ABSTRACT
The common view of the impact of photography on art is that it freed “painting,” left it to explore other avenues and ideas. The history of art photography is a history of genres. The old opposition, between “artists who use photography” and “photographers who aspire to art,” which characterized some of the later twentieth-century debates about art and photography, has more or less vanished. The contemporary position that photography occupies in art is intriguing. The mass absorption of photography within major art institutions has been growing in wholesale numbers. Art photography not only exceeds the existing canonical genres of historical art, listed, it has virtually exploded them ever since its invention, as the many books on art and photography clearly demonstrate. The dramatic influx of female artists in 1980s postmodernism using photography also had an impact on the very discourse on photography.
