Learning Photography From Monet

Inspiration from… Pollution?

Back before the Covid shit hit the fan, when the world still felt normal, I had the opportunity to visit the Denver Art Museum’s traveling exhibit of Monet paintings. Monet was an extraordinary artist. He bucked the traditions of his time, purposely refusing to paint the world in the way it was. Instead, he interpreted it the way it felt. It was a novel approach to art, and one that earned him derision from his peers.

Known for silky scenes of water and washes of color, most of Monet’s paintings look like they are covered in a layer of sheer gauze. Or, more accurately, as if they are viewed through haze or fog. That, it turns out, is very close to the truth.

The classic, foggy look of Monet, particularly his paintings of London and Paris, is actually due to the very real smog that engulfed those cities during the industrial revolution in which he worked.

The result is an array of unique paintings. Rather than avoiding, obscuring, or painting around the smoggy reality of his world, Monet embraced it, even emphasized it.

Many of his works are the absolute epitome of bad light. Paintings depict harsh sunshine filtered through a red/yellow haze… SMOG for gods’ sake.

Why then, as photographers, do we do our best to avoid such situations?

Maybe it’s the trending sensibilities of outdoor and nature photography; our wish to portray nature romantically, as pristine, wild, and clean, even if that diverges far from reality (see the post-script). Monet emphasized his industrial existence while we try to tidy our’s up. Our view of the world is no more real than Monet’s, we’ve just gone to the opposite extreme.

That’s unfortunate. As Monet showed, there is incredible beauty in the harshest conditions. Take this painting:

It’s part of his series from London’s River Thames. This one is entitled, simply, “Charing Cross Bridge”. Can you imagine what this must have looked like in person? The morning light, bright, and refracting off the smog, the thick haze all but obscuring the not-so-distant bridge and single boat on the misty river.

It had to have been ugly. Probably smelly. Our modern day sensibility, ironically, obscures our own perception of beauty. But Monet saw it. Not only did he see it, he spent hours painting it! And not just in this scene, but in many others as well, he embraced the industrial London stench to find something unique, and yes, beautiful.

It would take a rare photographer these days to be inspired by such a scene.

Hot Light

But it goes beyond the smog of London and Paris. Monet looked to more scenes that modern photographers would find uncomfortable. Harsh mid-day light for one.

Monet worked with texture. In his paintings of mid-day light he added thick streaks of paint to the brushwork on the grasses. Properly lit, those elevated strips of dried paint provide not just implied shadows, but ACTUAL shadows. I’m certain Monet realized this and used it to his advantage.

The more interesting question is why did he paint mid-day light at all? Photographers frequently dismiss that bright, overhead sun, as “bad”. It’s contrasty, direct, and washes out color. As an artist working with paint and brush, Monet could easily have interpreted the scene in any way he liked. He could have chosen the golden hour after dawn, the blue hour at dusk, or even the deep azure light of night. But he didn’t. He chose mid-day.

It wasn’t an accident of circumstance. Monet viewed his opportunity to paint a bit like a photographer sees a scene, as ephemeral:

“You have to know how to seize just the right moment in a landscape instantaneously,

because that particular moment will never come again,

and you’re always wondering if the impression you got was truthful.”

– Claude Monet

Monet realized, and photographers have mostly forgotten, that mid-day light is still beautiful. In its strong shadows, bright sun tells a story of summer: heat, deep shade, grasshoppers chattering on waxy wings, and of the hum of cicadas vibrating their tymbals from the trees.

Monet knew mid-day light offered more than blown out highlights. Why as photographers have we forgotten?

Of course he saw what many of us would have appreciated as well: reflections, water-lilies afloat on the surface of a pond, the arc of a bridge over the water. But he didn’t limit his vision to classic beauty. He saw, in the ugliness of the world, moments of sublime appeal.

I think it’s time we, as photographers, expand our vision.

Post-script:

While the air most of us breathe is, gratefully, cleaner than that of the Industrial Revolution of the early 1900s, our world is also much tamer, less wild, and far more endangered. Landscape and outdoor photographers flock to places we view as pristine. There are perhaps 10-15 locations that epitomize the modern vision of the classic wild landscape (think Yosemite, Horseshoe Bend, Denali from Wonder Lake, Skogofass Waterfall, the Tetons over the Snake, etc.). Photographers come from all over the world to shoot these locales, despite (or maybe because of) the fact these locations have been photographed a million times before. Meanwhile, other wild places, less well known, are devoured by the insatiable appetite of exploitation.

Increasingly, our landscape photographs are a myth. A pretty, convenient, comfortable, myth. They make us feel good. But it’s a lie.

I don’t wonder if landscape photographs that depict (falsely) wild nature, don’t lure us into a sense of complacency. We see that image, with its air of pristine beauty, and think “everything is just fine”. When it’s not. It’s not just fine.

We like to think that our images work as PR for natural landscapes (I know I do), but not if we only repeat what has been done before. We need to expand from these repetitive scenes, to work those little photographed places: our local open spaces threatened by a housing development, our public lands eyed by greedy mining companies and fracking rigs, and that overlooked patch of brush, that may not look like much, but holds your local pair of breeding Robins.

I encourage you to be a photographic advocate for your patch. Share whatever wildness remains to you, and use your images to speak up, not just for the last big wild places, but your place, your home, your own bit of feral nature.