of photography, especially architectural, adver-
tising, and industrial photography, and set the
standard for what was acceptable as a fine-arts
photograph for decades.
The tension between the subjective nature of
photography and those who believed the medium
had authentic applications toward objectivity ree-
merged in Europe around World War II with
photographers like those who would found Mag-
num Photos (including Henri Cartier-Bresson and
Robert Capa) orLifemagazine photographer W.
Eugene Smith. These photographers, enamored of
the possibilities of small format cameras, which
could use available light and come close to the
subject without the subject’s being aware of the
photographer, dictated an entire school of photo-
graphic endeavor. This movement had many rules
that claimed to be signals of whether a photograph
could be ‘‘trusted’’ as straightforward, unmanipu-
lated, and solely reliant on a combination of the
medium’s optical-mechanical characteristics, shaped
only by an alert guide. These rules included that the
image should not be cropped, leading to the famous
black border Cartier-Bresson included in his photo-
graphs to prevent publishers from cropping them, as
these photographers had great conflicts with pub-
lishers arising from the way photographs would
appear in the printed page. Yet this idealism had its
practical limitations: W. Eugene Smith worked
extensively on his prints, bleaching, dodging, and
burning until he got the desired effect. The ability
of the photographic negative to be manipulated to
compensate for less-than-ideal conditions at the
point of its exposure by no means is antithetical to
the idea that photographs are objective. Yet as
these very techniques are most often employed to
smooth over the differences between the way pho-
tography can capture images and the way the
human eye and brain process visual information,
would indicate that photographs in fact are not,
and perhaps cannot be, objective. A further confu-
sion about authenticity and objectivity happens
with montage, which presents disparate images as
one. Now easy to achieve with digital techniques,
this technological advance will create new ethical
problems for photographers.
In the late twentieth century, ideological con-
cerns about the photograph as an objective record
resided mostly in the area of photojournalism, as
postmodernism codified the position that all
images are subjective given that they are human
creations consumed in various cultural contexts.
An example is that in the late 1990s the consider-
able success of Brazilian photographer Sebastia ̃o
Salgado, also a Magnum photographer, led some
to criticize him for posing or otherwise interacting
with his subjects against the traditions of photo-
journalism in which the photographer should be an
observer, not a participant. Yet Salgado also fol-
lows the ideology of the social documentarians of
the early twentieth century, such as Jacob Riis or
Lewis Hine, whose social and political agendas
superceded the ideologies of fine-arts image mak-
ing. Yet the debate that Salgado engendered de-
monstrates the continuing synergy between these
two areas—the developing and perpetuating of
image ideologies useful to photographer-artists
interested in aesthetic expression and those useful
to larger societal goals.
Today’s photography is a very broad field with
applications in almost every aspect of modern life
whether using chemical or digital means. The often
subtle or even arcane arguments within photo-
graphy as a fine-art activity continue to have an
impact on its larger practice. And the practice of
photography in other realms continues to inform
the fine-arts ideologies. The development in the last
decades of the twentieth century of a fine-arts aes-
thetic based on vernacular forms such as the snap-
shot or the photo album shows these ideologies
continued to be defined by those that arose at
photography’s inception.
NunoPinheiroSeealso:Barthes, Roland; Camera Obscura; Decon-
struction; Ethics and Photography; Group f/64; Image
Construction; Krauss, Rosalind; Lens; Modernism;
Photographic Theory; Photographic ‘‘Truth’’; Pictori-
alism; Propaganda; Representation; Semiotics; ‘‘The
Decisive Moment’’; Visual AnthropologyFurther Reading
Allard, Sir Alexander.Jacob A. Riis, Photographer and
Citizen. New York: Aperture, 1993.
Barthes, Roland.Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photogra-
phy. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981, and London:
Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Bolton, Richard, et al.The Contest of Meaning. Boston:
MIT Press, 1989.
Bourdieu, Pierre.Un Art Moyen. Paris: Minuit, 1965.
Debray, Re ́gis.Vie et Mort de L’Image. Paris: Gallimard,
1992.
Freund, Gise ́le.Photographie et Socie ́te ́. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
Pinheiro, Nuno. ‘‘Fotografar a Outra Metade, Este ́tica e
Polı ́tica.’’ In Vaz, Maria Joa ̃o, Eunice Relvas, and Nuno
Pinheiro, eds.Exclusa ̃o na Histo ́ria, Oeiras: Celta, 2000.
Sontag, Susan.On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1973, and London: Allen Lane, 1978.IMAGE THEORY: IDEOLOGY