Photography: art or artifice?
Archived article from Feb 1, 2002
By Douglas Frank
Ever since Louis Daguerre received the first patent for photography in 1839, practitioners and aficionados have been arguing over the artistic merits of the medium. In no period was the discussion more intense than in the last two decades of the 19th century.
By that time, photography had become an industry as well as a popular pastime. Technological advances made it easier for both professionals and amateurs to record images, and people took up the new craze in great numbers. Photographic associations, salons and journals proliferated.
Paul Spencer Sternberger, assistant professor of art on the Newark campus, chronicles this period in "Between Amateur and Aesthete: The Legitimization of Photography as Art in America, 1880-1900" (University of New Mexico Press). The book looks at the strategies employed by both writers and photographers to elevate photography to a fine art.
The 204-page volume focuses on the radical changes in the practice and theory of photography and on the many discussions of its status in major American photographic journals of the late 19th century, among them the American Amateur Photographer, the American Journal of Photography, Anthony's Photographic Bulletin and the Philadelphia Photographer.
These and other publications became the forums for discourses on the legitimization of photography -- a hot topic by the end of the 1880s, the author points out.
Among the obstacles photography had to overcome on the road to becoming legitimate art, according to Sternberger, was that its "adherence to the laws of optics and chemistry appeared incongruous with art" and that "its process of representation seemed more distanced from the hand of the artist than other traditional media."
However, Sternberger writes, "Champions of artistic photography sought to identify the means by which the photographer's creative intellect was reflected in the picture-making process. ... Faced with the condemnation of photography as inherently inartistic because of its apparently mechanical and chemical nature, a burgeoning class of amateur photographers strove to construct a place for photography among the pantheon of the traditional arts."
Art-minded photographers modeled their work on formal codes of painting, taking the rules of composition outlined in respected texts on painting and employing them as a framework for principles of photographic practice.
They began to frame scenes with trees, use bodies of water for highlights and set up foregrounds, middle grounds and backgrounds in order to mimic or reflect ways that painters would structure their compositions. They experimented with moving their cameras to view scenes from different perspectives, choosing various angles and using natural and artificial lighting with artistic conventions in mind, according to Sternberger.
Many rushed to champion the new art form. For photographic theorist Frederic Hart Wilson, for instance, photography's place among the traditional arts was "an obvious given hampered only by 'mossy critics' and 'artist-bigots.'" He asserted that photography was as legitimate a mode of representation as any other graphic media and further argued that the process of representation was irrelevant and that the end justified the means.
Opponents, on the other hand, had a somewhat different viewpoint. Resistance to photographic art came from several camps including, surprisingly, artists such as John Moran, William Stillman and Peter Henry Emerson, who were gifted photographers as well. Stillman, for example, regarded photography as "an absolutely mechanical process" and maintained that a photographic view "can have neither sentiment nor expression." Yet, he conceded, while photography was not art, it could be artistic or "resembling art."
Some photographers, notably Alfred Stieglitz and his associates, who gained great fame in later decades, developed a style of artistic landscape photography labeled "pictorialism," exemplified by soft focus, deep shadows and richly textured tones, to show that photography was not necessarily devoid of human creativity.
Pictorialism, however, met with resistance among professional photographers, leading amateurs and the popular press, who preferred a "pure photography" or what would later be called "straight photography," free from such affectations. These critics opted instead to use characteristics unique to the photographic medium, such as the very broad ranges of tone and remarkably sharp detail that a photograph could display. In later decades, Stieglitz himself adopted this practice, to great acclaim.
With such differences of opinion, the photographic community became increasingly stratified during the two decades studied by Sternberger, as artists clamored to distinguish themselves from one another by extolling the merits of their particular skills and intentions, the author points out.
This process of differentiation ultimately led to the establishment of a self-proclaimed elite alliance of photographers centered around Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, which was fashioned after earlier painters' groups. The efforts of this group aided in the institutional legitimization of photography as art, an idea that gained a foot-hold at the beginning of the 20th century and continued to build as the century progressed.
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