Photographic Art

PHOTOGRAPHIC ART. Although photography was brought into being by artists and would-be artists in search of a new pictorial method, there has been comparatively little work produced in this medium worthy of the name of art. The major ity of workers who have attempted to use photography as a means of creative expression have failed because of their inability to recognize and make use of the basic resources of the medium. For many years both photographers and critics failed to realize they were dealing with a new art-form that was essentially dif ferent from all the other graphic processes, with the result that photographs were judged solely on the basis of their resemblance —or lack of it—to paintings and drawings.

Before photography could take its rightful place among the graphic arts, it had to be recognized as a new and independent medium, containing its own unique potentialities and limitations, and demanding therefore a new standard of criticism based on the principles and properties of the photographic process.

To understand why this recognition was slow in coming we must examine several factors that have influenced the develop ment and direction of photographic art.

Technical Evolution.

When the first successful photo graphic processes were made public by Daguerre, Talbot, and Herschel in 1839 (see PHOTOGRAPHY), the procedures involved were still difficult and uncertain and the available tools were extremely crude. Although some quite amazing results were ob tained, photography was still in the experimental stage.

The first substantial technical improvement came in the '5os when calotypy and daguerreotypy were replaced by the wet plate or collodion process. But even then the difficulties of cumbersome equipment and clumsy technique were sufficient to discourage all but the most enthusiastic.

The next important change came in the '8os when the whole photographic process was immeasurably simplified by the intro duction of dry plates and celluloid film. Then for the first time photography became flexible enough, and the technique involved sufficiently simplified, that it could offer an adequate means of expression to the artist. Since that time films have been improved in speed and colour sensitivity and various accessories have been added to the photographer's equipment, but in all essentials the process used today had been perfected by 1889, just 5o years after the first successful demonstration.

The Painter's Tradition.

Technical limitations were a han dicap to the early photographers who attempted to produce work that might rank as art, but a far more serious obstacle lay in the general acceptance of photography as just a new kind of painting. The camera had been the painter's tool long before photography was perfected. In the 18th century painters used a device very like the modern reflex camera; the lens was focussed on the desired view and the image traced by hand on a piece of paper laid on the ground glass. Thus when it became possible to fix the actual image by chemical means the new process was expected to be of primary importance as an aid to the painter in observing and studying nature. However, few painters made use of photog raphy in this fashion because of the time and effort required to master the technical intricacies of the new medium.

A notable exception was the Scotch painter, David Octavius Hill. The disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843 inspired him to commemorate the event in a monumental painting, and since it was to include the likenesses of nearly 500 persons, Hill turned to photography for assistance in his gargantuan task. From 1843-47, in collaboration with Robert Adamson, a young chemist, Hill produced a series of calotypes that are today considered masterpieces of photographic portraiture, while the painting these records were made for is deservedly forgotten. Whatever interest Hill's portraits may have aroused at the time, they were soon forgotten and were not rediscovered until the '9os. Meanwhile a battle over the question "Can photography be art?" was being waged on an ever-widening front. Those who contended that it couldn't be were for the most part painters, and their reasons, when carefully scrutinized, all reduce to the fact that since the camera was incapable of producing the equivalent of paintings and drawings it could not produce art. Some photographers were not concerned with the question and contented themselves with mak ing photographs for their own sake, but a growing number felt that the criticism was justified and cast about for means to remove this stigma from their medium.