Introduction to the History of Photography

"The job of the photographer in the 21st century has become increasingly challenging as the practice is an overwhelmingly populist business. Anyone who has access to a camera has the power to become an artist, leaving a plethora of cached evidence on the internet for public consumption. This “found” internet content serves as a vast laboratory for major experimentation, underpinning the concept of post-photography, with endless possibilities for artists to recreate original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras." Fiona Martin (short presentation of the book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore) http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/post-photography / Perhaps there is less novelty here, regarding the context of photography transformed by the new image technologies developed in the late 20th century, in the particular sense that the early impact of photography itself transformed the regimes of vision and impact...

Walter Benjamin, c. 1938 photo by Gisèle Freund The mimetic relationship that photography establishes with painting, drawing and printmaking , the attempt to "elevate" photography to the dignity and the cultural status of the established art forms of tradition, correspond to the initial phase of emergence of both a new technology of the image and a new visual practice. Photography relationship with the established system of the arts was indeed from the beginning a source of cultural anxiety and insecurity. Anxiety that we can understand as the manifestation of an obscure intuition that the invention of photography brought about radical changes not just in image production and in our uses of images, but also changes in our understanding of images, and consequently, in our understanding of ourselves. The total impact of this new form of vision in the system of the visual arts and in the larger field and forms of the visual culture of the modern world would be fully recogn...

"Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering." Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1820, Preface available here If truly historical knowledge can only be retrospective knowledge (and historical knowledge maybe the model of all knowledge), knowledge of the results that only, according to Hegel, will allow us to trace back and understand a whole process of development , our time can be seen as the proper time to write a history of photography. F...