Artists feared it would replace painting; it did in fact replace the itinerant portrait painter. “From this day painting is dead,” declared the painter Paul Delaroche in 1839 - painting’s highest aspiration being the faithful reproduction of the world. Well, painting still has a lot of life in it. But it is hard to comprehend how profoundly photography has affected both art and vision. We look at art - indeed, at the visible world - differently because we can hold its simulacrum in our hands.

When photography was born, mechanical efficiency was much on everybody’s mind. A number of observers though photographs would be great time savers for artists: make more studies than they could ever make, catch details they’d missed. We know now that artists relied heavily on photographs, but kept mum about it. Too embarrassing. The hand and eye were supposed to be enough; mechanical intervention was suspect. Yet Renoir, and later Picasso, said boldly that photography had freed painting for other tasks. If this machine could bring back nature as it was (only a few doubted that it really did that), maybe art didn’t have to bother. Photography, however, wanted everything, its own natural province and any other it could attain. Almost as soon as it became clear that art could do without the everyday world altogether, photography tried to follow suit. The camera had already been flirting with abstraction for some time when, in 1917, Alvin Langdon Coburn took his first non-objective photographs.

Photography’s relation to the other arts has always been equivocal. It was clear right away that the new medium would broaden general knowledge of art. In the nineteenth century, a thoughtful man like M. A. Root could assume that a wide dissemination of images would increase happiness and improve taste. In our own day we are less certain about happiness and taste; the glut of images threatens to reduce nearly everything to the same measurable staleness. What we appreciate and how we see have doubtless changed, for better or worse, because of photographs. William Ivins, an expert on prints, pointed out how limiting was the syntax of the graphic arts, which had been the only transmitters of painting and sculpture, and how photography made available certain styles, certain eras that could not be perceived clearly before.

Photography and art were always tangled, are tangled still. D. O. Hill doctored his photographs to make them more painterly. Illustrators were soon forced to copy photographs. The pictorialists fiddled with gum prints till they looked like chalk drawings, charcoals, anything but photographs. Today painters from Rauschenberg to Warhol appropriate photographs, which they use as freely as palette knives. The photo realist painters make a virtue of looking merely photographic. The holograph approaches sculpture.

Is photography among the fine arts? Once that was a burning question; it smolders in some spots even now. In 1857, Lady Eastlake wrote that what photography does best is “beneath the doing of a real artist at all.” Two years later Baudelaire stormed against the heartless bourgeois ‘facticity’ of the camera. Critics said photography was art if the photographer’s hand tinkered heavily with the print in the darkroom. Illustrators cried shame, humbug, and mechanical besides. Then Stieglitz took to the battlements to proclaim that a true artist could produce art no matter what the medium. In a typical fencing posture, George Bernard Shaw announced that photography was not only an art but a better one than painting. Eventually, the proponents of straight photography decided that photographs were art only if they were pure: no laying on of hands, no tinkering.

All that is clear is that the question is unclear. Probably it doesn’t matter. The way the issue is usually put, it excludes news, fashion, advertising photographs, and of course snapshots.  In the 1970s, the surging popularity (and marketability) of photography brought all these maverick forms into the fold, at least temporarily.  These forms - and passport photographs, police photographs, x-ray, microscopic, and telescopic photographs, not to mention film and television - influence the way we dress, eat, vote, think, live, and even die. We have no appropriate definition for photography yet. Possibly it is so complex we never will. Lady Eastlake offered a good starting point when she spoke of a “new form of communication between man and man = neither letter, message, nor picture, which now happily fills up the space between them.”

- Vicki Goldberg

Excerpt from the introduction to Photography In Print, 1981