"Photography, Art, and Modernity": What is the "modern" photograph?

One point made by Nesbitt in her article “Photography, Art, and Modernity” that I found thought provoking was the idea that advertising, in a sense, enabled the creation of the link between avant-garde painting and photography. Prior to the beginnings of avant-garde photography, photographs were seen mainly as documents in that they were used primarily by the mass media to advertise and update the public on the most current events. Because the avant-garde aimed to shock the already rapidly modernizing culture, they were presented with the task of presenting the public with even more current ideas than the technologically advanced images that the media had familiarized them with. Avant-garde photography was formed through its opposition to the mass media produced photo-document, but in its opposition it actually embraced the technicality and mechanic qualities found in these photographs and pushed them to a new extreme. Although photography as a medium wasn’t as wholly embraced in the world of avant-garde as painting, it shared the same philosophical basis of its opposition to the mass media. The avant-garde photograph did not try and mimic the qualities already found in avant-garde painting, but instead emphasized and criticized the qualities found in the type of photography that was, at the time, deemed the most “modern”- the document.

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Following Nick's lead, I have deleted the dedicated page for the additional independent posts and they should thus be posted on the homepage. This will keep things lively and current!

Response: Camera Work

Introduction: Camera Work

Nicholas Casey
1/29/13

The introduction casts the subject of photography in a light I have not seen it in before. As a member of the art community and modern society in general, It astonishes me to see such a popular and now expressive medium be the subject of such conflict. The primary question then was: could a machine produce a work of art? This calls into question different definitions of art. 

At the time, critics of photography saw it as a tool used in science, as something to produce evidence; as fact. It could not imitate painting and was therefore not art. This was to say that it lacked the synergy that occurred when the individual's creativity met the painting materials -- and created a work. This seemingly narrow black and white view of what is considered art is clearly an old method of thinking. Baudelaire claimed that "it was time for photography to return to its true duty; a servant of sciences and arts". 

What is especially interesting to me is that photography could not be art because it could not imitate painting, when just 100 years earlier it was painting that had to fight for recognition as an art form than a trade craft.

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History of Photo II Discussion Posts

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