I’ve been meaning to study the correlation between Impressionism and photography for awhile. Today, I came across this interesting article (https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8863) and decided I needed to write more about Impressionism itself before exploring it in the context of photography.

My response to the question “does Impressionism mean anything?”:

The author highlights the argument that Impressionism means nothing – it’s purely pretty, its subject is light itself, it’s an empty stage devoid of characters or symbolism.

Well, maybe Impressionist paintings mean nothing because they’re snapshots that, without built-in symbolism, more closely resemble how we perceive the raw material of the world. Do you see nothing and feel nothing when, walking down the street, you see a smiling baby, or an ocean landscape? Or, for that matter, a bird with a french fry? No, rather, you see something, sometimes even divine reality, because it is you who is seeing it, understanding it, reacting to it, emoting, making associations, informing your conscience, and learning to live. Impressionism is the precursor to photography for a reason – the capturing of light at a very specific hour, the perfect shuttering of the lens at the right instant – make us all into momentologists. We can come to understand symbols, but we can only experience moments. Our souls are infinite, but we live in time. 

Impressionism places the task of meaning-making more heavily on the viewer than symbolist painting does. As does photography…as does looking out the window. Impressionism simply allows us to look out different windows, in the same way that travel does, gathering more primal matter up from the world around us.

That we, the viewer, become the subject by imbuing the painting with meaning, does not, however, mean that Impressionism is purely relativistic. 

We experience it as we experience the world – first, through our senses, and then, through our minds and souls. We blink upon the canvas and recognize the hand of its creator, as we do when we look upon the moonrise and know God.