Anyone could capture an image; few could success-
fully manipulate that captured image to be on a par
with painting or printmaking as a unique, soulful
expression of a creative individual.
Yet as early as the 1920s, many artists and the-
orists began to question this ideology, especially in
light of the revolutionary political events of the
day, including World War I and the communist
revolutions. In the great disruptions of society in
Europe and elsewhere, it quickly became apparent
that photographs were malleable. The context in
which the image was seen was recognized to be how
the photograph’s meaning was determined The rise
of the illustrated press in Germany and later Amer-
ica, the use of photographs in advertising, and the
burgeoning of the cinema, universally described as
but an illusion of light, quickly spread the idea of
photography as a subjective medium that showed
no more ‘‘truth’’ than any other. In fact, its ability
to mimic what seemed to be the ‘‘real world’’ yet be
unreliable as fact gave rise to an entire new image
theory: that of photographic images as paradoxi-
cal. Many were content to let photography do what
it did well—more or less effortlessly capture images
from the everyday world (as evidenced by the huge
commercial success of products for the amateur
market)—and give photography its due as a sup-
porting player in the drama of fine arts production.
‘‘Photographic vision,’’ the notion that the
human ‘‘eye’’ was now being influenced by that of
the camera lense was first expressed with the rise of
Modernism and the Neue Sehen (New Vision)
movement in the 1920s. This notion arose out of
the interplay between the practical applications of
photography and the aspirations of some of its
practitioners that it be recognized as an art medium
equal to all others, but on its own terms. What
photography was able to depict that the human
eye could not capture undeniably influenced var-
ious modern art movements, from Impressionism
to Cubism. Yet photography’s expressive qualities
remained in doubt even as its subjectivity became
increasingly apparent, especially to its practitioners
and theorists.
As a major component of advertising and pro-
paganda, photography’s subjectivity became har-
der and harder to deny, yet popular audiences for
the medium remained vulnerable to photography’s
claim to objectivity. Its optical–mechanical quali-
ties were still recognized as scientific; what chan-
ged was a recognition that all human activity was
inescapably subject to human manipulation and
interpretation, a legacy of such post-World War
II philosophies as Structuralism and Deconstruct-
ion. Considering each photograph as a cultural
artifact, that is, a product of a particular society
and culture with its own particular set of codes,
directly opposed the earlier notion of photography
as a universal language. This a more politically
driven critique than it might seem; as with photo-
graphy their target is, from a Marxist point of
view, what could be called the ideological super-
structure of society.
The question of photography’s objectivity did
not arise once and then become settled. The issue
has been rethought and revisited in various ways
during various eras. The shift from artisan activ-
ities to the commercial press in early twentieth
century paralleled but did not define the reaction
against Pictorialism that unfolded in the fine-arts
photography realm as early as the first decades of
the century. The ‘‘objectivity,’’ which would be-
come the distinctive mark of mid-twentieth century
photography, had its roots in theNeue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity) movement of the 1930s, a pro-
duct of post-World War I society. The images that
resulted from the ideology of this movement were
paradoxical; many were so experimental or abs-
tract that the average viewer may not see them as
objective in any sense. Yet the philosophy held that
in producing images that could be made only via
photographic means (whether with a camera or
through non-camera means such as photograms),
true objectivity could be achieved, as the process
was freed from the subjectivity of the human eye
and experience.
The quest for objectivity took a much different
path among American art photographers of the
1930s, exemplified by Ansel Adams and Edward
Weston. These photographers believed that
through the use of view cameras, small apertures
and the care in exposing, developing, and printing
that led to the zone system, objectivity was
achieved through sheer technical skill. These deci-
sions, which produced photographs that were con-
sidered at the same time objective and beautiful, in
fact restricted photographic practice to a small part
of what photography was capable of achieving.
The belief that crystal sharp, black-and-white
images that displayed the full range of tones from
black to white were in fact the best, most factual
representations of the real world showed the power
of ideology. These images in many ways could not
be further from ‘‘real,’’ as they deleted color,
assumed that human vision is clear, sharp, and
able to focus simultaneously on foregrounds and
backgrounds, and presented images with degrees of
perspective often beyond human vision. Yet Wes-
ton’s and Adams’s ideology shaped the perception
of what is an objective image in virtually all typesIMAGE THEORY: IDEOLOGY