Who said photography isn art

It is part of a line of nativity scenes that is as long as Christian art, and was hailed by one critic as the photographic equivalent of "the method of drawing employed by the great Italian masters". I Wait , , shows a child with angel's wings resting its chin on folded arms and wearing the bored expression that brings to mind the underwhelmed cherubs in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. Such photographs were not direct quotations from paintings, but they raised in the viewer's mind a string of associations that gave photography a historical hinterland.

If Cameron and contemporaries such as Oscar Rejlander and Roger Fenton who took numerous photographs of still-life compositions of fruit and flowers as well as his better known pictures of the Crimean war were keen that their photographs should reflect their own knowledge of art, the links went both ways.

In , Leonida Caldesi published a book of her photographs of paintings in the National Gallery, and her intended audience was not just the public but artists themselves, for whom the photographs were both more accurate and more affordable than engraved reproductions. By , thanks to Fenton's photographs, artists could study classical statues in their own studios.

It was perhaps in depicting the nude — such as Fenton's bestselling photograph of the discus thrower Discobolus — that photography could repay its debt to art. Hiring a life model was expensive, and engravings were a poor substitute. Delacroix was one artist who "experienced a feeling of revulsion, almost disgust, for their incorrectness, their mannerisms, and their lack of naturalness".

And in 19th-century Britain and France, when pornography was illegal, photographs of the nude were in demand from customers who had no artistic interests. When it came to landscape photography the new medium appeared just as the impressionists were beginning to work in the open air. Some commentators saw photography's real challenge to painting as lying in its ability to capture what the photographer and journalist William Stillman called in "the affidavits of nature to the facts on which art is based" — the random "natural combinations of scenery, exquisite gradation, and effects of sun and shade".

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Master the art of visual storytelling with our FREE video series on directing and filmmaking techniques. More and more people are flocking to the small screen to find daily entertainment. So how can you break put from the pack and get your idea onto the small screen? Skip to content. Photography definition in art Defining art Before we can answer is photography art?

Does photography count as art? Debunking why photography is not art Those on the opposing side in the is photography art debate rely on a few different arguments to make their case. Why photography is not art stance: it merely captures reality. A clear-cut example of photography as an artform. In this case, surrealism. What is photography in art?

The answer may be subjective. What is fine art photography if not candid images showcasing the horrors of war. In his book, Barthe formulated the idea of the 'punctum', the detail within a photograph that pricks the viewer with a woundlike sensation.

Like modernist accounts of photography, Camera Lucida suggested that photography had a unique nature that made it distinct from all other visual media. Movements included Fluxus s and Pop Art c. One of the most important modern artists to rely on photography in the creation of his images, was Andy Warhol ; see for instance his screenprints of photos of filmstars, like Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor.

Postmodernist Photography. A competing conceptualization of photography claims that it has no innate characteristics. Its identity is, it is argued, dependent upon the roles and applications ascribed to it. This theorization of photography belongs to the contemporary critique of modernism that is known as postmodernism. Note: see also: Postmodernist Art and Postmodernist Artists. The desire to once again see art as socially and politically engaged, rather than belonging to a realm of creative purity, led scholars back to the writings of Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher who was associated with the Frankfurt School in the s.

In claiming that a photographic copy destroyed the 'aura' of an original work of art, and that it was possible for the masses to enjoy art through this simulacrum, photography symbolized for Benjamin the possibility of a divestment of cultural, and ultimately political, power from the National Socialists. In the s, left-wing theorists began to reconceptualize the medium's history in terms of how photography has been implicated in the exercise of power. For power and nudity, see the work of Helmut Newton ; for gender issues, see the work of Nan Goldin b.

The notion of photographic objectivity was further undermined by the writings of those scholars and intellectuals, most notably Jean Baudrillard, who challenged the idea of a pre-existent reality that is merely captured or reflected by visual media. According to Baudrillard, imagery is the reality through which we come to know the world. Up to the s, photographic art was identified with iconic images from the 19th century and the early 20th century.

Today it is identified with works made in the last thirty-five or so years. The massive increase in the value of photographs is often cited as proof that photography has finally been accepted as art. Note: see also Most Expensive Paintings: Top This is not the first time, however, that photography has been identified as an art form. What does distinguish the present day from the past is that information, in whatever form, is now rarely conveyed without still or moving pictures: photography, in its digital form, is as much a modern wonder as was the daguerreotype in Note: see also Animation Art and Video Art.

Conclusion: Photography is Art. Cutting through some of the intellectual sagebrush, the present consensus appears to be that photographs capture a contrived or deliberate moment of reality, and it is this deliberateness that contains the artistic kernel.

It is immaterial that the photo can be replicated a thousand times, thus depriving the 'original' of its unique status. It is sufficient that no two photographers are likely to create an identical image. The artistic quality of a "pictorialist" image which is "created" in the dark room, so to speak, is even more assured.

The process of judging whether photography is art, reminds us that neither painting nor sculpture is as pure an art form as is sometimes supposed. Bronze sculpture can be cast and recast in a large number of copies; and our knowledge of Greek sculpture comes not from original Greek statues but from Roman copies. Furthermore, it has been estimated that as many as 1 in 10 paintings that hang in the best art museums , are copies not originals. At the end of the day, a camera along with a dark room and its processing chemicals, is not so very different from a painter's brushes and paints.

It remains no more than a set of tools with which a photographer tries to create an image: an image to stir our soul, in the way that images do. All rights reserved. Photographic Processes: Daguerreotypy, Photogenic Drawing When it was announced to the world in January that it was possible to capture the image seen in a camera obscura an aid to drawing that projected what the artist saw on to a surface from which he or she could copy their subject , it seemed that there were no limits to human ingenuity.

Art Photographs There are many thousands of important art photographs in public and private collections worldwide and yet the majority were not made with the art exhibition in mind. Photography on Paper In the s, daguerreotypy and calotypy the name that Talbot gave to his process after important refinements in both gave way to wet-collodion photography, a process based on the use of glass negatives for the production of paper images.

Opposition to Photography as an Art The popularization of photography in the mid 19th century led to a shift in attitudes towards the medium. Pictorialism It was not until the end of the 19th century, however, that subjectivity in photography gained a broader cultural legitimacy.

Straight Photography The figure most closely associated with the promotion of art photography at this time was Alfred Stieglitz , a New Yorker with close connections to Europe. Humanist Photography Another important development that had its roots in France during the interwar years is humanist photography.

Similar to the impact the printing press had on the distribution of literature, photography, since its origin, generated a revolution in the art world. The unpredictable consequences photography brought to art, and society in general, can be compared to how, although the printing press was thought mainly for facilitating the reproduction of bibles and manuscripts, the impact it had in the distribution of ideas across social classes and borders could not have been anticipated.

Photography has changed the way we perceive the world. Modern history has been redefined thanks to photojournalism alone; a single image has had a bigger impact in describing an event than the number of words used to describe it. In terms of art, the world of painting was hugely revolutionized, with the dual effect of forcing the medium to move in new directions as well as providing it with new tools. The question whether photography should be considered art or not was an ongoing debate in the decades following its discovery.

It reflected a search for ways to fit a mechanical medium into the traditional expressive artistic forms. Several approaches were taken to this end, while some, by means of a camera, emulated the subjects and styles of traditional "high" art; others used it to benefit their observation and as a source of new ideas and information. The reproduction of art objects was also a key development in the use of photography; it had a profound effect on changing the visual culture of society and making art accessible to the general public, changing its perception, notion and knowledge of art, and appreciation of beauty.

Moreover, it made possible the establishment of art history as a serious discipline. From the ongoing discussions, heated articles and conflicting statements, particularly in France and England, over the role of photography in art, three main positions emerged regarding the potential of photography as an art form. The simplest argument, supported by many painters and a section of the public, was that since photography was a mechanical device that involved physical and chemical procedures instead of human hand and spirit, it shouldn't be considered an art form; they believed camera images had more in common with fabrics produced by machinery in a mill than with handmade work created by inspiration.

A last group believed that photography was comparable to etching or lithography, and therefore could be used to create just as valid works of art, plus it could be a beneficial influence on the arts as well as general culture. The French influential critic and poet Baudelaire believed that lazy and uncreative painters would turn to photography.

He had as strong belief in art as an imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas and dreams, and regarded photography as "a very humble servant of art and science, like printing and stenography" - a medium largely unable to transcend "external reality.