Technique

Reviewing the Paris Salon of 1859, Charles Baudelaire declared that photography is a medium for untalented and lazy painters. Its value is utilitarian at best, but never artistic. He praised photography only as a scientific tool for its unbreakable accuracy and compared the camera with the printing press that does not create literature but merely serves it. Baudelaire’s resolute stance gives an idea of how the invention of photography shook up the world. After all, every new invention in human history has led to the disappearance of certain jobs and the emergence of others. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight that the production of images became as instantaneous as it is today in the age of smartphones, but in everyday life and science the slow manual representation gradually disappeared into history.

A century and a half after Baudelaire we can, of course, say that photography soon became a medium in art equal to others. A lot has been written about the rivalry between photography and painting, and we can easily give examples of how this has encouraged art as a whole to find new forms. For example, photography freed art from the obligation to depiction, thus paving the way for the formal innovations that culminated in Abstract Expressionism in the mid-20th century. But in the end, such divisions are purely technical. First of all, light still falls on an object, it reflects from it, passes through a lens, gets projected as an image and is subjectively materialised using the chosen technique, whether it is oil on canvas or silver halide salts on film …