"Celebrating 150 Years of Photography," The World & I, Aug. 1989, pp. 202-07.

150 Years of Photographic Art

by Jason Edward Kaufman

While the history of photography is on the one hand the history of its technological development, it is also the story of its practitioners' struggle to gain for their medium the prestige accorded fine art. Photography was born of science and art, and its identity is linked to both disciplines. When the daguerrotype was brought before the French legislature in 1839, its advocates envisioned artists able to "surpass the most accomplished painters in fidelity of detail and true reproduction of the local atmosphere." However, once the initial wonderment subsided, the newest child of the industrial revolution was swiftly put to utilitarian and commercial use, accomplishing mechanically what was formerly done manually, providing a rapid and inexpensive means of recording the appearances of persons, topographical views, archaeological sites, botanical specimens, and man-made structures, and for replicating hand-made prints.

Notwithstanding, photography seemed predestined to be closely associated with painting. Its inventors were not only scientists, but artists intent on compensating for their inability to draw well. Their lenses were ground according to the demands of picturemaking. The Englishman William Henry Fox-Talbot, who pioneered a paper negative process ("calotype") at virtually the same time the Frenchmen Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced their polished-silver technique ("daguerrotype"), called one of his procedures "photogenic drawing," and titled his album of 1844-46, The Pencil of Nature.

Many would argue that photography induced painters to pursue abstract and personal styles as a way to distinguish their art from the patently photographic. In fact, photography was a tremendous stimulus to realism. Striving for naturalistic accuracy, painters consulted photographic studies from nature, employing to varying degrees material thus acquired. A list of prominent examples includes Ingres' portraits, which so conspicuously resemble large-scale daguerrotypes. Delacroix based a number of his figures on photographs, and himself experimented in several modes of photography, regretting that "such a wonderful invention" had not been made earlier in his career. Courbet and Millet collected photographs for reference in painting light and shading, and as great a landmark as Manet's Olympia (1865) has been shown, by Gerald Needham, to have been derived from a pornographic photograph of the period. Degas copied locomotion studies by Edweard Muybridge in order to depict the actual position of a horse's legs in full gallop. Eakins is known to have taken hundreds of photographs, many of which supplied him with motifs for his paintings. And the Pre-Raphaelite's, adhering to Ruskinian principles, attended to nature's details with the assistance of the camera. The instances are legion.

Despite its advantages for the artist, photographs were never exhibited within mid-nineteenth-century fine art exhibitions. Photography was considered a mechanical procedure and was relegated to the Industrial sections of expositions. Nevertheless, since painters demanded photographic views of landscape details and of nude or costumed models for reference, photographic genres were born. Even uncommissioned, independent photography gravitated toward the tradition of painted images and conformed to its conventions. After all, though it is indeed a mechanical recording process, photography is a picture-making process as well. Moreover, the appreciation of photographs requires a pictorial sensibility that shares much with the appreciation of paintings and the graphic arts.

Theory sanctioned the espousal of painterly aspects by photographers. In 1853, the painter William J. Newton, vice president of the Photographic Society of London, noted that the chemical property of photography enabled it to produce extremely detailed views, but pointed out that art requires "a broad and general effect," and urged photographic artists to render "the whole subject a little out of focus." In his Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), Henry Peach Robinson urged photographers to study the great works of past art and to apply their lessons to the arrangement of their photographs.

In the 1850s and succeeding decades, practical photography became tempered with an aesthetic sensibility. This was particularly evident in landscape prints which functioned as both document and as picturesque imagery. Carlton E. Watkins' views at Yosemite Valley and on the West Coast, for example, are dramatic compositions with a wide tonal range and virtuosic technique.

Others were more intentional in their pursuit of photographic art. Julia Margaret Cameron depicted themes from the Bible and from English literature in evocative, soft focus, and created probing, mysteriously-lit portraits of her renowned acquaintances. In an 1864 letter to the astronomer Sir John Herschel, she explained, "My aspirations are to ennoble photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty...."

With the simplification of photography in the 1880s, when George Eastman first offered the Kodak camera and film that could be returned for processing, photography became a popular and personal art, with a significant percentage of the populations of Britain and America owning cameras. In order to distinguish themselves from the banal productions of the masses of amateurs, certain photographers formed associations to promote the advancement of their craft as art. Believing photography's infinite detail and illusionistic depth to be overly clinical and inexpressive, they condoned manipulation of the print to convey individualistic moods, and fashioned their compositions after contemporary painting. Thus, the first coherent international photographic movement, which flourished until the end of the First World War, was termed "Pictorialism."

The Pictorialists employed a range of new processes (gum bichromate, oil pigment, platinum, photogravure, and others), even working the chemicals by hand to create unique (as opposed to multiple), painterly images such as Edward Steichen's Self-portrait with Brush and Palette (188 ). Their pictures often resembled works in other graphic media. Favorite subjects included idealized peasant life in a manner akin to the Barbizon school; symbolist landscapes in the style of Böcklin, Whistler, Innes, or Munch; scenes of bourgeois harmony similar to the late Impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent; and academic figures in classical poses and with antique props, representing religious, allegorical, or mythological subjects typical of the Salons. Some Pictorialists went so far as to stage the compositions of famous old master paintings.

Photography achieved limited success when it adopted the conventions of painting, whether replicating subject matter or simulating painterly effects. The result was deemed either intolerably artificial or inappropriate to the medium's unique potential to record facts. Despite its drawbacks, however, Pictorialism succeeded in gaining entry for photographs into art museums around the world, in having photographs included in fine arts exhibitions, and in establishing that photography was not merely a mechanical process, but a creative act.

The New York Pictorialist group, dubbed the Photo-Secession, was founded by Alfred Steiglitz in 1902. The most influential modern artistic organ of its day, its home, a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, known as "291," served as the locus of modern photographic activity in the United States for the duration of its existence (1905 to 1917). By exhibiting photographs by Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Strand, and himself alongside modern American and European paintings, Stieglitz fostered "the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression." From the private meditations of Pictorialism, photography shifted toward the public urbanism of the Secession. Like their contemporaries, the Ashcan School painters, members of the Photo-Secession made the modern city their subject, inventing formulas to depict "the new America."

In the first years of the twentieth century, important scientific and technological advances altered man's conception both of the universe and of himself: Einstein effectively reordered the structure of the world, Freud provided a new perspective on human behavior, and Bergson suggested that time was a fluxant dimension of consciousness. The modern age with its x-rays, electric lights, telephones, automobiles, subways, planes, and movie houses profoundly affected the concept and practice of photography.

Works such as Coburn's fractured and prismatic "Vortographs," taken through a kalaidoscopic mechanism, could serve as an illustration for Bergson's statement (1907), "form is only a snapshot view of transition." Giulio Bragaglia, a member of the quasi-Cubistic, Italian Futurist movement, used multiple and time-elapse exposures to blur movement, thus, he felt, leaving an image of the "universal dynamism" at the core of Futurist doctrine.

After the Armistice, having lost faith in the culture that had led to World War, the European avant-garde rejected tradition and set about dismantling culture. The German Dadaists created intellectually charged photo-collages by cutting out and pasting together images from existing paintings and photographs. Opposed to such iconoclastic impulses, Russian Constructivism and the German Bauhaus were among the movements that combined the applied and fine arts as a means of social engineering and of strengthening industrial production. Their respect for the machine favored camera-made imagery led artists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky to jettison sentimental content by arranging disparate machine elements in abstract photographic compositions.

The Surrealists used photography to show that things are not as they appear. With magical effects including multiple exposure, collage, combination printing, oblique angles, close-ups, camera-less images, and solarization, they made time and space seem malleable and fantastic. Photography's aura of factuality made subconscious dreams seem a plausible part of the observable world.

Edward Weston was a purist who rejected all forms of manipulation in photography. He steered a move away from constructivist design toward an organic aesthetic, claiming to attempt "the recording of the very quintessence and interdependence of all life." This influenced Imogene Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and others who in 1932 formed F.64, a photographic society based in San Francisco. Unlike Weston, whose work suggests the comprehensibility and abstract logic of nature, Adams' sublime panoramas aggrandized the terrain, creating some of the most memorable images of the American landscape.

In the late 1920s, the compact 35 mm cameras with enhanced viewfinders and up to a dozen exposures per load were instrumental in the expansion of the field of photojournalism. While in New York, Berenice Abbott and Helen Levitt documented New York in a journalistic style, in Europe, Henri Cartier-Bresson used his Leica to more pictorial ends, seeking what he called "the decisive moment" at which a composition comes into perfect equilibrium.

Social and aesthetic forms of photography melded in the work of two photographers employed in the 1930s by the Farm Services Administration: Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. As Lewis Hine had conveyed universal themes in his social documentary series of immigrants arriving on Ellis Island (1904), Lange's and Evans' direct, peel-eyed images are not only essential documents of the Depression era, they are also monumental icons of humanity. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the mantle of this tradition passed to Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, and Garry Winogrand, each of whom explored the American scene in all its oddity and irony.

When Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg appropriated photographs from commercial art and the mass media, our allegiance to photographic reality was strained. In her controversial essay, "On Photography" (1977), Susan Sontag compelled her readers to reconsider the nature and consequences of the medium, warning that photographs dull our perceptions, and comprise a meretricious, artificial drama that increasingly distances us from the real world.

A century and a half after its invention, it is indeed difficult to imagine the world without photography. The quantity of photographic images in our environment has been multiplied exponentially by an endless progression of commercial, scientific, and artistic applications. Photographs, both still and cinematic, have become integral components of our public and private lives.

While photographers today are less likely than painters to bereferred to as "artists," photographs regularly hang in our museums and galleries, and command high prices from assiduous collectors -- the medium is universally regarded as one of the fine arts. Certainly, from its inception, there have been practitioners of photography whose work constitutes visual art. Yet, there is no agreement as to what constitutes photographic art. Visual art, being the product of human activity, must partake of that which is distinctly human -- namely the ability to think and to feel. Thus, visual art comprises those images which stimulate the mind or the emotions, conveying ideas or associate responses (whether pleasant or disturbing) by means of physical description, intellectual symbolism, or abstract design.

We further require of visual art that it exude beauty. This somewhat relative and subjectively determined quality consists of the harmonious agreement between the parts, and the appropriateness of the visual means to an expressive end. Photographic art comprises those pictures that satisfy the criteria of any visual art. What is intrinsic to photography is first, its registration of light on a photosensitive substance, and second, the artist's selection and control of the pictorial elements. In order to be transformed into photographic art, the observable world must be seen artistically.

As Weston stated in "America and Photography" (1929), "In this day of everchanging values it is immaterial whether or not photography can be labelled art. It is of our day, -- we understand, respond to and need photography as a vital contemporary expression. But, for the sake of argument, -- the difference between good and bad art in any medium or of any age lies in the creative mind rather than in skill of hands. The way of seeing is what counts and that is conditioned by the artist's attitude, not by his skill as craftsman."

Recently, semiotic, structuralist, and conceptualist models have informed photographic art. For example, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman analyse the conventions of mass media personalities and identity, and Jan Dibbets and David Hockney deconstruct human perception of photographic space. More traditional styles persist in the terrifying and beautiful landscapes of John Pfahl, and in Nicholas Nixon's eloquent studies of aging and AIDS, in which biological and spiritual time unfolds.

Co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography," an historical survey comprising more than 400 images, remains on view at the National Gallery through July 30. It will travel to The Art Institute of Chicago (September 16 to November 26) and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (December 21 to February 25, 1990). The exhibition is supported by Eastman Kodak Company's Professional Photography Division.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©