images from their traditional representational func-
tion by reducing emphasis on recognizable subject
matter. Like Abstract Expressionist painters (Sis-
kind in fact was a friend of painter Franz Kline),
White and Siskind wanted to express their inner
psychological states and saw the purpose of their
work as self-expression and aesthetic exploration.
Outside the hermetic world of abstraction in art
photography, everyday photography proliferated, a
development with enormous implications for all the
arts. In his prescient 1936 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ Walter Ben-
jamin argued that mechanical reproduction through
photography would devalue handmade images
because they could be copied and widely distributed,
and that photography was creating a new kind of
cultural object—a portable image divorced from a
permanent context that gave it a fixed meaning.
Twenty years later, Robert Rauschenberg, like ear-
lier montagists but on a larger scale, recycled found
photographs into his ‘‘combine paintings’’ in the
1950s and his silkscreen paintings beginning in
1962, allowing visual information ripped from its
everyday context to infiltrate an art context. Also in
the early 1960s, pop artist Andy Warhol began mix-
ing painting and photography when he adopted the
photo-silkscreen technique to reproduce onto can-
vases found photographs appropriated from news-
papers, magazines, and other mass media sources.
Rauschenberg’s and Warhol’s use of photographs as
starting points not finished works and their adoption
of alternative processes became strategies taken up
by many artists from the 1960s on. Conceptually,
their work connected with Benjamin’s ideas, raising
issues about artistic originality and the meaning,
definition, and purposes of art in a visual culture
that consumes an enormous quantity of images
reproduced on a mass scale. They also presaged a
general move to re-engage art in the everyday world,
a move that the use of mass media photographs
helped facilitate. The later 1960s also saw the devel-
opment of Photorealism, a style of painting in which
an artist attempts to recreate a photograph in paint,
preserving all the photographic qualities of the
model, such as spatial flattening, smooth texture,
and selective focus. Chuck Close and Audrey Flack
in the United States and Malcolm Morley in Eng-
land were Photorealists in this era; more recently,
Gerhard Richter and Sylvia Plimack Mangold have
used a photorealist strategy for other ends.
By the 1970s still photographs of all kinds as well
as the moving images of film and television saturated
visual culture so thoroughly that art photographers,
painters, and other artists had to take notice. By this
time, photography instruction had entered the curri-
culum of fine arts education in colleges and univer-
sities, spurring exchanges with painting and other
mediums, including the consideration of photo-
graphs in light of theories important to the visual
arts in general. Photography moved to the center of
art-world consciousness and was in a productive
dialogue with many artistic forms beyond painting,
including sculpture, installation, performance, film,
and theater. Artists engaged in temporal or ephem-
eral forms such as performance or site-specific instal-
lations used photographs to preserve traces of
temporary works. Some artists in this era turned to
photography in part as a means toopposepainting,
which they saw as a moribund discipline. Photogra-
phy flourished as painting appeared to decline. Con-
ceptual artists put photographs at the forefront of
their practice, viewing photographs not as pictures,
like traditional paintings, but as signs that commu-
nicate ideas, like a kind of symbolic language. They
used photographs to comment on the nature of art,
and on the meaning and use of images in mass
culture. Feminist artists, Marxists, and others with
an activist cultural agenda also approached photo-
graphy semiotically, in their case questioning the
social functions of photography, including how
photographs represent and condition beliefs and
values about race, gender, class, nationality, and so
on. A general shift to ‘‘postmodernism’’ in the 1970s
and 1980s corresponded to recognition that the
images of mass media were not based on visual fact
but on the manipulations of the entertainment indus-
try and consumer capitalism.
Several trends connected photography in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century back to
painting. Color became more common than black
and white in art photography. And where photo-
graphs used to be small (the size of the negative if
contact-printed), contemporary photographs dis-
played as art tended to be large-scale, holding the
wall in the same manner as paintings, seen, for
example, in the works of the German photogra-
phers who emerged in the 1980s, especially Andreas
Gursky and Thomas Struth. Meanwhile, painting
became reinvigorated with a return to figurative
and narrative modes, and postmodern photo-
graphs likewise often depicted staged or fabricated
situations that expressed significant themes. Photo-
graphers as varied as the Americans Cindy Sher-
man and Andres Serrano, Canadian Jeff Wall, New
Zealander Boyd Webb, and the Japanese video and
performance artist Mariko Mori constructed ela-
borate artificial tableaux, drawing variously from
art history, film, fashion, and advertising. Some of
these photographers and others began using com-
puter montage to construct complex illusions,PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING