Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.
For the last two lessons you have been asking what counts as art. Today we narrow the question. Instead of asking about art in general, we look at one specific art form: photography.
The camera is less than 200 years old. Before it existed, if you wanted to show someone what a person looked like, or what a place looked like, someone had to paint or draw it. Today, anyone with a phone takes photographs without thinking.
What changed when the camera arrived? And what kind of seeing does a camera do?
View from the Window at Le Gras by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1826 or 1827)
This is the earliest surviving photograph we have. The exposure took several hours: Niépce left a light-sensitive plate in a camera pointing out of his window while the sun moved across the sky.
Before this image existed, the only way to record what something looked like was to draw or paint it. Think about what that meant. Every portrait was a painter's interpretation. Every landscape was a painter's choice of what to include. There was no such thing as a visual record that did not pass through a human hand first.
The arrival of photography changed that.
✍️ Write here: what kind of seeing does a camera do that a painter does not?
View from the Window at Le Gras
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John Singer Sargent, Self-portrait (1906). Oil on canvas
John Singer Sargent, photographed by James E. Purdy in 1903
Same subject. Same purpose. Very different objects.
✍️ Before you read on, write here: what could the painter do that the photographer could not? And the other way round?
A painter builds an image from nothing. Every brushstroke is a choice. The painter can flatter, omit, idealise, combine things that were never in the same room at the same time.
A photographer works with a world that is already there. The photographer does not build the image; the photographer selects it. Where to point, when to release the shutter, what to include in the frame, what to leave out.