HF The History of Photography 600pág

19 'High art' photography
The part played by photography in contemporary life can best be gauged from the
lengthy discussions and detailed exhibition reviews which then featured in newspapers
and magazines as prominently as do film reviews today. Sometimes the friends
of photography were carried away by their enthusiasm and expressed themselves in Fig 31
an incredibly pompous style :
Photography is an enormous stride forward in the region of art. The old world
was well nigh exhausted with its wearisome mothers and children called Madonnas;
its everlasting dead bodies called Entombments; its wearisome nudities called
Nymphs and Venuses; its endless porters called Marses and Vulcans ; its dead
Christianity and its deader Paganism. Here was a world with the soil fainting and
exhausted; worn by man into barrenness, over-crowded, over-housed, overtaxed,
over-known. Then all at once breaks a small light in the far West, and a new
world slowly widens to our sight-new sky, new earth, new flowers, a very heaven
compared with the old earth. Here is room for man and beast for centuries to
come, fresh pastures, virgin earth, untouched forests; here is land never trodden
but by the angels on the day of Creation. This new land is photography, Art's
youngest and fairest child ; no rival of the old family, no struggler for worn-out
birthrights, but heir to a new heaven and a new earth, found by itself, and to be
left to its own children. For photography there are new secrets to conquer, new
difficulties to overcome, new Madonnas to invent, new ideals to imagine. There
will be perhaps photograph Raphaels, photograph Titians, founders of new
empires, and not subverters of the old.1
Sometimes an attack on photography was equally ill-conceived. 'By invading the
territories of art, this industry has become art's most mortal enemy. If photography
is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions it will soon have supplanted or
corrupted it altogether.' Baudelaire's bitter diatribe in his review of the Salon of 1859
has been taken as proof of his enmity towards photography. But this was not altogether
the case. In the first place, Baudelaire admitted to Nadar that he had not
visited the photographic section of the exhibition, and his article in the Revue
Franraise was in the nature of a general essay against the growing commercialization
of photography and its attendant vulgarization of taste as evidenced by the popular
and frequently inane anecdotal and pornographic pictures for the stereoscope-none
of which were shown at the Salon. Secondly, Baudelaire was no less disparaging
about the bana,ities of the academic historical painters, and the trivialities-as he
considered them-of the naturalist and realist painters. It was these that aroused his