Photography-thoughts of poet Charles Baudelaire

When speaking about the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Buddhadev Basu remarked, "Not only poetry, but painting too has been pierced by his arrow; artists like Redon, , and Matisse have created their works using the language of his poetry; and Redon, in his lonely and disregarded youth, gradually found his own path by transcending two poets, Dante and Baudelaire."

Baudelaire not only influenced art with his poetic genius—he dissected it, attempting to peer inside. Before him, few critics had ever approached art so deeply. Perhaps that is why he is called the father of modern art criticism. Even so, he never truly resolved his inner conflict regarding modernity before his death.

To him, the true artist is one who can capture the spirit of his own time. Through deep observation, the artist knows how to discover beauty in both the ordinary and the extraordinary. In his view, an artist is not merely an artist—but a philosopher as well.

In his poetry—and also as an art critic—he merged Romanticism with realism. At times, he even dissolved the traditional duality of the Classical and the Romantic. His unconventional stance as both poet and critic was rooted in a profound understanding of life. He tried to understand life beyond bookish knowledge and wrote honestly about what he grasped.

Baudelaire both welcomed modernity with open arms and simultaneously expressed concern about how it was making people machine-dependent. This concern is reflected in his 1859 essay “The Modern Public and Photography.” Among his critical works, this essay is especially unique and important. The questions he raised there are still relevant and thought-provoking today.

We must remember that this essay was written just two decades after the invention of the daguerreotype camera. At the time, cameras had not yet demonstrated their full potential; the concept of a “photographer” as an artist had not yet formed. The camera was still cautiously progressing with many limitations. At least until the 20th century, the camera was seen as a wondrous tool for replicating reality exactly.

At such a time, Baudelaire observed that people were starting to equate “art” with exact replicas of reality. Through this essay, he mainly expressed his dismay. Nearly everyone was rushing to replicate visible scenes with the help of the camera; but to Baudelaire, a copy of reality was not art. Art, he believed, emerged not from the external world, but from the inner world of the mind—where imagination is free. For him, imagination was “the queen of the faculties.”

He stated clearly that photography was drawing people away from the world of imagination. Without the colors of imagination, no creation can rise to the level of true art. He suggested this not only in essays, but also in his poems:

‘That is the black picture that in a dream one night
I saw unfold before my penetrating eyes.’
Or,
‘There are some who have never known their Idol
And those sculptors, damned and branded with shame,
Who are always hammering their brows and their breasts’

This does not mean that Baudelaire rejected photography altogether. According to him, photography can be seen as a mirror of memory - it cannot be considered a mirror of art. He says, people are being fascinated by seeing their own face on the camera plate like Narcissus (Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate). However, that picture is not a work of art. Photography cannot take the place of art. Photography can be useful to the scientist, the tourist or the researcher; but if we put it in the place of art, it will destroy art,

‘Let it (photography) hasten to enrich the tourist’s album... the botanist’s; let it reproduce those precious but fragile things...If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether.’

Because, photography does not mix with imagination, it is merely a replica of reality. The main theme of the article under discussion is that imagination is the greatest characteristic of humans, without which art cannot be truly created. For him, the definition of reality is also different, realism is the portrayal of the inner world of our imagination and dreams.

We see a reflection of Baudelaire's thoughts on photography in his successor, the poet Rabindranath Tagore. A few years before his death, the world poet said about the camera, 'We can call the camera of a photograph an artificial eye. This camera sees very clearly; but it does not see completely, it does not see what is current, it does not see what cannot be seen. Therefore, it can be said that the camera sees blindly. Since the entire human being is behind the living eye, no matter how incomplete its vision is for any partial need, it is more complete in the field of human use with humans. We are grateful to God that He did not give us cameras instead of eyes.'

However, Baudelaire was much more ruthless towards photography than Rabindranath Tagore. According to him, photography (at that time) was adopted by the unsuccessful and lazy,
'The photographic industry became the refuge of all failed painters-with too little talent, or too lazy to complete their studies.'

However, he seems to have been somewhat skeptical about his own statement. He says that he knows that he will be told that the tendency to copy is actually possessed by stupid people. A genuine artist or a true art lover knows the difference between art and technology; but Baudelaire's fear is that 'it is an indisputable and irresistible law that the artist acts upon the public, that the public reacts on the artist.' (It is an indisputable and irresistible law that the artist acts upon the public, that the public reacts on the artist.) If the artist continues to copy reality as 'art', then his influence is bound to fall on society. On the other hand, if society starts to accept the copy as 'art', then the artist may also be influenced by that intention. Where is Baudelaire's fault! He saw this happen in his time,

‘More and more, as each day goes by, art is losing in self-respect, is prostrating itself before external reality, and the painter is becoming more and more inclined to paint, not what he dreams, but what he sees.’

Baudelaire’s statements on photography might seem harsh—but they are not untrue. More than 150 years after the essay was written, we still see cameras being used mainly to replicate objects, people, and scenes. There’s a striking lack of effort to use this “magic box” to invent true art. Baudelaire wasn’t putting the camera on trial—he was questioning the creativity of the human mind behind it. That question remains relevant today.

References:
- Charles Baudelaire: His Poetry – Buddhadeva Bose
- Small and Big (Chhoto o Boro), Kalantar, 1344 – Rabindranath Tagore
- The Flowers of Evil / Les Fleurs du Mal – Translated by William Aggeler
- The Painter of Modern Life – Charles Baudelaire (1863)
- The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers – T.J. Clark
- Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Modernity – in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire
- The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays – Trans. & Ed. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon Press)
- Baudelaire’s World – Rosemary Lloyd, Cornell University Press, 2002