Evolution Of Photography Research Paper

Being a fine art photographer, this is a BIG subject for me, having already taken 20th Century Art, I have a lot in my head about this, so excuse me if I ramble.

This debate has been ongoing since the beginning of photography itself. A heated debate that started early with such very outspoken critics as the influential poet turned art critic Frenchman Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) who held a strong belief that lazy and uncreative painters would turn to photography, that art is an imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas and dreams, and he regarded photography as "a very humble servant of art and science, like printing and stenography" - a medium largely unable to transcend "external reality." –Like many critics of

I blame this thinking as much on the time as the misunderstanding of the process. Many a critic never gave the photographer any credit, noting the image is taken by an apparatus directly ‘from life’, not created by an artist, giving no thought of the vision through the lens, manipulation of the subject prior to the image being taken or adjustment of image during printing and processing. This leads many to see photographs as straightforward plain old copycats and mechanical reproductions.

The obvious way to persuade the public that photography was a fine art was to produce photographs that emulated the mood, manner, or attitude of the paintings and prints that the public confidently held to be works of art.

In 1853, a member of The Photographic Society of London stated that photography was "too literal to compete with works of art" because could not "elevate the imagination". But fine art in itself evolved being defined in a variety of disciplines, including

In development it was slow and thus most images created were a still life, portraits, and objects that were easy to capture, much like paintings. It mimicked these images because of its limits for the time it was evolving.

A great example of early photography following painting is one of the pioneers in early photographic portraiture, Julia Maddox Cameron, whose work was very scrutinized, and she used her camera to bring out her vision in a way that was representative of the Pre-Raphaelite style of painting. At the same time, Ford Maddox Brown painted in this very style and was acknowledged as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. So photographers were learning and showing he world, slowly, that photographs are staged portrayals, like paintings: they too had to be carefully arranged and produced with proper lighting.

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