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“straight” photographer, free from the arty pretense of
Pictorialism and its Stieglitzian afterlife. Abbott and
Walker Evans both wrote short, infl uential articles which
celebrated Atget’s photographs. Abbott also mentioned
the work of Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan, Wil-
liam Henry Jackson, and the U.S. Geological Surveys,
as the epitome of clean, great photography.
Other avant-garde photography movements were
not so preoccupied with nineteenth-century precursors.
However, in Europe in the 1930s, several writers began
to view photography as the most important visual me-
dium of the era, and they sought ways to incorporate
it into the history of art. Heinrich Schwarz and Walter
Benjamin both turned to the model of Alois Riegl and
the Vienna School of art history. Riegl had insisted on
the importance of minor arts in any historical period:
devotion to a given material or process must be studied
seriously. Schwarz undertook a study of David Octavius
Hill (1931), and argued that the photographer’s use of
the calotype process was the perfect expression of the
bourgeois society of 1840s Edinburgh. Benjamin, whose
1931 essay “A Short History of Photography” is partly
a review of Schwarz’s book, took up the argument, and
extended it to suggest that the wide photographic ex-
perimentation of the 1930s made photography yet again
central to the culture. In his 1936 essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin
went further, and stated that the nineteenth-century
debates over photography as art missed the point: “The
primary question—whether the very invention of pho-
tography had not changed the entire nature of art—was
not raised.” Benjamin’s point was that the conditions
of photography swept away old notions of self-expres-
sion, genius, and craft, by which art had hitherto been
defi ned. His model was Atget, who had systematically
catalogued Paris without any evident interest in argu-
ments about art or photography.
From the 1930s, historical and aesthetic interest in
early photography grew. Many artists and critics took
the medium seriously—whether as mode of expression
or simply as the ubiquitous visual stuff of the age. A
broad range of writers paid attention; by the 1970s there
was a body of photographic theory to draw from, the
history of the medium was better understood, and there
was active interest in collecting work from all periods.
The rise in values for vintage prints in the 1970s led to a
hunt for old material: museums and libraries transferred
whole bodies of work from archives and library shelves
to exhibition spaces and art storage. The Museum of
Modern Art acquired Berenice Abbott’s vast holdings
of Atget material in 1969, and between 1981 and 1985
celebrated him as a master of modern art, with major
exhibitions and a four-volume publication. Other early
practitioners, such as Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le
Secq, also received monographic attention.
A divide in the critical community arose around
these exhibitions: one group of curators and historians
celebrated the over-due recognition of photography
by the artworld establishment (Eugenia Parry Janis,
John Szarkowski), while others loudly demanded at
what cost to the understanding of nineteenth-cen-
tury photography these objects were being fed into
the system of gallery/museum/auction-house, as yet
more examples of great modern art (Rosalind Krauss,
Christopher Phillips, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-
Godeau). The latter writers invoked Benjamin, and
they also turned to Roland Barthes, whose 1980 book
Camera Lucida took up Benjamin’s observations about
photography’s resistance to authorial intent. Barthes
insisted on photographs’ absolute, structural difference
from all other kinds of visual image: the photograph
always “carries” its referent with it, and the viewer’s
relationship to the referent can be intensely personal.
Barthes included nineteenth-century images because
they exacerbate one condition of all photographs: the
presentation of a past moment in time, Barthes’ “that-
has-been.” For Barthes, as for Benjamin, photography
is more powerful than art.
These critical debates continue. Szarkowski has
elaborated a lucid formal critique of the art of photog-
raphy in many books. For him, the medium was “born
whole”: great photographs are generated when photog-
raphers learn their craft, and look at other photographs.
No other training is necessary—any vernacular image
might be a successful picture. Diverse authors have
written against this position, insisting on the social role
played by photographs, and writing material histories
of nineteenth-century photography. Others have insisted
upon the medium’s persistent difference from all compa-
rable categories of picture, and the consequent changes
photography caused in modern experience.
Peter BarberieSee Also: La Lumière; Mission Héliographique;
and Photographic Exchange Club and Photographic
Society Club, London.Further Reading
Armstrong, Carol, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph
in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1998.
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Refl ections on Photography.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bolton, Richard, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories
of Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
Galassi, Peter, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention
of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1981.
Jammes, André, and Eugenia Parry Janis, Art of the French
Calotype, with a Critical Dictionary of Photographers,
1845-1870. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.