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tures Were Her Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY:
THE 1980S
A medium linked with low art and popular culture,
photography has historically been considered a sec-
ondary form of artistic expression. Despite the early
efforts of the Pictorialists, photography continued to
be associated with documentary, informational, and
commercial contexts. Its status started to change in
the late 1950s and during the 1960s, when the med-
ium was progressively introduced into the interna-
tional contemporary art scene and began to be more
widely collected, both publicly and privately. This
process culminated in the 1980s and photography
acquired a double status: on the one hand, it became
a luxury object, invested with considerable aesthetic
and economic value; on the other, it continued to
address broader public functions through its ‘‘pop-
ular’’ forms that came to dominate mass communi-
cation. And most interesting, these two seemingly
opposing statuses were conflated by many of the
most successful artists of the era. Other artists con-
fronted photography as both an object of aesthetic
delectation and a vehicle of more traditional social
concern, expanding tendencies that had shaped
photography in earlier decades.
By the middle of the 1980s, photography had
accomplished ‘‘all that was first set out in its mid-nine-
teenth century agenda: general recognition as an art
form, a place in the museum, a market (however erra-
tic), a patrimonial lineage, an acknowledged canon.’’
(Solomon-Godeau, 85) More specifically, the consider-
able growth of the art market contributed to the fetish-
ist dimension of photography, transforming it into
saleable and often over-valued merchandise. Indeed,
in the 1960s an increasingly active market had devel-
oped that coincided with Robert Rauschenberg’s and
Andy Warhol’s introduction of photography into
painting and as leading artists, into the mainstream of
contemporary art practice. Moreover a mass of docu-
mentation—of conceptual art, land art, performance
and body art, mail art—appeared in galleries in the late
1960s and 1970s and made their habitue ́s accustomed
to seeing photographs and eventually to buying them.
Thus a new market developed, one whose prices were
geared more toward high-priced painting than to tradi-
tional photography.
As the market grew in the 1980s, private collec-
tors constituted its most influential force and domi-
nated art-world consensus. Contemporary curator
and critic Dan Cameron summed up the unique
situation in 1986:If the art world five years ago seemed to be dominated
by the galleries—an adjustment that contrasted, for
example, to the central role of critics during the
1960s—it now appears that patronage itself is becoming
the all-important factor in determining the type of inter-
national impact an artist is going to have. Whereas until
recently artists and dealers talked about the number of
works sold from an exhibition, now the emphasis is
clearly on who bought them.
(Art and Its Double, p. 30)Beyond market peculiarities, the 1980s were char-
acterized by a fervent polemic—an artistic as well as
a theoretical one—around photography. The wide-
spread use of technical and reproducible imagery in
the fine arts is considered as one of the main distin-
guishing features of postmodernism, which em-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S