Painting with Light

The Invention of photography sent shock waves through the 19th Century art world. Painters were soon vacillat­ing between writing obituaries for their own craft and announcing that the cam­era was a toy that took neither brains nor skill to operate. It was such a rev­olutionary way to produce pictures, in fact, that no one was quite sure how to use it to best advantage. 

But produce pictures it plainly did, and it naturally was turned first to imi­tation of painting; many of the early photographers simply adapted the con­ventions-and the cliches-· of the older art form to their work. Instead of taking interpretive pictures of the real world around them, as 'photographers would later learn to do, they made pictures very much as painters made paintinqs, elaborate still lifes, careful­ly posed portraits, moody landscapes, formal figure studies, allegorical scenes-- and they judged these photo­graphs by what they had grown accus­tomed to seeing in paintings. At the French Photographic Society's exhlbl­tion in 1885, the judges rejected sev­eral photographs-including one of a man cutting his corns-because their subject matter was not deemed suffi­ciently dignified to qualify as art. 

In some respects-particularly in matters of composition, lighting and tonal values-photography learned much from its apprenticeship to paint­ing., When Dr. Hugh Diamond, an English physician and amateur photogra­pher, assembled the photographic still life shown at far right, he was drawing upon such venerable motIfs as the 18th Century version in oils at right above. Happily he had a good eye and was also a good technician. His photograph contained a wealth of rich tones, tex­tures and details that any painter might envy. But this sort of slavish following of painting more often led photography into blind alleyways. Too many photog­raphers, trying to produce grand works in classical or romantic style, dressed up their models In rented armor or bag­gy togas and posed them against paint­ed ruins. In the long run such pseudo­paintings proved only that the cold eye of the camera could devastatingly ex­pose artificiality for what it Was. Most such pictures look silly today. As photography came of age, however, its practitioners began to realize that they could do more than merely du­plicate paintings. Some started to use the camera to document social condi­tions and record informal scenes of ev­eryday life; still others sought artistic expression in compositions of light and form. Henry Peach Robinson, one of England's foremost photographers, be­gan asking himself some probing ques­tions. "Why," he wondered, "should we try to make our pictures look like the result of other arts? The limitations of photography as an art have not been definitely fixed."