WORSHIPERS OF THE SUN

AFTER CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

2013

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Pigment print on fine art paper

Print size : 77,8 x 15,5 cm ; with frame :  87,5 x 25 x 4 cm

[…] « During this lamentable period, a new industry arose which contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the di­vine in the French mind. The idolatrous mob demanded an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature – that is perfectly understood. In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day Credo of the sophisticated, above all in France (and I do not think that anyone at all would dare to state the contrary), is this: “I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good rea­sons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature (a timid and dis­sident sect would wish to exclude the more repellent ob­jects of nature, such as skeletons or chamber-pots). Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of Art.” A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: “Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing:’ From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A mad­ness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers. »

Charles Baudelaire, « The Modern Public and Photography », Salon de 1859; translation from Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art. Jonathan Mayne editor and translator.  London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1955.