Unfashionable views
Sir: Your contributor, J. W. M. Thompson ('Spectator's notebook', 16 May), quotes Sir Kenneth Clark as saying that photography has destroyed 'straightforward, naturalistic landscape painting'. It hasn't.
A landscape photograph is always un- satisfactory to the eye because the camera sees the world in the same way, as a one- eyed man. To those who are blessed with normal eyesight a photograph will always look wrong because it is wrong. An artist on the other hand puts on his canvas what he sees with both eyes, and this looks right and is satisfying to the viewer. This is why we hang pictures on walls instead of photo- graphs.
Canaletto and others made use of the camera obscura, which is why their paint- ings have the same air of unreality as that produced by a wide angle lens on a camera. The enormous foregrounds and tiny build- ings are typical, while the wealth of detail in the foregrounds such as coaches, carts, horses and people are only there because the vast empty space had to be filled with something.
To get the full impact of a good land- scape photograph you have to view it with one eye shut. The perspective then falls into place. Or, of course, you can use a stereo- scopic camera and view the pairs of photo- graphs with a proper stereo viewer. This produces the effect of actually walking right into the picture.
Photography as we know it today can never replace the landscape artist. Laser beam photography is another matter, but that is still in its infancy.
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