ABSTRACT
Until the nineteenth century the institutions in art’s histories categorized the visual arts according to distinctions between media.1 As a result of the industrial revolution it became increasingly difficult to maintain the necessity of these earlier distinctions. The reclassification of made artifacts of all sorts proceeded along lines other than the traditional ones of comparing the arts in order to determine the characteristics distinctive to each. The use value of artifacts, their innovativeness in regard to mechanical or technological methods, and their distance from so-called aesthetic functions served to define the new products that resulted from the marriage of industry and science. Photography especially challenged both the old and the new categorization of artifacts and art because it so obviously exhibited characteristics of industry, science, and art. Initially, in contrast to the other representational media, photography was internally, rather than comparatively, defined.
