The discussion "detachment" and possibly staged photographs in the Times article brings to mind the book I just finished reading, The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Both the author and his protagonist are war photographers and the book is a discussion on whether photographs can tell the truth or whether that can only be achieved by paintings. (Some truths cannot be captured in 1/125th of a second. "Photographs remind painting of what it should never do while a painting reminds photography of what it was capable of suggesting but not achieving.")
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this discovery.
It seems to me that painting is no more or less "objective" than photography--for one thing, the painter is of course stopping the action at the painterly moment-just as the photographer is when she shoots. And for the second, it's even more subjective than photography because the painter's biases are even more a part of the rendering of the scene chosen by the painter to depict.
The main character debates this point with himself and with the victim of one of his war photos in the book. It's an interesting philosophical discussion. The subject of the photo (The Face of Defeat) was a Croatian (this was during the Bosnian war) and because the photograph went around the world, the man suffered greatly in the aftermath. He was tortured, his family brutalized and murdered. It's an interesting book by one of my favorite authors (he also wrote The Club Dumas, among others).
Not sure I get the context of the discussion vis a vis photography vs painting. Photography is more immediate surely so his likeness would be distributed more widely via newspaper than if his portrait had been painted, photographed, and then distributed the same way. Also, in paintings, most of the subjects are posing and or more likely not in fact be the "originals" --eg in a war picture.
The photographer decides after a lifetime of taking pictures of war that the only way for him to tell the truth about war is through a painting. He moves into an aged watchtower and uses the circular inner walls as his canvas for a panoramic mural that distills his understanding of war. It covers millennia of images from Troy to the present.
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It will be interesting to see what comes out of this discovery.
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Photography is more immediate surely so his likeness would be distributed more widely via newspaper than if his portrait had been painted, photographed, and then distributed the same way. Also, in paintings, most of the subjects are posing and or more likely not in fact be the "originals" --eg in a war picture.
I loved The Club Dumas.
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