Painting is a zone photography will never occupy. The Lovis Corinth exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris neatly demonstrates what the defenders of the Bill Henson case can never evoke. The eminent art historian Roger Benjamin’s defensive invocation of the term “gestualism” will never meaningfully transfer from the material inventiveness of painting (the substantive reality of which – in, say, a painting such as Corinth’s Innocentia above – will always be an object as much as it is an image) to the pictorialist effects of a Henson. A painting is always a (material) construction of reality, even if the subject matter of the painterly images is not always representational. By contrast with a photograph, paintings and sculptures are always artefacts of the manipulation of matter, artefacts of the imagination, before they are images or representations. Hence the specific aesthetic pleasures of the Corinth exhibition.

Benjamin’s attribution of qualities of painterliness in photography do not shift the essential optical objectivity of the photographic engagement with the subject – the reality of the subject/camera/photographer/image/audience nexus will be present no matter what effects of print, scale, or framing context may be orchestrated by the photographer/artist. The photographer’s subject carries her identity with her when she leaves the studio in a way the painter’s subject never does. And Benjamin’s “whiff of the sublime” – surely an agency of a heavenly order – invokes an authority we thought photography was instrumental in eliminating, way back when.

(see the following link to The Australian news story that the NSW DPP will not recommend proceeding with charges against Henson)