History of Photography

In the second half of the 20th century, art photography became increasingly intertwined with commercial uses and with other forms of art. Today artists, like advertisers, designers, and other commercial users, look at photography as one of many media tools available to them, to be used not for its own properties so much as for its ability to suit a particular purpose.

From the years immediately following World War II until the mid-1970s, many photographers viewed with suspicion the mix of commercial and artistic motives that had established photography as a vital part of Western visual culture. As universities and art schools across the United States began to offer courses in photography, the artistic purity of photography again became an issue. Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Minor White, and other photographers taught students that by mastering technique, they would be freed to express their personal vision. Much of their work and that of their students verged on the abstract. Widely admired artists of the camera like Edward Weston provided an example of how photographers could live and work outside the commercial realms of photojournalism, fashion, and advertising.

Meanwhile, the more commercial genres also thrived. Photojournalists such as Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White, David Douglas Duncan, and W. Eugene Smith all prospered in print and in the public eye, while newcomers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn brought more elegance and attention to fashion magazines and beauty advertisements. The introduction of television in the 1950s further strengthened the growing cultural role of photographic reproductions and films. Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, in his book The Americans (1959), approached the documentation of American life with a skeptical, sardonic eye. Americans Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus followed his lead, with candid shots of the less picturesque aspects of society.

In the 1960s the overwhelming presence of commercial imagery became a subject for artists with no interest in photography as an art form. In 1962 American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol began to silkscreen reproductions of photographs onto canvas. Along with pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, they rejected abstraction in painting and sculpture by introducing popular visual images drawn from comics, newspapers, and advertising. They were soon joined by conceptual artists, who were interested less in objects than in the ideas behind them; they used photography as a means of documenting their activities and performances (see conceptual art).

In the 1970s and 1980s museums and collectors began to take photography as seriously as the older mediums of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Photography also became central to the practices and theories of postmodernism, a movement in art and thought that asserted the end of the ideals of modernism. According to postmodernists, originality and individual expression, which had been of paramount importance to modern artists, were no longer valid goals in a world filled with reproductions. There is no longer anything new to create, they claimed, and all visual images are merely copies of previous copies. American artist Cindy Sherman made this idea visible in her series of homemade Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), photographs of herself posing in the guise of various clichés in cinematic history. Since photography is the primary source of such reproductions, the postmodernists held it up as the most important medium of contemporary art, although in many cases they used it in combination with other art forms.

Today photography remains a vital and inextricable part of contemporary art, as well as retaining its commercial and more everyday uses. The invention of various digital means of making, altering, and transmitting images has thus far failed to curtail interest in traditional methods of picture making. Nor has such technology lessened the faith most people have in the documentary truth of photographs. While this may change over time, the history of photography will continue to offer lessons about the development of human vision and perception.