The large influence that photography exercised upon the Impressionists is a commonplace of art history. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say, as Stieglitz does, that "the impressionist painters adhere to a style of composition that is strictly photographic." The camera's translation of reality into highly polarized areas of light and dark, the free or arbitrary cropping of the image in photographs, the indifference of photographers to making space, particularly background space, intelligible—these were the main inspiration for the Impressionist painters' professions of scientific interest in the properties of light, for their experiments in flattened perspective and unfamiliar angles and decentralized forms that are sliced off by the picture's edge. ("They depict life in scraps and fragments," as Stieglitz observed in 1909.) A historical detaiclass="underline" the very first Impressionist exhibition, in April 1874, was held in Nadar's photography studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.
know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know what piece of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet—the famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936—becomes far more interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.
Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things. When Thoreau said, "You can't say more than you see," he took for granted that sight had pride of place among the senses. But when, several generations later, Thoreau's dictum is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing's sake. Thoreau still lived in a polysensual world, though one in which observation had already begun to acquire the stature of a moral duty. He was talking about a seeing not cut off from the other senses, and about seeing in context (the context he called Nature), that is, a seeing linked to certain presuppositions about what he thought was worth seeing. When Strand quotes Thoreau, he assumes another attitude toward the sensorium: the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts.
The most influential version of this attitude is to be found in painting, the art which photography encroached on remorselessly and plagiarized from enthusiastically from its beginnings, and with which it still coexists in febrile rivalry. According to the usual account, what photography did was to usurp the painter's task of providing images that accurately transcribe reality. For this "the painter should be deeply grateful," insists Weston, viewing this usurpation, as have many photographers before and since, as in fact a liberation. By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation—abstraction. But photography's impact on painting was not as clear-cut as that. For, as photography was entering the scene, painting was already, on its own, beginning its long retreat from realistic representation—Turner was born in 1775, Fox Talbot in 1800—and the territory photography came to occupy with such rapid and complete success would probably have been depopulated anyway. (The instability of nineteenth-century painting's strictly representational achievements is most clearly demonstrated by the fate of portraiture, which came more and more to be about painting itself rather than about sitters—and eventually ceased to interest most ambitious painters, with such notable recent exceptions as Francis Bacon and Warhol, who borrow lavishly from photographic imagery.)
The other important aspect of the relation between painting and photography omitted in the standard account is that the frontiers of the new territory acquired by photography immediately started expanding, as some photographers refused to be confined to turning out those ultra-realistic triumphs with which painters could not compete. Thus, of the two famous inventors of photography, Daguerre never conceived of going beyond the naturalist painter's range of representation, while Fox Talbot immediately grasped the camera's ability to isolate forms which normally escape the naked eye and which painting had never recorded. Gradually photographers joined in the pursuit of more abstract images, professing scruples reminiscent of the modernist painters' dismissal of the mimetic as mere picturing. Painting's revenge, if you will. The claim made by many professional photographers to do something quite different from recording reality is the clearest index of the immense counter-influence that painting has had on photography. But however much photographers have come to share some of the same attitudes about the inherent value of perception exercised for perception's sake and the (relative) unimportance of subject matter which have dominated advanced painting for more than a century, their applications of these attitudes cannot duplicate those of painting. For it is in the nature of a photograph that it can never entirely transcend its subject, as a painting can. Nor can a photograph ever transcend the visual itself, which is in some sense the ultimate aim of modernist painting.
The version of the modernist attitude most relevant to photography is not to be found in painting—even as it was then (at the time of its conquest, or liberation, by photography), certainly as it is now. Except for such marginal phenomena as Super Realism, a revival of Photo-Realism which is not content with merely imitating photographs but aims to show that painting can achieve an even greater illusion of verisimilitude, painting is still largely ruled by a suspicion of what Duchamp called the merely retinal. The ethos of photography—that of schooling us (in Moholy-Nagy's phrase) in "intensive seeing"—seems closer to that of modernist poetry than that of painting. As painting has become more and more conceptual, poetry (since Apollinaire, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams) has more and more defined itself as concerned with the visual. ("No truth but in things," as Williams declared.) Poetry's commitment to concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem's language parallels photography's commitment to pure seeing. Both imply discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity: wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity.
While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer's venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, "revealing to others the living world around them," as Weston described his own work, "showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed."
Although Weston (like Strand) also claimed to be indifferent to the question of whether photography is an art, his demands on photography still contained all the romantic assumptions about the photographer as Artist. By the century's second decade, certain photographers had confidently appropriated the rhetoric of a vanguard art: armed with cameras, they were doing rude battle with conformist sensibilities, busy fulfilling Pound's summons to Make It New. Photography, not "soft, gutless painting," says Weston with virile disdain, is best equipped to "bore into the spirit of today." Between 1930 and 1932 Weston's diaries of Daybooks are full of effusive premonitions of impending change and declarations of the importance of the visual shock therapy that photographers were administering. "Old ideals are crashing on all sides, and the precise uncompromising camera vision is, and will be more so, a world force in the revaluation of life."