Photography and the Arts: Essays on 19th Century Practices and Debates

Description

Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including academics, critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written? Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualised for art and re-contextualised for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'? Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the essays examine the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.

Juliet Hacking is Subject Leader for Photographic Studies at Sotheby's Institute of Art, UK. Joanne Lukitsh is Professor of History of Art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, USA.

By placing nineteenth-century photography into rich dialogue not only with fine art but with other disciplines, this welcome volume provides thought-provoking readings of both familiar and overlooked images with an attentiveness to the material properties of photographic objects. * Elizabeth Siegel, Curator of Photography and Media, The Art Institute of Chicago, USA * This innovative volume presents photographic history in all its wonderful, controversial diversity. The essays open onto myriad forms of art-making, illuminating crucial debates in nineteenth-century aesthetics. The book's introduction offers an indispensable historiography of the subject. Photography and the Arts makes a valuable contribution to the art history of photography. * Rachel Teukolsky, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, USA *