PHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY
The development of twentieth-century photographic
theory can be divided into two periods, the first
finding its roots in the nineteenth century and stretch-
ing through to the late 1960s, and the second dating
from the 1960s, through to the present time. Prior to
the 1960s thought about photography had been lar-
gely carried out by those who earned their living
outside of universities, typically hobbyists, curators,
critics, and professional photographers themselves.
As a result, academic research that took place during
this time had little impact on photographic theory.
During the 1960s, however, there was a dramatic
broadening of university curriculums, especially in
North America, with the result that a new generation
of journalists, art historians, and artists emerged that
was marked by awareness of theoretical issues in
academic disciplines such as philosophy, sociology,
and political theory. This new theoretical awareness
influenced photographic theory quickly and drama-
tically. These two periods can be labeled simply the
pre-academic and academic, respectively, and rough-
ly coincide with the Modern and Postmodern eras in
visual arts as a whole.
Pre-Academic Period
Photographic Objectivity
The pre-academic period is dominated by the idea
that photography is an essentially objective process.
When a photograph is made, features of the scene in
front of the camera are mapped onto the shapes and
tones of the photograph according to optical and
chemical laws, thus arguably leaving no room for
the photographer’s subjective understanding of the
scene to have a bearing on the arrangement. Such
presumed objectivity informed much pre-academic
discourse in that it led many to deny that photogra-
phy could be an art form, and others to conclude
that photography could be especially helpful in the
quest for progressive social reform and for the pur-
poses of scientific, anthropological research.
Photography as an Art Form, Eastlake’s Challenge,
and the Pictorialist Response
The conflict between the objectivity of photogra-
phy and the potential of photography as an art form
has its roots in the nineteenth-century early-moder-
nist idea that art has as its essence subjective self-
expression. In this view it is the proper function of
the visual artist to depict, not the world as it is
objectively, but rather the world as he or she sub-
jectively takes it to be. This subjectivist understand-
ing of art poses a problem for photographers with
artistic aspirations, as it is not apparent how the
allegedly objective photographic process can allow
for the required subjective depiction. Lady Eastlake,
writing in the 1850s, was perhaps the first to write
clearly on this tension between the presumed objec-
tivity of photography and the prevailing views on
art. Eastlake essentially presented art-photogra-
phers with a challenge: either show how the objec-
tive process of photography can have enough
subjectivity added to it allow for the possibility
that it produce art, or surrender the idea that photo-
graphy can be an art at all. Much of the ensuing one
hundred years of photographic theory can be under-
stood as a variety of responses to this challenge.
In England in the late nineteenth century, mem-
bers of the Linked Ring Society explored different
ways of responding to Eastlake’s challenge. Henry
Peach Robinson, for example, argued that the
requisite subjectivity could be added by using
photography to depict fictional scenes, something
he achieved by cutting and pasting together ele-
ments from several photographs in a way that sup-
ported an imagined narrative. Such photographs,
he argued, could not be accused of objectivity, as
objectivity is a relation between a scene and its
image, and so cannot be present when the scene
itself is non-existent. A different approach was
taken by Peter Henry Emerson, who felt that by
abandoning actual subject matter Robinson was
straying too far from the proper function of photo-
graphy. Emerson instead chose to depict actual
scenes, and added subjectivity by using the photo-
graphic process in a way that mimicked the optical
limitations of the human eye. In the United States in
the early twentieth century Alfred Stieglitz initiated
the Photo-Secessionist movement, which took the
attitude that photographs could be subjective inso-
far as they became more like paintings in terms
of methods of formation and appearance. Collec-
tively the Linked Ring and Photo-SeccessionistPHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY