The earliest controversies about the relationship between
photography and art centered on whether photograph’s fidelity to appearances and
dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a
practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defence of
photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art.
Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of
reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing,
a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than
painting. Ironically, now that photography is securely
established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant
to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding,
recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring
themselves—anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to
debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that
their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they
simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism:
the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of
art. Photographers’ disclaimers of any interest in making art
tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than
about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who
suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of
art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist
painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of
classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting.
Much of photography’s prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims
with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art
implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960’s. Appreciating
photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded
by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting—that is, abstract art as
developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse—presupposes
highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity
with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting,
reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its
subjects than about art. Photography, however, has developed
all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many
professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as
an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far
that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted
activity—in short, an art. Could you name a few of the Classical Modernist painters