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Movements in
Photography II
Kim Taylor for 180 degree imaging © Kim Taylor, 2009. All Rights Reserved. Has Photography Changed? Good question, especially in light of our Movements in Photography article which would seem to suggest it does. Painting and sculpture have a development which we can see yes? From the first crude attempts at beads and wall paintings through developments in style which may or may not reflect conventions in the society it existed within. Check out the Venus of Wallendorf on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines crafted about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. Hmm, has sculpture developed much since then? In that same article you'll see the Venus of Brassempouy which is dated to 24-25,000 years ago and that piece is actually pretty impressive. Alright, cave paintings from about the same time period? Coloured pigments, representations that are still quite recognizable. OK I guess that those two arts are roughly as they are today, the basics haven't changed, sculptures are three dimensional images carved from blocks of material and paintings are pigment on a two dimensional surface. By this type of definition / classification, photography also seems to have spring full-fledged into existance at one go, so no, photography has not changed since it's origin... Well at first it was a chemical recording of images created through reaction with light on two dimensional surfaces. I suppose digital images are different, in that they are photo-electronic rather than photo-chemical, and they are not always printed out with pigment, dye or silver on paper surfaces, but often displayed on electronic screens. Yet we call it photography so OK maybe photography has indeed changed since it was created 170 years ago. What implication does this have on our "history of... " theories with their chronological marches through time, art school following art school up to our peak of creativity today? Is development, change and chronology the way to go when thinking about art? Give me some time to think about that one while I head out to a family holiday event. ------------ Right, I'm back and I think I need to stop looking at art in a historical context. The development of different art schools and the idea of a progression from primative to modern seems a bit of an artificial concept to me now. This is especially true in the history of photography when you consider its age. Let's go through the history of photography schools and see what we find.
Well, three days of research later and I've come up with the table above. What is glaringly obvious to me is that we can make a timeline of photographic equipment and chemical development but there is no way we can say that photography has chronological movements. Movements yes, but they don't follow each other, rather what movements can be supported by the technology will appear within a year or two of the technology. Where did Jeff Wall (re-created reality) come from? The very first pictorialists of the mid 1800s who roped their relatives into posing for created tableau. Ansel Adams and f/64 the inventors of "straight" photography? Straight back to P.H. Emerson's 1889 book on naturalistic photography which has to be traced back to the technicians and academicians who dominated the photographic societies in the 1860s against which the pictorialists (the art is more important than the accuracy of the representation) railed. Robert Capa and war photography? Robert Fenton in the Crimea in 1852. Travel photography, again back to the 1850s when photographers hauled baggage trains over the mountains to shoot their 8x10 wet-plate collodian plates. Megapixel Madness? How about the Mammoth of 1850, think of the megapixel equivalent of a negative that is 4.5 x 8 feet. Street photography comes from Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand in 1960 right? Oops, H. Cartier-Bresson and the Leica of 1925... Lartigue? Street photography appears when we have a small fast camera that we can shove into people's faces. Digital manipulation scandals? I give you the Cottingham Fairies of 1917. I'm sure you can come up with your own conclusions looking at the table and doing a bit of searching online to follow some threads. Notes: |
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