But photography had its most dramatic effect on painting as a technology of reproduction. From the beginning, numerous observers had suggested that by reproducing works accurately and inexpensively, photography could visually educate a wider public, and so build a larger, more appreciative audience for painting. Photographic reproductions, especially of well-known paintings, became a thriving business by mid-century. Through photographic reproduction (eventually including lantern slides), it became possible for paintings, especially those in private collections or still relatively remote museums like the Prado or Hermitage, to become familiar to a wider and more diverse public. Yet, ironically, that public could remain startlingly unfamiliar with the physical qualities of these works.
Photography has not replaced painting. If anything, the ubiquity of photographs seems currently to reinforce the value of painting, its association with rarity and luxury, although the rising market value of photographs is blurring this boundary. Rather, photographs mechanized a particular way of organizing visual information on a surface, of making two dimensions ‘read’ as three, and in so doing, to defining a single viewpoint. This much was familiar to European viewers of the first photographs. In separating this principle from dependence on a highly skilled hand, in making it infinitely mobile and reproducible, however, photography modelled a world in which infinitely many single points of view could exist at the same time, dispersed in space, but identical to one another. It was, further, a world visible beyond the capability of the human eye, recorded at speeds far greater than that of the draughtsman's hand. Those 19th-century painters who, like Delacroix, greeted photographs as a potential asset to art understood their work not solely in terms of a technique, but as the project of making meaningful models of the world. Artists are still making such models, often real-time, interactive ones. Whether their work involves photography, painting, neither, or both, the world to model now is one in which photographic images deeply and continuously inform everyone's sense of space, time, and self.
Editor: Li Jing
Email to Friends
Print
Save