How photography transformed the art world for good
Even before the world began to realise just how culturally significant photography could be, it was influencing the way that artists approached their work. Back in the 17th century, key figures like the Dutch painter Vermeer and Italian genius Caravaggio were busy transforming their studios into camera obscuras, drawing inspiration from the scenes outside of the four walls that they spent most of their time in.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years to 1888. This is the year that Kodak released their first instant, consumer-friendly camera, and the art world quickly realised it’d never be the same again . Suddenly, artists didn’t have to start punching holes in their studio walls in order to find inspiration through photography - they could just slip their Kodak into their bag and take photos wherever they wanted to.
Photography’s unbounded popularity allowed painters to break loose from tradition and rethink every aspect of their art. They started to crop scenes, view subjects from unusual perspectives and think about where light was coming from and how it affected the way their photos looked.
Painters such as the French post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton were among the first to use Kodak instant cameras to aid their work, using them to “observe fine details, perspectives and light effects too fleeting to see with the naked eye”.
Pierre Bonnard, 'Landscape at Vernon'
Other painters began to take a more literal approach to the photos that they took and would simply replicate what had been captured onto the canvas. Paintings like Van Gogh’s Portrait of the Artist’s Mother and Paul Cezanne’s The Bather were among the first famous works derived from photographs, and it didn’t take long for others to start employing this approach themselves.
Paul Cezanne, 'The Bather'
Nowadays, the line between photography and traditional art is beginning to blur. Rhein II - a shot taken by German photographer Andreas Gursky which sold for a record-breaking £2.7 million in 2012 - was digitally manipulated to remove unwanted objects from the photo - arguably making it more of a conceptual art piece than a true photograph. In the same year, the Deutsche Borse photography prize was won by John Stezaker, who fuses photographs onto stills of old film-stars to create bizarre collages. Whether this should be regarded as photography at all is open to debate, but there’s no denying that its influence on art is still as healthy as ever.
