List Three Ways the Development of Photography Has Changed Art Artists
How Photography Became an Art Course
Can Computers Create Art? Part 1
This is the first part of a series of posts on the topic of whether computers can create art, adjusted from my longer essay on that topic . For lessons from the by well-nigh AI and art, perhaps no invention is more than significant than photography. This first essay addresses the question: How did photography become respected equally an art course, and what lessons does this hold for new artistic AI technologies?
Prior to the invention of photography, realistic images of the earth could only be produced past skilled artists. In today'south world, we are so swamped with images that it is hard to imagine just how special and unique it must have felt to see a well-executed realistic painting. And the skills of professional artists had steadily improved over the centuries; by the 19th-century, artists such as the Pre-Rafaelites and the French Neoclassicists have achieved dazzling visual realism in their work.
The technical skills of realism were inseparable from the other artistic challenges in making images. This changed when photography automated the chore of producing images of the existent world.
In 1839, the first two commercially-practical photographic processes were invented: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's daguerreotype, and William Henry Fox Talbot's negative-positive process. They were mainly presented as ways to produce practical records of the globe. Of the two, the daguerreotype was more popular for several decades, largely because Talbot's process was restricted by patents. Improvements to Talbot's method somewhen fabricated the daguerreotype obsolete and evolved into modern film processes.
Portraiture and Other Practical Uses
Portraiture was a master driver for early adoption of cameras. And then, equally today, people enjoyed possessing pictures of their friends, loved-ones, and ancestors. Portrait painting was merely available to aristocrats and the very wealthy. In the 18th century, several inexpensive alternatives were adult, such as the silhouette, a representation of an individual's outline, typically hand-cut past an artisan out of black newspaper.
The daguerreotype offered an economical way to create a realistic portrait. Information technology was very tiresome and required locking the subject area'south head in place with a head brace for several minutes, while the field of study tightly gripped their chair, so as not to motility their fingers. Even so, numerous daguerreotype studios arose and became commonplace as technologies improved, and many portraitists switched to this new technology.
Inside a few decades, photography largely replaced about older forms of portraiture, such as the silhouette, and, today, no one seems to specially regret this loss. Every bit much as I appreciate the mystery and dazzler of old etchings and portraits, and even some current portraiture, I'd usually rather apply my mobile phone camera than to try to pigment everything by hand.
Another early on use for the daguerreotype was to produce souvenirs for tourists: by 1850, daguerreotypes of Roman ruins completely replaced the etchings and lithographs that tourists had previously purchased. As the technology improved, photography became indispensable as a source of records for engineering projects and disappearing architectural ruins, besides every bit for documentary purposes, such as Matthew Brady'due south photographs of the horrors of the American civil war.
"Is Photography Art?"
Artists and critics debated for many decades whether photography is art. Three main positions emerged.
Beginning, many people believed that photography could not be art, because it was fabricated by a machine rather than by human creativity. From the start, artists were dismissive of photography, and saw it equally a threat to "existent art.'' Even in the first presentations of 1839, classical painter Paul Delaroche is reported to have blurted out "From today, painting is dead!" Two decades later, the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, in a review of the Salon of 1859:
"If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, information technology will soon supplant or decadent it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.''
A 2nd view was that photography could be useful to real artists, such every bit for reference, but should not exist considered as equal to cartoon and painting. For example, despite his public denunciation of photography, Ingres' after paintings prove considerable evidence that he worked from photographic reference.
Finally, a third group, relating photography to established forms similar carving and lithography, felt that photography could eventually be as significant an fine art form every bit painting. This group, including hobbyists and tinkerers, avidly explored its potential.
The Issue of Photography on Art
Photography ultimately had a profound and unexpected outcome on painting. Painters' mimetic abilities had been improving over the centuries.
Many painters of the 19th century, such every bit Pre-Raphaelites similar John Everett Millais and Neoclassicists similar Ingres, painted depictions of the earth with dazzling realism, more than had always been seen before. However, cameras became cheaper, lighter, and easier to use, and grew widespread among both amateurs and professionals. Realistic photographs became commonplace by the finish of the 19th century. If photorealism could exist reduced to a mechanical procedure, then what is the artist's role?
This question drove painters away from visual realism and toward different forms of abstraction. James McNeill Whistler's Tonalist move created atmospheric, moody scenes; he wrote: "The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints but the tree, or the flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the rex of artists would exist the photographer. Information technology is for the creative person to do something beyond this." The Impressionists, who sought to capture the perceptions of scenes, were probable influenced by the evocative "imperfections'' of early photographs similar the Boulevard du Temple, shown above.
In contrast, Symbolists and post-Impressionist artists moved away from perceptual realism altogether. Edvard Munch wrote "I have no fear of photography every bit long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell. … I am going to paint people who breathe, experience, love, and suffer.'' Vincent Van Gogh, describing his artistic breakthroughs around 1888, wrote to his brother:
You must boldly exaggerate the effects of either harmony or discord which colors produce. It is the same matter in drawing — authentic drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, color and all, would not be a picture at all, no more a photograph.
In other words, Munch, Van Gogh, and many other artists of their generation viewed realism as the job of photography, and the goal of the real artist was to find a way to become beyond realism—to do something that cameras could not do.
In 1920, many decades after, André Breton, a founder of Dada and Surrealism, prefaced a argument on Dada with: "The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the sometime modes of expression, in painting also as poetry. … Since a bullheaded instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves upwardly for … they at present aspired … to interruption themselves of the faux of appearances."
It seems likely, in fact, that photography was one of the major catalysts of the Modern Fine art move: its influence led to decades of vitality in the world of painting, as artists were both inspired by photographic images and pushed across realism. Without photography, mayhap modern fine art would never have existed.
Pro-Photography Movements
Meanwhile, photographers attempted to develop and advocate for their ain art form. In the United States, these photographers chosen themselves the Photo-Secessionists, since they "seceded" from custom and traditional forms of art. They argued that the artist's considerable command over the image cosmos, to limited their vision, made information technology an art form.
The Pictorialist movement, begun around 1885, pursued a particular visual aesthetic in the creation of photographs as an fine art grade. Pictorialists exercised considerable artistic control over their photographs. Some used highly-posed subjects as in classical painting, and carefully manipulated their images in the darkroom to create very formal compositions. Many of their works had hazy, atmospheric looks, similar to Whistler's Tonalism, softening the realism of high-quality photography. They seemed to be deliberately mimicking the qualities of the fine art painting of the time, and today much of their work seems rather affected.
The Photograph-Secessionists pursued various strategies toward legitimization of their work as fine art, such as the organization of photographic societies, periodicals, and juried photography exhibitions. Their works and achievements fabricated information technology harder and harder to deny the creative contributions of photography; culminating in the "Buffalo Show," organized past Alfred Stieglitz at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the kickoff photography exhibition at an American art museum, in 1910. Photography was firmly established as an art.
Subsequent Modernist photography movements shed the artificial styles of Pictorialism. This included photographers similar San Francisco's Group f/64, who explored combined sharp-focused, naturalistic imagery with abstracted compositions.
Lessons for AI and Art
This story provides several lessons that are directly relevant to AI equally an artistic tool.
When the camera was beginning invented, information technology looked similar a machine that automated the creation of art. No skill was required. Many artists feared and disparaged information technology. They predicted that it was going to destroy high-quality art and put the best artists out of work.
What actually happened?
- A new art course was created: photography. This class has its own unique styles and creations.
- One-time art forms were reinvigorated. Perhaps modern art would not be at all, had photography not raised questions about the artist's role in realism.
- Onetime portraiture technologies became largely obsolete. In do, this meant that portrait studios needed to larn and adopt the new engineering science.
- Photography became available to hobbyists; prototype-making was "democratized." Present, anyone with a mobile phone tin can take a picture.
This pattern repeated with the invention of estimator graphics. In the early days of estimator graphics, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith (who later founded Pixar), tried to interest Disney animators in the new technology. Smith later on said "Animators were frightened of the figurer. They felt that it was going to take their jobs abroad. Nosotros spent a lot of time telling people, 'No, it's just a tool — it doesn't do the creativity!' That misconception was everywhere." Today, estimator animation is an enormously successful new art form, and it relies on the talents of vast numbers of animators and other artistic and technical professionals.
I believe that the same design is repeating itself with the new artistic AI tools. Naive spectators, who do not empathise current AI technology or art (or both), worry that AI will brand artists obsolete. Don't believe the hype. In fact, these new tools open up enormous creative opportunities for art and culture; they do non replace artists merely, instead, empower them.
I explain more in the next part of this series.
References
The historical information in this essay is primarily distilled from ii books: A World History of Photography, past Naomi Rosenblum, for general history, and Art and Photography, by Aaron Scharf, for the interplay of painting and photography. The Alvy Ray Smith quote is from The Story of Pixar, by Karen Paik.
This essay is adjusted from a longer essay that I have published in the journal Arts.
Source: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63