Did photography change painting?
Today's post can be used as a real life example for AoK The Arts, Knowledge and Technology, and possibly other elements of ToK. There is an associated video linked here, and below. We look at how the invention of the camera, and development of photography may have changed painting (and vice versa).
Did the invention of the Camera change painting?
Until the mid 19th Century painting aspired to a super realistic re-creation of reality - the more realistic the painting the better the art & artist. This was mainly because painting was the main way that we capture a record of the physical world, rich people (such as lords of the manor) would pay artists to produce flattering portraits of themselves, their families, their land and their animals. Then in 1839 the camera was invented, and suddenly we had a new technology that could capture precise and accurate representations of the physical world. No more need for portrait painters, good bye realistic representational art, and consequently we see the rise of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, post surrealism etc. Conclusion the camera fundamentally changed visual arts - convenient huh ? it’s a comfortable little story of how technology changes knowledge, it’s also a little too convenient, maybe a crude oversimplification, or simply wrong.
Let’s dig a little deeper…,
We’re going to have to use the terms knowledge and technology somewhat interchangeably. Where technology ends and knowledge begins is open to much discussion, and not really the main focus of this post. We will broadly accept that technology is the physical tool of knowledge. For the purposes of short hand convenience we’ll consider them as mutually inclusive factors.
The ToK question : does new knowledge replace old knowledge?
The applied ToK question: does new technology produce new knowledge which replaces old knowledge produced by old technology ?
The real life situation: Did the new technology of photography displace, or change, the old technology of painting because it was better at accurately recording images ?
Let’s quickly run through 3 perspectives:
Perspective 1:
The archetypal / crude depiction that new technology supplants / replaces pre-existing technology.
This was the argument made at the beginning of this video - and it was real fear in the mid 19th C:
Lei Qin argues that some painters thought that the emergence of the new technology of photography in the 1840s would spell the end of their art form, she quotes the French painter Paul Delaroche upon seeing a camera said this: “As from today, painting is dead!”.
This replacement argument is often made at the beginning of a new technology - for example as home video machines became popular in the 1980s it was thought that they would replace cinema, emails would replace paper letters, planes would replace ocean liners etc, Sometimes the new technology does replace the old technology (think horses and cars), but often it only changes the use of the old technology. Which leads us to our second perspective:
Perspective 2: New Technology changes pre-existing technology.
Elena Martinique argues that photography radically changed painting and art (Martinique). She particularly argues that the impressionists (such as Monet, Sisley, Degas and Cezanne) were particularly influenced by photography. Photography allowed artists new ways to examine the relationship between space, light and form. Photography allowed landscape artists such as Courbet and Daubigny to depict details such as the ways in which light filters through trees, or how water curls at the crest of a wave. Figurative impressionists such as Manet often used photographs of landscape to inform the backgrounds of their paintings.
In 1851 the French Government initiated the Mission Heliographique, a project in which 5 photographers were hired to document the monuments and architecture of France. Their photographs were later used by impressionist painters to inform their painting, this can be seen in Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral and Pissarro’s paintings of the Boulevards of Paris.
So, this perspective is that the new technology modifies or changes the pre-existing technology. Non art examples might be that planes did not replace ocean liners, but led to the rise of leisure cruises, emails did not replace paper letters but just increased the value of a handwritten letter, digital music did not replace vinyl records, but made the vinyl a niche status symbol and so on.
Now we could get into the definition of the word replace, and discuss the function of the technology in the production of knowledge, but we’ll have to save that for future videos, because our 3rd perspective introduces a more radical perspective.
Perspective 3: Pre-existing knowledge eventually changes the new technology.
After the introduction of film based photography in the 1840’s early adopters of this new technology started to realise that the capacity for photography to produce new, innovative and even abstract representations of the world was far greater than it’s capacity to capture realistic views of the world.
Remember the 5 photographers hired by the French Govt in 1851 - well 4 of them were trained artists. When they submitted their photographs to the Commission des Monuments Historiques it became obvious that rather than capture survey images showing the state of old French monuments they had actually made many artistic photographs contrasting line, shape, form and other artistic devices.
Throughout the 1800s photographers started to realise that as a form of visual communication photography could communicate more than accurate realism, they started to adopt many of the visual design methods of painters to communicate message, meaning, context and emotion. Henry Talbot Fox’s image The Open Door is a conscious effort to make a photograph in the style of the 17th Century Dutch school. In the intervening years photography has developed as an art form far beyond the mere capturing of reality.
So, in this perspective pre-existing or old knowledge changes the new knowledge, and this question is not really about technology, it’s all about knowledge.
The original question itself is wrong (first rule of ToK: question the question). Photography and painting are maybe better thought of as different expressions of the same function of knowledge - that function / purpose being visual communication, or they can be thought of as two completely different & separate forms of knowledge & technology. As such we can develop some analytical knowledge perspectives, these are knowledge counterclaims in the ToK World:
Knowledge Counterclaim 1:
We’re actually not comparing two technologies that produce even similar knowledge for even similar purposes. As Pierre Bonnard argues that: “ “The question is not the painting of life, but making painting come alive.” This perspective argues that the purpose of creating photographic knowledge is completely different to the purpose of creating painted knowledge. The knowledge producers are constructing that knowledge to fulfil different needs.
Knowledge Counterclaim 2:
Verisimilitude - does photography actually reproduce reality as we experienced it ? Is what we know about a scene just how light has fallen on a flat image sensor ? Photography can remove context, emotion etc Arguably the painter better captures our knowledge of place & time by being able to manipulate the physical elements in order to better capture that which is present. It may be that painting is the more representative art form because painters can convey meaning, context, emotion. How often have you seen a photo of yourself which does not accurately represent your experience of that event ?
Knowledge Counterclaim 3:
Maybe the images tell us more about the people who constructed them than about the scene that they are supposedly recording. Both paintings and photographs are constructed in a particular way. The artist & photographer bring their interests, purposes, biases, judgments, culture, values and truth to how they construct the image. The image is actually their interpretation of the scene not a replication of the scene. As such the knowledge created by each technology is knowledge about the knowledge producer rather than the scene captured.
Knowledge Counterclaim 4:
What about the wider context of the development of the new technology of photography ? The 19th C was a time of rapid industrialisation in Europe, material wealth quickly increased, and people started to enjoy leisure time and surplus wealth. Arguably, photographic knowledge was a compatible product of this context. Rather than photography replacing painting, it could be that the social context changed and painting was no longer well adapted for the new industrialised context.
What is clearer than a well focussed photograph is that once you dig below the surface of a convenient, and comfortable, knowledge relationship you find that influence, interpolation and implication are far more intricate and involved than they might first appear.
ToK Teachers can find lessons for AoK The Arts at this link, and this one (on the Arts & Ethics).
Daniel,
Lisbon, December 2022
Works Cited
Duggan, Bob. “How Photography Changed Painting (and Vice Versa).” Big Think, 7 February 2013, https://bigthink.com/articles/how-photography-changed-painting-and-vice-versa/. Accessed 22 November 2022.
Grøtta, Marit. “Reading/Developing Images: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Advent of Photography.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 41, no. 1/2, 2013, pp. 80–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23538443. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Martinique, Elena. “How Did Photography Influence The Impressionists?” Widewalls, 12 October 2019, https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/impressionists-photography-museo-thyssen-bornemisza. Accessed 22 November 2022.
Qin, Lei. “Some thoughts about photography's influence on painting | CCTP 802 – Art and Media Interfaced.” Georgetown Commons, 27 March 2018, https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-802-spring2018/2018/03/27/some-thoughts-about-photographys-influence-on-painting/. Accessed 22 November 2022.
Willette, Jeanne. “Mission Héliographique, Part Two.” Art History Unstuffed, 30 January 2015, https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/mission-heliographique-part-two/. Accessed 25 November 2022.