Photography is a medium so ubiquitous that we perhaps take its presence in our lives for granted. Yet its original public advent in 1839 was widely hailed as a scientific wonder – and was feared as posing a direct threat to the artistic status of painting in oils. After all, now that Louis Daguerre’s invention could capture the visual world in pin-sharp detail in a matter of seconds, then why would anyone spend innumerable hours before a canvas, laboriously picking out those same visual details with a brush and pigments? This course will interrogate the complex and often fraught inter-relationship between photography and the more ancient visual arts. We will excavate the fascinating ‘pre-history’ of photography, in the technology of the Renaissance, and the photochemistry of the 18th century. The work of pioneers such as Louis Daguerre and William Fox-Talbot will be analysed, while Victorian reactions to the new medium, both journalistic and theoretical, will be sifted and evaluated.
The focus will then shift to the 19th- and 20th-century history of photography as an artistic medium in its own right. Here the work of seminal photographers such as Gustave le Grey, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Donald McCullin, and many others will be explored – and the question will be posed as to precisely what, in broad retrospect, the medium of photography has uniquely added to the visual arts of our era?
What about today's photography? What has been the impact upon photography of new visual technologies, such as Photoshop or the smartphone, which could scarcely have been imagined at the start of the twenty-first century? Crucially, does the current availability of highly sophisticated visual manipulation technology, which can be quite literally held in the palm of one’s hand and utilised in a moment, present a new threat to the exclusivity, and even the existence, of photography as an autonomous art form?