Picasso and Photography

This article was originally published on February 11, 2013

Until I had read Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror by Anne Baldassari, curator of the photographic archives at the Musee Picasso in Paris, I had not realized the extent of the artist's involvement with the medium. I had over the years seen some of his self-portraits, which seemed extremely self-conscious, and a few photos of sitters from which the artist had worked while creating their portraits, but I had not appreciated the significance of these as they related to Picasso's work methods. In her study, though, Ms. Baldassari painstakingly chronicles Picasso's use of photography throughout his career and demonstrates that black & white photography was essential to his artistic vision.

If there was any doubt regarding the extent of the importance which Picasso attached to photography, it is dispelled by the following quote from the book's Introduction:

"Sometime around 1910, Picasso reported declared, under the influence of hashish, 'I've discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I've nothing else to learn.'"

It should come as no surprise that an artist of Picasso's genius should prove an excellent photographer. If nothing else, The Dark Mirror would be worth acquiring simply for its wealth of imagery. I know of no other publication where such a comprehensive collection of the artist's photography has been gathered together, let alone placed side by side with the artworks with which they correspond. Particularly revealing is Picasso's photo of the Spanish village Horta de Ebro placed side by side with his 1909 cubist painting of the same subject.

Many of the photos shown in The Dark Mirror were not taken by Picasso himself. He had a huge collection of souvenir postcards which he used as sources. The most controversial of these are a series of semi-nude photos of African women which today would be regarded as clearly exploitative. Baldassari's attempt to link these to the famous 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is intriguing if not entirely convincing.

At the heart of Baldassari's thesis is the belief that the use of monochromatic images served as a reductive agent that permitted Picasso to better visualize the components of his work without the distractions the use of color otherwise entailed. This is particularly true of a series of photos from 1912 documenting wall arrangements of papiers colles in his Boulevard Raspail studio. 

Coincidentally attesting to the importance of the monochromatic to Picasso's vision is a recently closed exhibit at the Guggenheim aptly entitled Picasso Black & White. Significantly, the description of the exhibit on the museum's website states:

"Claiming that color weakens, Pablo Picasso purged it from his work in order to highlight the formal structure and autonomy of form inherent in his art. His repeated minimal palette correlates to his obsessive interest in line and form, drawing, and monochromatic and tonal values, while developing a complex language of pictorial and sculptural signs."

As Baldassari notes repeatedly, photography was to Picasso a "dark mirror" in the sense that he was able, through its use, to see more clearly the form underlying his work.