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Can Photography be regarded as a valid Artform?
This entire article is © James
Wakefield 2002.
Reproduction Prohibited. All Rights Reserved.
Section One: A Brief History of Photography
To explore the question of whether or not
photography can be regarded as an art form we must first investigate
the origins of photography and it’s rise to use as a mass
medium.
Photography was first used as a visual representative medium
in the early 19th Century.
Thomas Wedgwood was the first person to successfully
record an image, but he was unable to fix the photograph for
any extended period of time.
It was not until mid 1827 that Niepce recorded the first
successful picture, however, it required an exposure of eight
hours!
This was the starting point for one of the world’s most
relished inventions. The ability to accurately capture a scene
without the need for artistic talent or scientific knowledge.
Niepce was a scientist, as was Louis Daguerre, who continued
his work when he died. They were not artists.
Daguerre can be regarded as the founding father of Photography
as he took Niepce’s process and improved it considerably,
reducing the exposure time to just half an hour and discovering
the first permanent fixing agent - salt.
As the word spread that the Daguerreotype required “no
knowledge of drawing…” and that “anyone may succeed....
and perform as well as the author of the invention” many
showed an interest and “Daguerreomania” became
a craze overnight.
However, even in the very first days of photography it was met
with opposition, especially from artists who believed it could
seriously threaten their professions; one journalist even regarded
the new invention as satanic:
“The wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only
impossible... but the mere desire alone, the will to do so,
is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man-
made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God
should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a
Frenchman... to give to the world an invention of the Devil?”
Article in the Leipzig City Advertiser 1839/40
It can be safely said, that at this period of time, photography
or ‘Daguerreomania’ was not regarded as an
art form by anyone.
Whilst Daguerre was perfecting his process, a man called William
Henry Fox Talbot was perfecting a similar process known
as the Calotype. His process produced considerably poorer
quality images than that of Daguerre’s at first, but by
the early 1840’s Talbot had made some significant improvements
and was clearly excited by the prospect of creating realistic
images without applying pencil to paper:
“How charming it would be if it were possible to cause
these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain
fixed on the paper!”
The advantage of Talbot’s system compared to Daguerre’s
was that an unlimited number of Positive prints could be made,
whereas Daguerre’s could produce only the one. Although
the Daguerreotype was revolutionary, it did not hang around
for long, and in fact all film photography today is based around
the work of Fox Talbot.
The arrival of photography was met with mixed views, the negative
ones coming mainly from artists who saw the potential of this
medium taking over art completely, as there would no longer
be the need for artists to make accurate representations of
scenes. This proves the point that at that time the job of artists
was primarily to represent a scene as accurately as possible,
something that certainly cannot be said of artists today, a
point that will be explored in more detail later.
Charles Baudelaire, whilst reviewing a photographic exhibition
in 1859, clearly saw the need to put photography firmly in its
place:
“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some
of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted
it altogether...its true duty…is to be the servant of the
sciences and arts - but the very humble servant, like printing
or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature....”
“Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those
books, prints and manuscripts which time is devouring, precious
things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in
the archives of our memory - it will be thanked and applauded.”
“But if it is allowed to encroach upon the domain of
the... imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon
the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so
much the worse for us."
Almost in desperation, Baudelaire attempts to discredit an invention
which he knows will be revolutionary and put traditional artists
at risk.
As time went on, photography’s popularity continued to
increase, and by 1857 there were 147 photographic establishments,
compared to a mere handful in the mid 1840’s.
Photography met a new era in 1851 when the Collodion Process
was developed by Frederick Scott Archer which reduced
exposure times to a matter of seconds, allowing for many more
photographic horizons. The price was also nominal compared to
Daguerreotypes that typically cost a guinea (£1.05 - a
typical weeks wages); the Collodion process could produce prints
for as little as a shilling.
The biggest turning point in photographic history, however,
was in 1871 when Dr Richard Maddox decided to use the
newly discovered Gelatin instead of glass as a basis
for the photographic plate. This led to the development of the
Dry Plate Process. The Dry Plate revolutionised photography;
cumbersome wet plates, on site darkroom tents and specialised
knowledge were no longer required to take photographs - it was
now open to the masses.
George Eastman developed the Kodak Box Camera
and flexible film in 1888 allowing photography to be accessed
by a much greater number of people.
The twentieth century was dominated by photography. Thanks to
this remarkable invention, almost everyone has access to a camera
and we can now see (accurately) how others live, what other
places look like, what the moon looks like… Photography
has revolutionised our lives, taking advertising, the media
and television/film to a whole new level. But is it Art?
Continue to Section Two
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