Linnea Havener - Reading Assignment

This article talks about the development of photography and how many artists started to switch from painting to photography because it was an easier way to record an image. Beginning photographs were taken both by skilled photographers as well as amateurs who improvised or made mistakes. A big difference between painting and photography was that paintings usually showed something the artist viewed as important whereas the subject matter in photographs included everything.

The photographer had to learn that what he was looking at and what ended up being in his photo were different things and that the photograph was not reality even if it looked like it. The common person however believed that photographs always told the truth and that sometimes our eyes would trick us so the only way to see reality was through the photo. In a sense that is correct because a photograph of a scene can last longer than the person who say that same scene. Photographs then become the way we remember things and become reality by being the last existing evidence.

Because of the development of photography, narrative painting’s popularity decreased. Something both paintings and photography have in common is that they are just a snapshot of a scene and cannot tell the viewer the whole story of what was happening before or after. Since photographs couldn’t be used to tell a story, it was used as symbols instead.

The edges of a photo help tell the viewer what is important as well as creating a relationship between the subject matter than wouldn’t necessarily be identified if the scene were unframed or framed in a different place. Back in the day, photographers could not crop their photos so the landscape they saw when they took the photo is what would fill the whole photo frame instead of allowing them to crop the photo to change the focus.

Photographs show little segments of time that always show the present that they were created in. Photographs that had blurry subjects due to movement and a slow shutter speed were thought of negatively and as a mistake although time-lapse paintings were still appreciated. Once faster shutter speeds were created, capturing tiny moments of time while an object was moving became a fascination for photographers.

By using different vantage points, photographers are able to change reality. Although the photographer has some control over how they take the photo, the end result is still somewhat uncontrollable. Photography has also affected modern painters as well as constantly affecting the development of photography.

I thought this article was interesting because it helped explain the history of photography and how it has developed over time. It was also interesting how the author tied in painting to the process of photography and although the connection was definitely clear, it would have been interesting to see how other medium might have also been influenced by the development of photography and vice versa. I think that I might have been able to understand this paper a little better if I had a bigger degree of background knowledge on photography. Since I have never used photo plates to take photos, it was hard to picture them when the author talked about framing and cropping photographs back in the old days. If I had had more background knowledge on the subject I might have better been able to understand and picture what the author was referring to.