dear Holgablog readers, should head out to your nearest gallery as soon as you’ve finished reading this article. Over the last few years, toy and vintage cameras have slowly helped me to “see the light”, so to speak.

Toy cameras, in their uncontrollability, often mean that the simplest shot turns out to be the most successful. By scraping away the technical complexities, I’m left with the fundamentals: the colour and the shape. And so the art world is the perfect place to turn in order to get some hints about what makes a successful photo, even once all the complexities are gone.

Recently I’ve begun investigating the world of Impressionism: Monet, Manet, Degas and a whole bunch more. I suspect my approach to all of these when I was a teenager – surrounded by the glow of televisions and the gradual perfection of pixellated realism – was similar to that of 19th century French art critics weaned on more classical, accurate visual styles:

“Try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of flesh in
the process of decomposition with green and violet spots…” – Albert Wolff

Ironically, the development of photography in the 19th century was influential in the direction that artists took. Candid snapshots offered an air of spontaneity rather than fixed poses, and the work of Eadweard Muybridge allowed artists the opportunity to depict humans and animals in dynamic poses. Did these chemical processes even introduce errors and variations that changed the way people thought about vision?

Impressionism captures a view of the world that is fleeting, dynamic and vibrant – the impression a scene makes, rather than a technical reconstruction. It often attempts to capture a transient moment of light – something that anyone who has tried to a sunrise or sunset on film knows is all to quick. It notices colours that emerge not just from an object, but from the light itself. It is bold, but also subtle in how it makes the viewer aware of all the things we might otherwise miss.

What can we learn from Impressionism that we can then take out into the world with our Holgas?

For me, it is a jump from seeing the world simply as a series of arranged objects, to seeing it as a canvas of light. A jump from saying: “Here is a person. Here is a hill. Here is the moon.” A jump to: “Here there is contrast. Here there is texture.”

Why is this important? Perhaps this is due to the fundamentally confused nature of a photo – or even any picture, perhaps. Is it a flat reminder of the things we see around us, a handy memento? Or is it something new, a fresh interpretation of a world our eyes have grown used to seeing?

Ultimately, a camera and a film know nothing of “objects”, and care about them even less. The brain, not the eyes, is responsible for working out which bit of light goes with what other bits of light. And in toy cameras, this separation becomes even more mixed up. Lack of clarity – blur, vignetting, light leaks – all make the brain work harder to turn a photo into what we think we might remember, or imagine.

Stare at the works of the Impressionists for a while, and this detachment of what our eyes see from what our brain sees gradually grows, like vinegar and oil separating. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings inspired this post for me but there is, of course, plenty more. “River Bend” and “Impression: Sunrise” are some of my favourites, but I’d also recommend sitting down with a cup of tea and letting yourself be absorbed by Renoir’s “A Path Through the Long Grass“, Pissarro’s “Church and Farm at Eragny“, and Degas’ “Blue Dancers“. Just to start with.

For me (still as an art-fan-newbie), these are all experiments in dealing with how we see through light, not through objects. Harking back to Jules Castagnary’s comments in 1874, ”they do not render a landscape but rather convey the sensation produced by the landscape”.

Observation is more than objects – and maybe, just maybe, my younger self would have done a bit better at art if he’d known this.