Photography

Soon after photography had been born in the early 1830s, endless discussions whether photography was an art or a technique began. For some, the birth of photography foretold the end of painting, drawing, lithography, engravings and prints, but many artists maintained that a machine could never produce a work of art.

Throughout the 19th century, photography was used for many different purposes. Photography was used for the first time for the photographic police files after the overthrow of the Paris Commune (1871). Scientists Muybridge and Marey used photography to break down movement. Painter Degas made use of photographs for his paintings. A great number of unknown photographers set up their shops and produced posed portraits, and explorers compiled albums of pictures taken in distant lands. Photography was ideally suited to recording the problems of modern life. One who contributed importantly to its rich documentary tradition was Eugene Atget.

But photographers consistently espoused the idea that photography was an art. They shared the belief that photography was a set of physical and chemical operations in which the artist played a key part by measuring, filtering and softening matter, shade and light, and specially by choosing subjects and settings. In the 1890s in Europe and the United States, these photographers were known as pictorialists - they were retouching their works with brushes.

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.[1] Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. The result in an electronic image sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result in a photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically developed into a visible image, either negative or positive depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the American photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz responded to this movement of pictorialists by advocating a return to a pure form of photography, with no interference other than framing the subject. The magazine Camera Work contributed to the dissemination of photographs in this school, such as the pictures of Paul Strand.