Effects Of Photography On Painting

1 Pages 290 Words

In the 19th century, photography was considered to be the end of painting. Not only did the camera quickly become a painters tool, but it can be argued that the invention of journalistic and moving picture photography freed painting from the need to produce strict academic images of historical events and places and helped allow Impressionism and Modern Art to occur. By examining the history of photography to the present state of modern art we can cleary see how both have effected and forced the progression of each other. Highlighting such movements as the The Renaisance period and the use of the Camera Obscura, The Industrail Revolution, The Impressionists, and will help to better understand these effects.


Camera obsura and early influences

With the invention of the camera obscura in the sixteenth century and the invention of the photographic process in the nineteenth, traditional patterns of visual perception and pictorial expression underwent dramatic transformations. The American scholar and critic, Van Deren Coke, has in fact suggested that artists "begin to see the world through the lens and not so much through their eyes," adding that "the single lens does things to space, does things to the artist's perception." (1)


The influence of photography on painting came about through such activities as the actual operation of a camera, the developing of prints, the making of composite photographs, and the painting of photographs. All these activities, singly or in combination, had sometimes profound effects on painters, giving them new compositional concepts, making them aware of photographic tonality, encouraging overall rendition of detail, and prompting a move away from painterly principles of spatial relationships....