| Image Views: 3648 EXIF: ISO:800 ... Shutter-speed:1/400s ... Aperture: f/13 ... Focal length:18mm ... Flash: not fired ... Thanks everyone for sharing your views on post-processing [yesterday’s post]. I read each one of them very carefully … and gather that although everyone accepts photography is an art-form but believe that a distinction has to be made between: [1] Art and [2] Documentary photography/ Photojournalism. The importance of documentary-photography in recording various historic & socio-political events cannot be refuted, but today I want to write on … "The struggle to establish photography as an art form" ... Although yesterday I wrote from the top of my head, today’s write-up is compiled from a few articles I browsed online ... The struggle to establish photography as an art form ... In the late 19th century when photography was becoming increasingly popular, there was a huge backlash by artists and critics who scorned, scoffed, sneered and decried at the labeling/designating photography as an art-form. They argued that the camera-work was so precise and believable that it left no room left for “artistic interpretation”; which is a defining characteristic of art ... And since photography is machine-made ... it does not have the same status than other man-made art-forms like paintings. This notion is embodied in the words of French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire who said [in 1859] that “if photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have corrupted it altogether” … Many photographers took innovative measures to establish photography as art-form. To demonstrate that artistic sensitivity, imagination and individual style were possible with camera ... many photographers began manipulating the photographic process ... Thus in late 19th century, a trend emerged where photographers started "imitating paintings" of their time ... They favored darkroom techniques to get some control over the results they desired to achieve using innovative techniques like … [1] Softening and blurring parts of photographs during printing process to achieve softness of the paintings ... [2] Another approach was applying a needle directly to negatives and scratching pencil-like lines or shading around figures ... [3] Some even used multiple negatives to produce prints ... Adherents of these techniques photography came to be known as “PICTORIALS”. Most of the pictorialists favored subject-matter made popular by impressionist painters like hazy landscapes, nudes, and groups of children playing around ... But then some photographers like “Henry Peter Emerson” denounced the approach of the pictorials. Emerson believed that photography was an art form as legitimate as painting … But was against the techniques used by pictorials. He advocated that photographers should “rely only on naturally occurring effects of light and subject, never resorting to contrived costuming or hand retouching of the print”. He emerged as an advocate of “straight photography” … and believed that photographic images should not be tampered with or subjected to handwork, or it looses its integrity … Although these two schools of ... [1] Pictorials and [2] Straight photography ... had very different approaches … But the mission was the same … to establish photography as an art form! However in the struggle for securing a place for photography in the art-world, the most important name is of Alfred Stieglitz. He probably did more than any other individual to get photography recognized as art-form and at the same level as other arts. He was insistent that "photographs should look like photographs" ... only then the medium of photography would be considered with its own aesthetic credo and so would separate photography from other fine arts such as painting. This approach by Stieglitz gained the term "STRAIGHT photography". In 1902 he founded "Photo-Secessions" with a group of talented avant-garde artists. In 1905 he directed the Photo-Secession Gallery in 291 Fifth Avenue, New York ... A gallery that came to be known as the "291", and exhibited not only the work of contemporary photographers, but also works of the most celebrated painters like Picasso, Rodin, Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec ... and thus after a long struggle photography was earned the status of an art!!! What I find most interesting is that it’s the documentary type photography done with an artistic touch … that truly established photography as an art form … However with the emergence of digital photography and the easy use of post-processing tool … the scope of "artistic-expression" enters a totally new dimension. [Documentary Photography - I ... of VI] |