Evolution of Photography as an Art Form
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From the beginning of photography in 1839, photographers sought recognition as artists. However, the way they talked about it – often using the term ‘drawing’ – made many believe that photography was trying to occupy a part in the realm of older visual arts. It is quite possible that they used the term in the absence of anything more suitable; nevertheless, photography came to be seen as an attempt to replace portraiture or landscape painting, inspiring thoughtful people to ask if photography had the better qualities of painting or drawing.
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Going against that, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake was the first to present – in 1857 – a modernist aesthetic: that photography should be measured not by aesthetic standards of older visual arts but by those of photography itself, because it had strengths that fine arts could never possess, such as the capacity for infinite detail or instant production. This idea justified writing the history of photography more or less without much reference to the history of contemporaneous art. The earliest of these focused more on technological progress than on the photographers or their output, but Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography (1937), inverted the focus, even though it reiterated the notion that technological breakthroughs helped propel aesthetic ones and referred rarely to painting.
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Newhall went on to establish the Museum of Modern Art and led a university department of photography. In 1964, John Szarkowski, then the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, listed – in The Photographer’s Eye – five essential characteristics of the medium: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, the time, and the vantage point. Contemporary photographers reflected on these characteristics and, more generally, on the idea that whatever else a photograph is about, it ultimately is about the nature of photography itself. Photography also developed its own independent exhibition system, arguably out of necessity, since it was excluded from the 19th-century salons, excepting the Paris Salon of 1859. As a result, by the end of the century, photographers had established their own salons to present their work to general public as art – in England, Austria and France – as a new generation of photographers with artistic aspirations replaced the medium’s pioneers. These new photographers created photography’s first international aesthetic movement, pictorialism.
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Pictorialists made their case for photography as an art by producing photographs that looked as if they had been made by hand. The only trouble was that the art of painting itself, especially the avant garde movement centered at Paris, was changing so rapidly at the turn of the century that these photographers’ efforts came to seem retardataire. Alfred Stieglitz, of New York, is often credited with single-handedly promoting photography as an art in early 20th century America. Young Stieglitz was an ardent pictorialist, until he went to Paris and met great modern, abstract painters like Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Thereafter, at his modest gallery, Stieglitz alternated modernist European art with pictorialist photography shows. By 1910, he virtually stopped featuring pictorialist photography and became a promoter of modernist art not only from Europe but also from America. The last photography show Stieglitz mounted featured the work of Paul Strand whose close-in, near-abstract pictures of porch shadows and bowls eerily resembled modernist paintings.
