Monday, September 15, 2008
Photographing The Unicorn Tapestries
Richard Preston's article about the attempt to photographically capture the Unicorn Tapestries resolves to the real issue. The issue is that an image is not a cargo of data.
When I looked at [the tapestries], each flower and plant, each animal, each human face took on a character of its own. The tapestries were full of velvety pools and shimmering surfaces, alive with color and detail. In the fence that surrounds the captive unicorn, tarnished silver, mixed with gold, gleamed in the grain of the wood. In comparison, the digital images, good and accurate as they were, had seemed flat. They had not captured the translucent landscape of the Unicorn tapestries, as the weft threads dive around the warp, or the way they seemed to open into a world beyond the walls of the room.
Many people would not be fully aware of the difference between the original and the photographic copy. They would focus on the impressive technological achievement of duplication. We are battered nearly insensate by pop culture crudeness, rendering our world simpler, more garish, less interesting, juicy, sexy, full to the brimming. It's not that the technology and sophisticated mathematics attempting to capture the tapestry images aren't themselves superb; it's just that those digital images are crude by comparison to the work of art. In other words, the soul of the art, its resonance, is lost in the digital translation.