{"id":3146,"date":"2015-03-14T21:09:59","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T21:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3146"},"modified":"2016-08-30T21:23:46","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T21:23:46","slug":"how-photography-evolved-from-science-to-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-photography-evolved-from-science-to-art\/","title":{"rendered":"How photography evolved from science to art"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nancy Locke<\/a>, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Much like a painting, a photograph has the ability to move, engage and inspire viewers. It could be a black-and-white Ansel Adams landscape of a snow-capped mountain reflected in a lake, with a sharpness and tonal range that bring out the natural beauty of its subject. Or it could Edward Weston\u2019s close-up photograph of a bell pepper, an image possessing a sensuous abstraction that both surprises and intrigues. Or a Robert Doisneau photograph of a man and woman kissing near the Paris city hall in 1950, a picture has come to symbolize romance, postwar Paris and spontaneous displays of affection.<\/p>\n

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Today, few would debate the artistic merits of a photograph like Edward Weston\u2019s Pepper No. 30 (pictured here).<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

No one would question that photographs such as these are works of art. Art historians can explain the technical and artistic decisions that elevate photographs by the masters, whether it\u2019s Weston\u2019s use of a tiny aperture, Adams’ printing techniques or Doisneau\u2019s distinctive aesthetic. It\u2019s clear that Pepper No. 30 belongs in a museum, even if a selfie posted on Facebook doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, it was not always this way. Photography has not yet celebrated its 200th birthday, yet in the medium\u2019s first century of existence, there was a great deal of debate over its artistic merit. For decades, even those who appreciated the qualities of a photograph were not entirely sure whether photography was \u2013 or could be \u2013 an art.<\/p>\n

Science or art?<\/h2>\n

In its first incarnation, photography seemed to be more of a scientific tool than a form of artistic expression. Many of the earliest photographers didn\u2019t even call themselves artists: they were scientists and engineers \u2013 chemists, astronomers, botanists and inventors. While the new form attracted individuals with a background in painting or drawing, even early practitioners like Louis Daguerre or Nadar could be seen more as entrepreneurial inventors than as traditional artists.<\/p>\n

Before Daguerre invented the daguerreotype (an early form of photography on a silver-coated plate), he had invented the diorama<\/a>, a form of entertainment that used scene painting and lighting to create moving theatrical illusions of monuments and landscapes. Before Nadar<\/a> began to create photographic portraits of Parisian celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt, he\u2019d worked as a caricaturist. (An aeronaut, he also built the largest gas balloon ever created, dubbed The Giant.)<\/p>\n

One reason early photographs were not considered works of art because, quite simply, they didn\u2019t look<\/em> like art: no other form possessed the level of detail that they rendered. When the American inventor Samuel F B Morse saw the daguerreotype shortly after its first public demonstration in Paris in 1839, he wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018The exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived,\u2019 the inventor Samuel F B Morse marveled after seeing the first daguerreotype (pictured here). \u2018No painting or engraving ever approached it.\u2019<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A photograph of a haystack, with its thousands of stalks, looked visually staggering to a painter who contemplated drawing each one so precisely. The textures of shells and the roughness of a wall of brick or stone suddenly appeared vividly in photographs of the 1840s and 1850s.<\/p>\n

For this reason, it\u2019s no surprise that some of the earliest applications of photography came in archaeology and botany. The medium seemed well suited to document specimens that were complex and minutely detailed, like plants, or archaeological finds that needed to be studied by faraway specialists, such as a tablet of hieroglyphics. In 1843, Anna Atkins produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions<\/a> \u2013 considered the first book illustrated with photographs.<\/p>\n

Finally, the genesis of a painting, drawing or sculpture was a human hand, guided by a human eye and mind. Photographers, by contrast, had managed to fix an image on a metal, paper, or glass support, but the image itself was formed by light, and because it seemed to come from a machine \u2013 not from a human hand \u2013 viewers doubted its artistic merit. Even the word \u201cphotograph\u201d means \u201clight writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics weigh in<\/h2>\n

Before the photograph, painted portraits had almost always flattered the client and conformed to the fashions of the day; meanwhile, the earliest photographic portraits didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth (Lady) Eastlake, one of the foremost 19th century writers on photography, listed many of the photograph\u2019s shortcomings when it came to rendering the female face. In a black and white photograph, blue eyes looked \u201cas colourless as water,\u201d she wrote<\/a>, blonde and red hair seemed \u201cas if it had been dyed,\u201d and very shiny hair turned into \u201clines of light as big as ropes.\u201d Meanwhile, she noted that the male head, with its rougher skin and beard or moustache, might have less to fear, but still suffered a distinct loss of beauty in the photographic portrait. To Lady Eastlake, the photograph, \u201chowever valuable to relative or friend, has ceased to remind us of a work of art at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Pictoralists sought to manipulate photographic negatives to make the images appear painting-like. Pictured is Edward J Steichen\u2019s The Flatiron (1904).<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Debate over photography\u2019s status as art reached its apogee with the Pictorialist movement<\/a> at the end of the 19th century. Pictorialist photographers manipulated the negative by hand; they used multiple negatives and masking to create a single print (much like compositing in Photoshop today); they applied soft focus and new forms of toning to create blurry and painterly effects; and they rejected the mechanical look of the standard photograph. Essentially, they sought to push the boundaries of the form to make photographs appear as \u201cpainting-like\u201d as possible \u2013 perhaps as a way to have them taken seriously as art.<\/p>\n

Pictorialist photographers found success in gallery exhibitions and high-end publications. By the early 20th century, however, a photographer like Alfred Stieglitz, who had started out as a Pictorialist, was pioneering the \u201cstraight\u201d photograph: the printing of a negative from edge to edge with no cropping or manipulation. Stieglitz also experimented with purely abstract photographs of clouds. Modernist and documentary photographers began to accept the medium\u2019s inherent precision instead of trying to make images that looked like paintings.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhotography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man,\u201d wrote<\/a> critic Clement Greenberg in 1946. \u201cIt is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as work of art as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, well into the 20th century, many critics and artists continued to view photography as operating in a realm that was not quite fine art \u2013 a debate that even continues today<\/a>. But a look back to the 19th century reminds us of the medium\u2019s initial shocking \u2013 and confounding \u2013 realism, even as photo portraits printed on calling cards (\u201ccarte de visites<\/a>\u201d) were becoming as fashionable and ubiquitous as Facebook and Instagram today.<\/p>\n

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Social media in the 19th century: the calling card.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nancy Locke, Pennsylvania State University Much like a painting, a photograph has the ability to move, engage and inspire viewers. It could be a black-and-white Ansel Adams landscape of a snow-capped mountain reflected in a lake, with a sharpness and tonal range that bring out the natural beauty of its subject. Or it could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":7489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7490,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146\/revisions\/7490"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}