What were some of the arguments about the relationship of art to photography? Discuss an image as an examples of at least two of these main arguments. (25%)
The first successful photographic process that invented by Daguerre in 1839 received a great welcome from people with replacing painting portraits with its accurate recording. However, some in art world, especially the French painter, Paul Delaroche, said, “From today painting is dead,” and this was the kind of debate that photograph should be accepted as an art or not among the critics, artists, and photographers. Some said the photograph could be richer with detail in any other art filed, and the other said it was nothing more than a simple record of reality or the art piece that produced by artists’ hands or soul but the business that produced by mechanical automatism and could be copied in hundred times. In these situation, the photographers gave up the peculiarities of photograph and tried to reach the pictorial representation. Therefore, the painting-like photograph became more popular than the realistic photograph itself. For creating a pictorial photograph, the Combination printing method was used. People combined individual elements from separate images, and they put them into a new single image by manipulating multiple negatives or prints. The person who attempted this pictorialism for the first time was William Lake Price (1810-1896). Price gave his work, Don Quixote in his Study, Early 1850s, and won high …show more content…
Portrait photography in 19th century was also used as a scientific tools. In the J.T. Zealy’s series of photographs of slaves, the black people in this portraits are all lack of clothing unlike the portraits of middle classes. This series was on purpose of providing evidence for the theory that Africans were separated