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

Photography is now recognized as high art, bringing new challenges to how the history of creative photography is written. Modernist claims for the medium's aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting, while postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive, de-contextualized for art and re-contextualized for history. Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history to open up new critical spaces.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 24 March 2022
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Photography, in its contemporary and historical manifestations, holds a prominent position within the esteemed citadels of Western art culture. It boasts its own institutional network, intricately woven into the broader art world, comprising specialists such as critics, curators, collectors, dealers, and conservators. This extensive cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography, distinguishing it from its commercial, scientific, and amateur guises. However, this well-deserved recognition of photography as high art presents a host of new challenges. How will the newfound prominence of photography in the art world influence the narrative of creative photography's history?

Modernist assertions regarding photography's aesthetic often drew upon precedents from painting. Postmodernism, in turn, challenged the hierarchical cultural order centered around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs straddle the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive, oscillating between de-contextualization for art and re-contextualization for history. Yet, what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for the photographic? Photography and the Arts revisits both celebrated and neglected practices by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history, in order to create new critical spaces. Authored by esteemed scholars in the domains of photography, art, and literature, this book delves into the metaphorical and material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive, and sculptural arts.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350283527