ABSTRACT
It might be said that photography no more came into existence to serve art than the printing press arrived to produce poetry. In less than two hundred years of existence, photography’s rapidly evolving uses have become integral to so many aspects of modern people’s lives (Goldberg 1993), with so many different and important meanings, that the issue of photography’s place among the pictorial fine arts can never claim central interest, practically or theoretically. Thus some of the most important philosophical issues about photography lie outside art, aesthetics, and the scope of this article. Yet, while useful in some ways, analogies to print technologies have limits. Artistic uses were, after all, among the aims of the first inventors of photography and its many subsequent re-inventors. One simple reason for this is the close association between fine art and making pictures and representations generally. There is still much truth to the old idea of art as representation, as the extremely high proportion of real or putative works of visual art that are straightforwardly representational could hardly be an accident. Conversely, there is a strong, if careless, tendency to use the word ‘art’ for any process of making meaningful visual images, particularly representational ones. Thus the many successful general histories of photography (Gernsheim 1986, Newhall 1982, Rosenblum 1997) include much photo art history, depend on recognized works of photographic art, identify photo artists, and deal with kinds of photo aesthetics.
