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.