From its very beginnings, photography has always struggled to find its place in the art world. In France, until the beginning of the 20th century, most writers and artists saw photography as a mere tool for painting, nothing more. It was only much later that photography began to be recognized for what it is: an art in its own right. At first, with attempts to give it a “painting” side, then thanks to Surrealism in the first half of the 20th century, photography gradually established itself in the art world. In the 70s, there was a real craze that enabled photography to gain its letters of nobility, supported by theoretical and aesthetic reflections. The arrival of digital technology has only accelerated this integration into contemporary art. But isn’t this fusion a new way of reducing photography to a secondary role? The question is worth asking…
Writing about photography, an art in its own right?
Talking about photography as art today requires a minimum of historical context. Ever since the first techniques for fixing an image on a support were developed, the relationship between photography and art has been, shall we say, complicated and shifting. As early as the end of the 18th century, certain scientists were beginning to imagine what this “technical image” could be, and how chemistry and optics could bring it into being. When photography officially came into being in 1834, two major questions arose: is it really an art form? And if so, under what conditions? Suffice to say, its status was immediately a real headache!
Take, for example, the old story told by Pliny in his Natural History: a young girl from Corinth, Dibutade, who, to keep a souvenir of her lover going off to war, traces the outline of his shadow cast on a wall by a lantern. It looks like a painting, yes, but above all it has the air of photography before its time, despite the obvious anachronism. This little story could have been the ideal starting point for integrating photography into the great family of the arts. But no, it didn’t receive such a warm welcome.
And yet, in recent years, photography seems at last to have been adopted by the visual arts family, which had previously seen it as the ugly duckling. Now, everyone is snapping this medium up as if it were the most beautiful of swans. But does this new admiration really do photography justice? I’m not sure, especially as photography has always struggled to fit into a single category. So, if we want to write about photography as an art form today, we must of course know its history. It may not be the only angle of approach, but it’s clearly a must if you want to understand why this medium took so long to gain acceptance and why, even now, it continues to upset codes.
The rebel handmaiden, but under surveillance
When Arago gave his famous speech on August 19, 1834, presenting the daguerreotype to the academies, he made a point of emphasizing just how a revolution this invention was. He added, probably influenced by the painter Paul Delaroche, that it was “an immense service to the arts”. But the artists and intellectuals of the day, especially in France, took a different view. For them, this new invention had to remain in its place, in a role of “very humble handmaiden”, at the service of science and the arts. There was no question of photography claiming the status of art in its own right.
Great names like Baudelaire and Delacroix, even if they didn’t necessarily share the same aesthetic approach, were unanimous: photography had to remain in the shadow of painting. Baudelaire, true to his provocative style, even saw it as a tool designed to flatter “the foolishness of the multitude” and “the idolatrous crowd”. Delacroix, for his part, feared that the artist would become “a machine harnessed to another machine”, transformed into a mere reproducer of images. In short, for them, photography could not compete with the nobility of painting and it was crucial to keep it in a subordinate position.
Despite this fierce opposition, photography began to emerge from the shadows, not least thanks to the open-mindedness of certain movements like surrealism in the early twentieth century. But at the end of the 19th century, authors such as Flaubert, Zola and the Goncourt brothers were still wary. For them, photography was merely a documentary tool, not an art form. History has shown them to be wrong, but at the time, photography remained the faithful servant of the fine arts, still far from being recognized as the autonomous art it would later become.
Photography in the face of industry
In the early decades, photographers had a real challenge, namely to distance themselves from industry. With the industrial revolution, photography was seen as a mere product of a machine, a tool among many others. Not very flattering, I’m sure you’ll agree. So, to escape this unflattering image, photographers began to form professional associations in France and England. In 1854, for example, the Société Héliographique became the Société Française de Photographie, an institution that still exists today. They were also able to count on the first specialized magazines, such as La Lumière in France or the Photographic Journal in England, which finally offered a space to discuss the real issues, including whether photography could really claim the status of art.
In England, Elizabeth Eastlake, a sharper pen and more open-minded than Baudelaire, wrote as early as 1857 that photography excelled in what it could do, and that it would be pointless to force it to rival painting or any other art form. In her opinion, it was time to stop trying at all costs to compare it to traditional art and just accept its abilities for what they were. Basically, she wasn’t wrong, but despite her cautious advice, some photographers wanted to prove that their medium deserved a place in art in its own right.
Pictorialism: photography wants to prove it’s an art
These photographers, known as pictorialists, no longer wanted to be treated as mere executors. No, they wanted to be recognized as artists in their own right, and to that end, they went to great lengths. Following the guidelines of Henry Peach Robinson’s textbook, Pictorial Effect in Photography, published in 1869, they began to impose techniques and rules on photography that came straight from painting. They even developed new chemical processes to produce artistic effects: charcoal prints, platinum salts, cyanotypes… everything went into giving their works an undeniably artistic dimension.
The problem? These photographers were so obsessed with getting closer to painting that they sometimes forgot the true nature of photography. Robert Demachy, one of the great names of pictorialism, was quick to say that he was prepared to erase the photographic character in order to achieve this. Ironic, isn’t it? In seeking to legitimize photography, they ended up drowning it in an academicism that, in the end, didn’t really do justice to the originality of this medium.
Ultimately, photography came to dominate the art world, as evidenced by the numerous awards (Robert Capa prize, Cartier-Bresson prize, Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, Higashikawa prize…) rewarding photographers and recognizing their artistic prowess. However, it took time for photographers to really free themselves from the shadow of industry and this permanent comparison with painting.