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The Innocent and the Mechanical: Ruskin’s Pictorial and Photographic Eye

L’innocent et le mécanique : l’œil pictural et photographique de Ruskin
Raphaël Rigal

Résumés

Cet article prend pour point de départ l’ambivalence de Ruskin au sujet de la photographie, qui s’étend d’une critique acerbe à un éloge admiratif. Que les idées de Ruskin aient changé au cours de sa vie n’est pas surprenant ; ce n’est pas non plus chose nouvelle, une myriade de critiques ayant attaqué cet aspect de la pensée ruskinienne. Sa rencontre avec la nouvelle technologie photographique est plus qu’une découverte. C’est un jeu de cache-cache entre une révolution du visuel et un homme dont la vie entière était dédiée au voir. Le rejet apparent de la photographie par Ruskin cache une proximité théorique entre deux visions. Dans Elements of Drawing, Ruskin invite ses lecteurs et potentiels étudiants de dessin à recourir à « l’innocence de l’œil », une façon de voir le monde qui s’appuierait sur une perception purifiée, débarrassée de toutes les idées préconçues et significations associées à ce qui est perçu visuellement — le but étant de se reposer sur une expérience directe du monde. L’on pourrait concevoir l’appareil photographique, en tant qu’objet technique, comme un mécanisme similaire, produisant l’empreinte de la lumière. Dans les deux cas, la représentation pourrait réduire le monde à son existence, faisant fi de tout le sens attaché aux phénomènes que sont les images. Mais cette approche froide et mécanique de la représentation ne permet pas de rendre compte de l’attachement ruskinien au sens profond des objets naturels ou artificiels ; de la même façon, elle ne rend pas compte du pouvoir des photographies comme objets et signifiants symboliques, au-delà de simples reflets de la réalité. En revenant à l’approche théorique de la vision appliquée, telle que présentée dans les textes de Ruskin, cet article essaiera de résoudre ce décalage entre signifiant et signification, et entre la transparence et le sens. Cela sera fait en examinant la potentielle approche d’une application à la photographie de la théorie de la vision de Ruskin, et en la connectant aux prétentions artistiques de la photographie, en particulier dans le contexte du xixe siècle ; un lien sera aussi établi avec l’utilisation de la représentation pour aider à la conservation d’environnements naturels et artificiels, ce qui nous amènera à interroger l’usage politique de la vision.

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Introduction

1If one were to collect and analyse all of John Ruskin’s writings, one would have a hard time identifying a subject on which the author of Modern Painters has never changed his mind. The monumental length of Ruskin’s works and his life in such a period of changes and upheavals as the Victorian era justifies such variations in opinions: one’s perception of a subject might hardly remain the same over several decades, as noted by Michael Harvey (Harvey 25), to the point that several critics have complained about it in the past century and a half, according to Caroline Levine (Levine 73). Such a variation can even be found within one single work, for instance in a passage on photography and perception, as noted by Lawrence Gasquet (Gasquet 2).

2Rather than trying to navigate through dozens of contradictory comments to ‘chart a course through the maze of his opinions’ (Harvey 25), one could try to ascertain Ruskin’s actual thoughts by focusing on such a lodestar as his constant passion for vision and representation, for the analysis and reproduction of what is perceived—as Caroline Levine or Suzanne Fagence Cooper do (Levine, Fagence Cooper). Such a focus is especially fruitful if borne to bear on his ambivalent relation to photography.

  • 1 These are only four men among a host of more discreet early practitioners and pioneers of photograp (...)

3Part of Ruskin’s ambivalence arises from the confrontation of his constant thirst for precise vision and the potential for semiotic catastrophe that photography represents at its birth. As a result of the almost coincidental and uncoordinated efforts of four men, Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, and Bayard,1 photography in its early years was drawn between artistic and commercial endeavours, and found itself at the centre of contradictory discourses on its epistemological status and the possibilities it opened (Edwards, Benjamin; see also Smith 10). Even an individual’s relation to photography might vary, critical eye notwithstanding, as in the case of Barthes’s retrospective analysis of his appreciation of photographs (Barthes).

4Ruskin’s thoughts on photography follow the same variation; interested in the practice as soon as the early 1840s, when the daguerreotype was first introduced in Great Britain, Ruskin went on to consider photography as a boon given to the world, a tool to support art, a defective artistic process, and a mechanized evil polluting vision. Some contextual elements might bring some nuance to this cacophony, and, as Lindsay Smith argues, this hesitation follows contemporary discourse about photography and is influenced by ‘various social and aesthetic factors’ (Smith 11); but the ambivalence remains.

5However, some convergence can be found between photography as a craft and Ruskin’s theory of representation. In both cases, visual perception results in the creation of an object which is not simply a pure reproduction, but also a signifier for deeper truths about the world and/or aesthetic effort. The visual object produced by drawing or photography is an encoding of a new reality created by the artistic process (Flusser 26); the merit of Ruskin’s approach—applied to either old-fashioned art or to photography—is to consciously play on the limit between the transparency of images and a quest for something else, lying just beyond the visible ‘significant surfaces’ of these images (Flusser 6). This is what this article will try to show; our first focus will be on what one could call ‘mechanical innocence’—the process of photographic reproduction, which is quite similar to what Ruskin advises in Elements of Drawing; then we will focus on the transferability of theories of vision, from Ruskin’s direct contact with nature to photography’s mediated contact with light; finally, we will explore the possible political side of this innocence of the eye, and the impact a unified theory of vision might have as a reaction and a coping mechanism to the semiotic catastrophe of photography.

Mechanical Innocence: The Eye and the Lens. Optics and Perception

6Rather than the complex and lengthy studies of Modern Painters or The Stones of Venice, The Elements of Drawing might be the simplest and most direct way to approach Ruskin’s conception of what it means to see, and to see clearly, with the aim of representing the world. This ‘manual of drawing’, to quote Ruskin’s preface (Cook and Wedderburn, xv, 9), is made up of three letters presenting exercises for anyone who would want to learn how to draw, and, through that, how to see the world and better appreciate art. But more than just a method, this manual is also a way to present some of Ruskin’s theories on vision, on art, on pedagogy, or on artistic categories—some of these theories echoing opinions expressed in Modern Painters and other works.

7In this combination of theory and practice, Ruskin often insists on light and shadow, and their transcription—rather than representation—in drawing. In the first ‘Letter’ of his manual, named ‘On First Practice’, all exercises focus on shading, tints, and the effect of light on objects—bar a couple which focus on contours and lines. As for the note on the concept of the ‘innocence of the eye’, which is one of the first theoretical pieces in that same section, it also emphasizes the primordial importance of light in the perception of the world, rather than absolute forms or colours:

The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
For instance: when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. (Cook and Wedderburn,
xv, 27–28)

8Ruskin’s idea in this first section of Elements of Drawing is training his readers to recognize the effect of light and shade on the world, the impact they might have on form and colour, and to reproduce this effect first and foremost. Forms and colours themselves are left aside, to be dealt with once a good grasp of light and shade has been acquired. Even when they are included, these new elements are dealt with in practical terms: Ruskin asks for the representation of an actual form, underlined by shadow, and actual colours, altered by light. As noted by Natalie Prizel, in doing so, Ruskin ‘reject[s] the cognitive, [and] can be distinguished from a more prevalent Kantian strain . . . Ruskin’s aesthetics—at least so far as innocence of the eye is concerned—live in the non-conceptual’ (Prizel 2024, 5).

9Photography, although not mentioned in that way by Ruskin, obeys the same principle: it is first and foremost the chemical effect of light, reflected in different quantities by different objects, on a receptive material; the result is the impression by a chemical process of a reproduction of the play of light and shade in the world. The physical impact of light on that material is barely different from the impact that light reflected off objects in the world has on the human eye. Drawing only adds one extra step, which is the use of the hand to deposit on a receptive surface (paper) a chemical element (graphite, charcoal, ink) that will reproduce what the eye has perceived as the play of light and shade.

10This resemblance between the mechanical eye of the camera and the innocent eye of the budding artist is acknowledged some pages later by Ruskin, in an exercise of drawing of branches and leaves of trees:

The brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex your sight. And this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the outline itself; at least the chemical action of the light in a photograph extends much within the edges of the leaves, and, as it were, eats them away, so that no tree extremity, stand it ever so still, nor any other form coming against bright sky, is truly drawn by a photograph; and if you once succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you will find the result much more lovely and interesting than any photograph can be. (Cook and Wedderburn, xv, 73)

11What Ruskin refers to in this passage is a form of overexposure: a badly controlled amount of light entering the camera burns too much of the receptive material, preventing the impression of some details on that material; underexposure would work in the same way, but Ruskin focuses more on shades of light than on shades of darkness and thus does not mention such a phenomenon.

12But even the more commonly accessible aspects of drawing bear resemblance to the photographic process. Indeed, Ruskin starts his method by insisting on a purely technical dimension of drawing—changing inclination of pen or paper to create a darker line or make paint pool in one part of the sheet, drawing more or less gently, with more or less speed, to create different effects. This can easily be equated with the mechanical dimension of photography, to which Barthes, professing his ignorance of the medium, clings as a last defense against the mortal scrutiny of the eye: ‘L’organe du Photographe, ce n’est pas l’œil, [. . .] c’est le doigt: ce qui est lié au déclic de l’objectif, au glissement métallique des plaques’ (Barthes 32). Drawing, under Ruskin’s pen, becomes as photography, a mechanical process by which eye and hand combined transcribe the world as exactly as possible.

The Transparency of Art

13Identifying this pattern does not solve the issue of photography as a transparent craft, and of photographs as purely deictic objects, that would show something—transcribe reality—without any claim to the artistic. That this is precisely what photography tended to is, in some way, true: Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1931, 16), James Mudd (Edwards 1–3), Roland Barthes (Barthes 16) all lamented the tendency for photography to be reduced to pure representation, either for commercial or sociological purposes. However, the similarity between Ruskin’s first lessons on drawing and photography’s basic workings is both a source of hope for the artistic potential of the latter and a negation of a purely deictic process.

14Throughout the first book of his method, Ruskin seems fairly aware of the tediousness and artificiality of his exercises, often inviting readers to move from one exercise to another—these first steps are ‘dull and hard work’, as he admits (Cook and Wedderburn, xv, 89). But he also invites the reader to refer to existing works of art, accessed through photographs or engravings, in order not only to know how to perceive Nature, but also to learn of different ways to represent Nature. This is no mere imitation, no reproduction of what a previous artist has done— ‘You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect’ (Cook and Wedderburn, XV, 77). The goal here is rather to pick here and there small lessons in drawing from the great masters of art, to learn of ways to accurately show foliage, eyes, limbs, landscapes, and the plays of light and shadow on all of these elements. It is never pure accuracy of representation that is sought after here, but the ability of each artist to twist technique in order to render the impression of reality, thereby bypassing any reduction of the art to its deictic value: Dürer’s leaves, Raphael’s eyes are not used as examples of perfect transcription of reality, but as instances of representation of the effect reality had on each artist. What is implied in these exercises, as a reminder of the professed goal of Ruskin’s method, is that learning the basic steps of drawing will eventually make one more able to create and appreciate art, combining technique, inspiration from old masters, and observation from Nature.

15All this potential for artistic creation is associated with an admitted deficiency of the drawing eye: it is impossible to fully represent what is seen, because what is represented will always be nothing more than the imprint of light on the eye. Some elements might not be perceived clearly enough, some might be obfuscated by shadows or by an excess of light, all will be perceived in a way that does not entirely correspond to what they are. The theory of the innocence of the eye solves but partly this deficiency: it explains how to make sense of the world, by showing it as patches of colour affected by light which the mind perceives and subsumes under known categories; but it is accompanied by the observation that no colour painted on canvas will be absolutely true to Nature. Then another obstacle stands in the way of a pure deictic image: the fact that nature is in constant movement, making ‘direct imitation . . . more or less impossible’ (Cook and Wedderburn, XV, 90). All these obstacles open the gate to artistic endeavour, by creating a gap between the object and its representation.

Transferring Theories: The Essence of Art

16Art, according at least to some of Ruskin’s works, lies beyond the simple gesture; as noted by Harvey (Harvey 32), quoting from The Stones of Venice and from letters, art does not lie in technical mastery alone:

It is no more art to manipulate a camel’s-hair pencil, than to manipulate a china tray and a glass vial. It is no more art to lay on colour delicately, than to lay on acid delicately. It is no more art to use the cornea and retina for the reception of an image, than to use a lens and a piece of silvered paper. . . . All art is a low and common thing and what we indeed respect is not art at all, but instinct or inspiration expressed by the help of art. (Cook and Wedderburn, 1903, XI, 202 and note)

17The mechanical dimension is what connects drawing, painting, and photography, but it is not enough to create art. It is only a foundation on which to build an individual expression. This implies some proximity between the innocent eye of the budding painter and the mechanical eye of the photographic machine, however, along with the impossibility for any activity to be artistic by default. But despite Ruskin’s defiance towards photography, it does not imply that only drawing and painting can lead to an artistic result; since the same mechanical foundation serves as the basis for drawing and for photography, then the same inspiration or instinct could elevate either activity—and beyond that, the same reasoning could be transferred to any and all activities with a pretence to the artistic.

18As for what precisely makes a creation a piece of art, hints are to be found through all of Ruskin’s works, for instance in Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, Elements of Drawing, or in various letters. True artists create their work after Nature (‘young artists . . . should go to Nature, . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’; Modern Painters, vol. I, pt. II, sec. VI [Cook and Wedderburn, III, 624]). They should however control the modalities of their creation, without abandoning themselves to sensation (the first order of poets, described as ‘men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly’; Modern Painters, vol. III, pt. IV, chap. XII [Cook and Wedderburn, V, 210]). Their art is issued from an inseparable union of body and mind, inspiration and soul guiding the technical and mechanical (‘the moment that inner part of the man [of which body parts] are all the mere servants and instruments . . . stands forth . . . then the work becomes art indeed’; Stones of Venice, vol. III, chap. IV [Cook and Wedderburn, XI, 202-3]). Finally, as far as representation of Nature is concerned, truth to vision is of the utmost importance—including respecting the deficiencies of vision that light or distance can incur (‘A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances, continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts’; Elements of Drawing, Letter II [Cook and Wedderburn, XV, 105]).

19These are elements that Ruskin uses as part of his method in Elements of Drawing, inviting readers to adapt lines, tints, or object represented based on what the eye can see, and so based on how distance, light, or the position of the eye itself in relation to the object can influence perception. Despite the ambiguous advice given in Modern Painters to ‘selec[t] nothing’, this practice implies a form of selection: rather than representing what the mind knows to be true, the ideal artist should represent what the eye experiences to be true—the selection process being the simple result of physics and optics.

20Although Ruskin does not acknowledge it, this is also what he did himself through daguerreotypes, for example in his famous comparison between a sketch and a photograph of the Katzenturm in Fribourg, in Modern Painters, vol. V, part V, chap. II (Cook and Wedderburn, VI, 46). Comparing the two representations he himself produced, he claims that his sketch of the tower expresses a higher veracity than his photograph, because of its more accurate representation of how the walls and the tower follow the topographical curve of the mountain. However, the daguerreotype also expresses a higher veracity on some elements. The game of light and shadow is more accurately represented in it than in the sketch, which downplays the high-contrast lighting typical of mountainous landscapes. The strength of the tower and the wall, which Ruskin himself praises in the same passage, is more visible in the photograph’s solid perspective than in Ruskin’s hasty sketch. Even the curve of the mountain itself is rendered in the daguerreotype, by the choice made to treat only part of the plate and so to create an ovoid picture which underlines the run of the wall.

Arranged Veracity

21Although the characteristics of these images are a matter of accuracy rather than true artistry, photography—even in Ruskin’s time and circles—still follows the ideals he set out. One of the strongest examples of this is the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, to whom Ruskin wrote in 1868 that his main interest was with ‘the possibility of wresting luminous decomposition which literally paints with sunlight—no chemist has yet succeeded in doing this’ (Cook and Wedderburn, XXXVII, 734). Once again obsessed with light and its effect, Ruskin expresses his ambition to see art focus less on technical precision and more on an accurate rendering of lighting and its impact on lines—the phrase ‘luminous decomposition’ being understood here as an echo of the overexposure and haze described in Elements of Drawing.

22However, this is exactly what Cameron does in her photographs, along with what she was criticized for, critics attacking her alleged misuse of the lens (Springer and Weiss 10). La Madonna Aspettante/Yet a little while (Springer and Weiss 37) for instance displays this effect of light, and reinforces it by contrasting overexposure on one part of the composition (the Madonna’s forehead, where light almost erases the limit between hair and skin) and underexposure in another (her arm and chest, lost in shadows), the Child sitting in a more balanced lighting. She Walks in Beauty (Springer and Weiss 94–95) also relies on overexposure, using the brightness of the central figure and the contrast with its sombre background to make the main character a heavenly vision. The technical medium of photography is used here in quite a Ruskinian way: the optical effect of light is controlled in order both to produce an image that relies on mechanical capture of reality and to stray from that reality, representing through the photograph itself the otherworldly dimension of the woman in Byron’s eponymous poem.

23Although this process primarily affects visual representation, poetry presents a similarly artificial rendering of reality, but with a less obvious reliance on mechanical perception; and Pre-Raphaelite poetry, built on the same Ruskinian basis as Pre-Raphaelite painting, obeys similar laws. In both cases, truth to Nature implies a mode of representation that is affected by physical elements, the final result being more a visualization of these effects than an absolute truth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s collection A Trip to Paris and Belgium, for instance, uses the same process of summary representation of landscape elements, as in ‘On the Road to Waterloo’:

It is grey tingling azure overhead
With silver drift. Beneath, where from the green
The trees are reared, the distance stands between
At peace  . . .

Where the waters run
They have the sky sunk into them—a bath
Of still blue heat; and in their flow, at whiles,
There is a blinding vortex of the sun. (McGann 358, l. 1–4, 11–14)

24Following the advice formulated by Ruskin of privileging changes of tint to represent the effect of light and distance, rather than trying against all hopes to reproduce all details, Rossetti focuses here only on the raised pieces of the scenery. What the text highlights is the salient elements of the landscape, and the way in which they are perceived—the final image of the sky reflected in a stream being the climax of such an effort, with reflection becoming a full combination of sky and water, interrupted only by the ‘blinding vortex of the sun’.

Political Innocence: Art and the Universal

25The transferability of principles, however, is not enough to make photography an art of the same standing as painting (in tints or words). Among the spectrum of requirements mentioned by Ruskin for art to exist, some of which we listed earlier, the hearty commitment to an artistic endeavour that would go beyond the simple technical feat stands out. It is mentioned several times in Modern Painters, it underlies most of The Stones of Venice, and Elements of Drawing often hints at it: a true artist must have a sincere and complete approach to art, but this art must also represent a complete investment of body and soul—that is to say, in Ruskin’s opinion, the entirety of the artist, who ‘is made up of both: they are to be raised and glorified together, and all art is an expression of the one by and through the other’ (Cook and Wedderburn, XI, 203). This is the next, and most significant, step in the creative process, as it reduces the artistic legitimacy of an endeavour that would only rely on the technical.

26Ruskin’s fundamentals of drawing, and the basic method of photography as well, can be reduced to a mere reproduction of the world. In the process of representation, some powers of combination are involved, some selection is implied by the obedience to laws of physics, and some artifice is introduced, the result being that the drawing, painting, or photograph is a mechanized, artificial, and subjective view of its object. As such, it reduces the world to its mere existence, stripping all meaning away from the phenomena that are the objects painted, drawn, or photographed; this is especially true of photography, according to Ruskin, who sees the mechanized eye of the camera as an echo of the dehumanizing mechanism of Victorian liberalism.

27Such a defiance is not limited to a thinker who could be seen (and was, on quite a lot of points) a reactionary, stubbornly going against the grain of the time. The same idea, between pessimistic analysis and cautious distrust, can be found in Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s works on photography, both of which insist on the mechanical dimension of the craft. The former sees the increased reproducibility implied by photographs as a way to destroy the aura of objects represented, meaning a way to extract them from the ritualized space and time from which they erupt (Benjamin 1972, 21; Benjamin 1931, 39–42): whether natural or artificial, the objects whose image is reproduced lose their sacredness and their meaning.

28Barthes is slightly more down to earth and more sombre, focusing mostly on the link between photography, life, and death. He distinguishes between studium (a sort of field, or sector, to which the object represented belongs) and punctum (that je ne sais quoi in the photograph that makes it interesting), insisting that most pictures lack punctum and are simple examples of studium (Barthes 47–49); but he subsumes these two notions to a global vision of photography as a killing of the subject, who becomes an object, fixed and transfixed by the photographic process (Barthes 30).

29Both theories boil down to the same Ruskin-echoing idea: photography, by changing living gaze into a mechanism and reproduction into immobilisation, bears the risk of destroying what it represents—or abstracting it too much. It also implies a possible deficiency of photography: its impossibility to be anything other than a report of what happened at some point, its inability to move beyond representation and include beauty or meaning. However, it all depends on what can be considered ‘meaning’.

Photography and Meaning

30Ruskin’s own use of photography is not without meaning: Elements of Drawing is replete with invitations to look at photographic reproductions of works by Rubens, Titian, Turner, and other great masters, a process he also used when teaching at the Oxford School of Drawing and the Working Men’s College. Alongside engravings, photographs are a way for master and student alike to have easy access to paintings scattered throughout Europe, out of reach, or locked in private collections. One could argue that photographs like that of Bellini’s The Virgin, with St George and St Catherine, currently held in the Ashmolean Museum, is nothing but a representation of an object—it could even be argued that the photograph destroys the sacred aura of a painting meant to be devotional. But in the context of Ruskin’s work as a teacher and on the background of his political tendencies, such a photograph is not a destructive and meaningless reproduction: it is an intellectual and moral ladder, making accessible to sometimes underprivileged students the beauty that Ruskin sees as characteristic of a more noble age.

31Art in Ruskin’s theory is never neutral. Be it architecture, painting, poetry, or, in a more ambiguous way, photography, any artistic endeavour stands for the moral state of a nation and a people. When reproducing works of art, using photography implies at least some degree of faith in the capacity of the photographic process to respect the moral value of the original; indeed, the purpose being to get students of art familiar with true beauty and art, the choice of photographic reproduction means the permanence of this accessibility. This choice could also reflect an even deeper, more unconscious meaning, connected to the representative quality of the image: by re-presenting the painting, by showing it anew, the photograph displaces it. This displacement can be accompanied by a practical or pedagogical reframing (focusing on how a limb is drawn, on how foliage is arranged), and deconstructs the act of seeing works of art in two ways: by extracting it from its usual milieu of museums and galleries, and by focusing on specific elements that will help the student go from technical reproduction to aesthetic achievement. The same could be said of all of Ruskin’s lessons in drawing, since all of it is based on relearning how to see, casting a new light on nature, and building a new sense of vision.

Preservative Photography

32There is another political purpose of photography and drawing or painting, which unites mechanical representation of works of art and aesthetic rendition of landscapes; and Ruskin’s use of Bellini unwittingly stresses this aspect. His photograph made the painting The Virgin, with St George and St Catherine accessible to his students—but also to us, as the painting has been ‘lost sight of’ (Cook and Wedderburn XXI, 13). This could even be a semi-conscious effort from Ruskin, who was painfully aware of the vulnerability of artworks: Turner’s drawing of the river Greta near Brignall, destroyed in a fire in the 1840s, remains visible and accessible only through an engraving by Samuel Rawle which is also part of the educational series to which the Bellini photograph belongs.

33In both cases, the mechanical serves a higher purpose: its productions, photograph or engraving, are not mere reproductions of images, empty and purely deictic; they have become the only testimony of a lost piece of beauty. It is true that Ruskin makes a difference between this process and art, both in private letters and in public work—Harvey quotes a letter to W. H. Harrison in which Ruskin acknowledges the conservative power of the daguerreotype, while still fearing its effect on art (Harvey 26). But a photograph or an engraving which preserves lost artworks can be seen as becoming less of a meaningless deictic entity and more of a reincarnation, picking up the original object’s sacred aura, disrupting the destruction feared by Benjamin (Benjamin 1931, 41–42; Benjamin 1972, 15–17), and eventually serving as an essential basis for preservation (Bergera and Otero-Pailos).

34Even the crystallization of a moment that photography creates is not necessarily a way to destroy the life of Nature. Photography lacks the artist’s gesture, and the attempt at echoing the movement of life through the pencil, the brush, or the chisel—that movement which Ruskin asks students to strive towards, in Elements of Drawing; but repeated photographs, with their ability to reproduce details, can capture movement on a larger timescale. The result, in Ruskin’s approach to the craft, is the use of mechanical reproduction to understand how landscape changes and evolves, as Suzanne Fagence Cooper notes (Fagence Cooper 102). This in turn leads to art—including photography—being used to preserve the environment, or at least try to raise awareness about it in the way Wordsworth’s poetry helped shelter the Lake District. Part of the potential that photography holds for ecological preservation comes from its making possible the study of geology and biology by a fundamental trustworthiness of its process (Green-Lewis 45), despite challenges that arose in other branches (Tucker 60–84); but part also comes from its resemblance with drawing: the redefinition of the act of vision leads to a more acute attention being given to the landscape, Ruskin himself exemplifying this visual attention (Fagence Cooper 158 sqq.).

Details, Meaning, and the Objectification of Things

35Preservation often implies attention and faithfulness to detail: Bellini’s painting, Turner’s drawing, the spires of Venice, and the glaciers of Chamonix cannot truly be preserved by the artificial eye of the camera—or the natural hand of the painter—if the details that make them significant disappear. The daguerreotype of Katzenturm and its sketch might both be incomplete in their own ways, but both also give away more details, and reconstruct the tower better than an impressionist picturing that would only be concerned with the general effect, and not with the form that supports it.

36However the basic innocence of the eye is also supposed to make accessible, underneath the flow of details, what Nathalie Prizel defines as ‘an ideal of relational looking’ (Prizel 2015, 434): the endless catalogue of details, which Mayhew both criticizes in Pre-Raphaelite painting and indulges in when describing society, is not enough on its own to establish political action and to give meaning to art. The effect and general impact of the scene depicted on the eye is what will make people want to save the old monuments; what will save them is the details, preserving the craft of centuries. The risk, which is increased in photography by its ambiguous relation to death, is that the object becomes reduced to its image—abstracted beyond recognition.

37Another danger lies in the very idea of art being meaningful. A necessity for the reproduction, be it mechanical or manual, to have a purpose and an intent, implies either that beauty must always be meaningful, or that no beauty can be self-sufficient. Landscapes, monuments, paintings are for Ruskin signs of beauty, of a specific relation to God, of the moral state of a civilisation. The photograph either takes up this meaning, imitating the original object, or means death (for Barthes), or destruction (for Benjamin). Even the idea that photography would be vision reduced to its most mechanical form, the result a purely deictic imitation of what is pictured, does not stand: in this form, as is often made explicit by Ruskin, the photograph still represents both an object and a form of decadence of art and civilisation. The vital energy that Ruskin identifies as an essential component of art disappears under the pressure of all these external meanings, and part of this disappearance is even due to Ruskin’s own conception of the world as a reflection of divine breath.

38On the other side of the relational spectrum, D. G. Rossetti’s work provides an alternative: poetry, painting, drawing, even photography can follow another path, that of the ‘poetry of nonstatement’ (Riede). This theory presents some aspect of poetry (or what it represents) as being empty of meaning, especially spiritual. The result could be a form of dereliction, leading to despair and nihilism; but it can also be construed as a way to reinject value into the world itself: the leaf painted after Ruskin’s instructions has beauty because of its being a pure object, the monument photographed has beauty regardless of the value of the photograph for preservation. If untainted by any fetishization of images, such an approach could even achieve more than Ruskin’s theory, because it uses his insistence on innocence and on the simplicity of vision to create a new, self-contained art.

Conclusion

39Ironically but unsurprisingly, the question of photography as a potential Ruskinian art is a matter of vision: vision of photography and photographs, but also of the artistic process and of the relation works of art bear to the world. While leaving some space for photography to gain intrinsic value, however, Ruskin’s theory prevents it from reaching full artistic status. The deictic dimension of photographs becomes mixed with the equally deictic dimension of truly representative art, while a more artificialized staging strays away from the world and its truth. The matter of his ambivalence on the status of photography might be unsolvable without taking into account the entirety of Victorian scientific and artistic discourse on this new technology—a discourse which Ruskin had to be in contact with, because it informed the reception of the cities he loved and the painters he supported. Photography might remain, for the author of Modern Painters, ‘a mechanic substitute for the picture in the same way that he considers cast iron an inferior replacement for sculpture’ (Smith 10), and lack the utmost artistic value of traditional art; but the similarities between Ruskin’s innocent vision and the photographic apparatus’ mechanical eye are such that photography could, by following Ruskin’s vision, remain at least a crucial adjuvant in the preservation of beauty and in its facilitation—giving at least a solution to the Ruskinian ambivalence by considering photography as a saviour because of its mechanical dimension, and not in spite of it.

40Rather than the transcendental value that Ruskin seems to place in art, one could thus turn to a more immanent power, animating representation in the same way that it animates the world, and making the final artistic product an alternate microcosm which echoes the world, but has its own claim to art. In the same way as a practical, non-conceptual, hands-on approach to art could save British painting from a Reynoldsian rut, the practical, mechanical, finger-on approach of the photographic apparatus could inject a physical relation to the world back in the quest for beauty. The ability of photography to participate in the quest for non-deictic beauty is not hypothetical; it has been made clear by the rise of aesthetic photography after (and starting with) Cameron’s innovations—to the point where the production of the camera obscura can reach the same Bakhtinian level of autonomy as all painting or poetry: in the words of Japanese photographer Shiga Lieko, in a comment on her series Human Spring: ‘photography has created its own time and space, as if resisting the inescapable structure of time, of past, present, and future, in which we live’.2

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Bibliographie

Amar, Pierre-Jean. L’ABCdaire de la photographie. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.

Barthes, Roland. La Chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

Benjamin, Walter. L’Œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique. 1972. Paris: Allia, 2007.

Benjamin, Walter. Petite histoire de la photographie. 1931. Paris: Allia, 2022.

Bergera, Iñaki and Jorge Otero-Pailos. ‘Editors’ Introduction: Photography and Preservation’. Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 10.2 (2013): iii–v.

Cook, E. T. and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. The Works of John Ruskin. 39 volumes. London: Allen, 1903.

Edwards, Steven. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2006.

Fagence Cooper, Suzanne. To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters. London: Quercus, 2019.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Göttingen: European Photography, 1984.

Gasquet, Lawrence. ‘“Why is it that a photograph always looks clear and sharp, — not at all like a Turner?” John Ruskin & Perceptual Aberration’. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 91 (Printemps 2020): en ligne; https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.7078

Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Harvey, Michael. ‘Ruskin and Photography’. Oxford Art Journal 7.2 (1984): 25–33.

Levine, Caroline. ‘Visual Labor: Ruskin’s Radical Realism’. Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000): 73–86.

McGann, Jerome, ed. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Collected Poetry and Prose. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.

Prizel, Natalie. ‘The Non-Taxonomical Mayhew’. Victorian Studies 57.3 (2015): 433–44.

Prizel, Natalie. Victorian Ethical Optics. Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies. Oxford: OUP, 2024.

Riede, David. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision. London: Cornell UP, 1983.

Smith, Lindsay. Victorian Photography, Painting, and Poetry. The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.

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Tucker, Jennifer. Nature Exposed. Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.

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Notes

1 These are only four men among a host of more discreet early practitioners and pioneers of photography; concise, but still more extensive, information on the history of photography can be found in Amar and Edwards.

2 Video interview available on https://forecast-platform.com/mentor/lieko-shiga/ (last seen 04.09.2024).

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Raphaël Rigal, « The Innocent and the Mechanical: Ruskin’s Pictorial and Photographic Eye »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 102 Automne | 2025, mis en ligne le 30 septembre 2025, consulté le 17 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/17387 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14v8j

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Auteur

Raphaël Rigal

Raphaël Rigal graduated from the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm in 2015, and defended a PhD thesis at Sorbonne Université in December 2020; his work, under the supervision of Pr. Pascal Aquien, focuses on ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites, and modernity’. His previously published papers (in Angles, Motifs, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens) deal with languages, identities, and matters of representation in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. He teaches English at Gustave Eiffel University in Champs-sur-Marne.
Diplômé de l’École Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm en 2015, Raphaël Rigal a soutenu une thèse en études anglophones à Sorbonne Université en Décembre 2020 ; son travail, sous la direction du Professeur Pascal Aquien, s’intitule « Dante Gabriel Rossetti, les Préraphaélites, et la modernité ». Il a publié des articles (dans Angles, Motifs, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens) sur les langues, les identités, et la question de la représentation dans la poésie préraphaélite. Il est PRAG à l’Université Gustave Eiffel (Champs-sur-Marne).

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