essay hist. art and photography

Art and photography are intimately intertwined. Photography is, for the most part, a branch of art. Using the same techniques and styles to create a beautiful, meaningful picture, or just get the message across.
However, art in the traditional sense has also been irreversibly changed to accommodate this new medium. While for many centuries pencil, paint and stone were some of the few mediums available to capture the world and events as accurately as possible, Photography was suddenly able to do this much faster and more accurately than anything before it - however carefully drawn. This meant that artists were much less necessary for deliberately capturing an image, they were therefore more able to express themselves in which ever way they saw fit. This extra freedom led to the copious art movements of the late 19th century and much of the 20th.

Before the camera, battles had to be drawn after the event, coronations, weddings (if drawn at all), children, anything moving, had to be drawn from memory or imagination, and so were often flawed. Portraits would take several days, and the subject would have to sit very still for hours on end, meaning many portraits often looked rather stiff. Paintings and sculptures, however, could be changed, photographs were often stuck in the form they was taken in, difficult to edit, and always black-and-white. There was, it seemed, still room for art in commercial works.

The changes seen in art became gradually more radical, from the Impressionists onwards. The changes ranged from incessantly busy pieces, to 'minimalist' pieces of art by the 1960's. The industrial revolution had an equally impressive impact on art as photography - though there is a good chance that it was the combination of the two that made the changes so fast paced.

While the whole world had been trudging along working as best it could with nature, heavy industry was making everything faster, better, stronger than many traditional methods and pushing the little guy out. It led to the widespread rise of cities, and the shrinkage of rural communities. Many people were often brought up in wildly different surroundings to their forefathers, and that included many artists. Some found greater solace in open spaces, others wanted to fill them. This meant that some artists became more fascinated, however less 'in touch' with the countryside when they visited it, while others couldn't successfully accustom themselves to the quietness and peace,  and the lack of people.
The advent of the Box camera - a camera that had 100 exposures in it, and once all used, would be sent back to the factory, where the film was developed and returned to the owner - also meant that, as well as making the camera more a accessible to a wider audience, it again helped to make artists redundant.

Photography, coupled with the continually advancing world pushed against art for capturing things; art became a source, not for depicting what was happening as accurately as possible, but purely for depicting what the artist saw, how they saw it - such as Picasso and his painting 'Guernica'. Instead of showing everything as it was, his jagged, Cubist style showed more pain and suffering than the traditional art styles. In short, art became art for arts self.


Cubism opened the door for more experimental works, such as Surrealism and Dadaism. Both new styles found photography a helpful element, where they could take a photograph and then draw from it, instead of from memory and getting the details they wanted to include in the pieces wrong.

Photography was a fairly quick (if not yet easy) way to remember the world around the artist. capturing things of interest and storing the information safely. Unlike memory, the images remained accurate in a way the memory cant. It thus made accuracy easier for the detailed, life-like drawings of some artists, and, through tearing, folding, moving, easy to distort the image (whether to make an abstract image, or a simply more interesting one).

This easy to tear, distort etc image helped artists such as Dubliner Francis Bacon who torn images up to make new images. Taking several photographs of the subject and then taking a Cubist approach, trying to show as much of the subject as possible in the one image, tearing the photographs up and placing them together in a new and, to him at least, exiting order, or folding them to make a new image. Photography made it easier for this artist to abandon the traditions and restraints of traditional art and the reality of what he could see.

Photography also changed advertising, often being easier to make prints from, and, during the 1950s, the source of many prints designed to sell drinks, food, soaps and other domestic or luxury items and appliances. In old non-fiction books, there were often adverts for related items throughout, with a mixture of photographic and drawn prints; which over the next few decades became more and more photo based, leading to pop art (art based on old advertising styles) becoming an actual art movement, spawning Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstien.