Photography and Painting

        While reading this week’s passages in Wells, I found myself really interested in the symbiotic relationship between painting and photography. The bulk of the reading centered around the debate about whether photography is art or simply a recording device, but the way photography affects art is really important as well. When photographers found out the creative prospects of a photograph, “Pictorialists” tried to mimic the effect of a canvas and make their images blurred to evoke the properties of a painting. To me, this isn’t embracing what photography can do— it is merely trying to mimic a painting. 

However, the tables turned when photography became a cheaper and easier way to take portraits, which in my opinion is a form of art itself. Sure, the rich were still paying for their expensive painted portraits, but such an immediate art form as photography was perfect for the middle class. It’s as if photography became the art form of the middle class, not only seen in portraits but also in the ability of amateur, everyday people to take pictures wherever they wanted as cameras became more common. This also brings up another point in the reading, which was the fact that painting could be seen as an “elitist” art, while photography is “anti-elitist” because it could be reproduced. Painters were always seen as some sort of a gifted, almost divine type of person, causing their works to be expensive and valued highly. But photographs were a technical art that could be passed around and used for communication purposes, highlighting a key difference between how photography and painting were viewed at the time. 

I found another interesting intersection between painting and photography to be during the realism movement. Realism attempts to capture life as it truly is— no artistic bias (if that’s even possible!), and depictions of everyday scenes and people. However, photography was able to do that better than painters could. Photography has the unique ability to document exactly what is in front of it, a quality paintings cannot do, due to the artistic hand and medium. I enjoyed the quote about how a realist painting was scene as a “faulty Daguerrotype.” That phrase alone highlights how even though painting was seen as a higher art form, it couldn’t beat photography when it came to depicting real life. 

Also, painting owes a huge part of it’s history to the invention of photography because of it’s ability to be used as research. Now, painters could take pictures of places and models and piece together their compositions, lessening sketching and sitting time for models. Photography changed the way the painting process occured, and some of the biggest changes were seen during the Impressionist movement. Monet, for example, painted as if his paintings were snapshots of everyday life. I agree with Wells’ observation that in a way, photography freed the painter from his “responsibility for literal depiction.” The expressive brushwork and focus on optics and light of Impressionist paintings had photography to thank for the ability to paint things as the artist sees them. The subject matter of paintings expanded to include middle class scenes and “plein air” paintings instead of the typical mythological or historical depictions prior. 

It’s just funny to retrospectively note the huge impact that photography had on painting, even through the intense debates about whether photography was an art form. In a way, isn’t it like photography helped create the art of the impressionists or some of the most famous painters of the twentieth century? Photography basically created “Gare Saint Lazare” and “Bain a la Grenouillere.” Even if someone would argue that photographs are not art, the idea of photography certainly has created fine art itself.