Photography as Both Art & Document

What is AI Going to Do to Art? (Part II)

Date: 16 April 2023 - 21:55

News ID: ۱۱۴۰۴۸

LOS ANGELES (Noema Magazine) -- Trust in a camera’s ability to produce objective pictures was built up over the nineteenth century by emphasizing the technology’s externality to human subjectivity. Fox Talbot celebrated his estate’s ability to draw itself because it removed human interpretation. His French contemporaries, Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce — with equally solid claims to the invention of the medium — insisted on the elimination of the draftsman as a critical step in the “fixing” of nature’s visual expressions.
An existing literature in the history of science traces how the development of the photograph helped negotiate “objectivity” as a neutral conceptual category. In nineteenth-century science, photographs of biological and anatomical samples displaced illustrations as a more trustworthy form of visualization, even if they were less clear. Photographs could be fuzzier and more visually ambiguous than hand-made illustrations, but their mechanical nature helped them circulate as comparatively more reliable.
Framing photography as distinctly outside the realm of human fallibility was one of the technology’s biggest selling points. The maintenance of this idea, however, prompted difficult questions about attribution. If a photograph was truly an automated form of draftsmanship, could photographers be thought of as artists? The production of a photograph certainly couldn’t happen without human operators, but could they be considered a creator more than someone using a machine in a factory?
As with AI-generated artworks, the “automation” of draftsmanship prompted new ways of thinking about authorship. One early contender for photography’s true author was light itself, acting autonomously on behalf of the sun. An early form of the technology invented by Niépce in 1826 required a full day of exposure to the sun and was thus coined “heliography,” or “sun writing.” English art critic Elizabeth Eastlake, describing the emergent genre in the 1830s, referred to photographic tools collectively as a type of “solar pencil,” using light to draw upon the camera’s lens. This was decried — but not contradicted — during the Salon of 1859, when the interminably grumpy French critic Charles Baudelaire skewered photography as a form of fanatical sun-worship.
Baudelaire’s 1859 rebuke indicates that the presumed objectivity of a photograph was not yet recognized as a universal value. He mocked French aristocrats who believed that true art was an exact replication of nature, describing Daguerre as the Messiah of a “revengeful God.” “And now the faithful says to himself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee

of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing.’” Baudelaire contested the categorization of photography as an art form but also the claim that it functioned as a perfect transcription of reality.

Numerous types of photographic technologies emerged in the nineteenth century, each with their own technical idiosyncrasies. Daguerreotypes looked different from calotypes, and all were fuzzy compared to photographs today. Which of these could be said to best represent reality? Individual cameras could consistently replicate certain types of visual information, but this was not yet true of photography as a genre.

Despite the protests of aristocratic art critics, commercial photography cemented itself as a market in France over the course of the nineteenth century. Arguments about its lack of creative merit gradually faded in the face of photography’s mounting profitability. Because of its technical novelty, however, it was unclear whether photography involved sufficient human creativity to qualify for protections under French copyright law. Erasing human influence from the photographic process was good for underscoring arguments about objectivity, but it complicated commercial viability. Ownership would need to be determined if photographs were to circulate as a new form of property. Was the true author of a photograph the camera or its human operator?

In the mid-nineteenth century, answers to this question were hastened by the material stakes. The first legal designation of photography as a creative art form occurred in April of 1862, when the French photographers Mayer et Pierson successfully prevented the sale of retouched and altered celebrity portraits taken by their studio. Because they had taken the original photographs, Mayer et Pierson argued that the portraits were theirs alone to monetize. The court’s ruling represented a hard-won success. Earlier that year, it had rejected their suit on the grounds that photography was functionally automated — the medium was little more than a chemical process for fixing the image of external objects using a machine.

What changed this thinking? When Mayer et Pierson appealed the decision in April of 1862, they used an argument that reintroduced human agency into the photographic process. By reframing photographs as les dessins photographiques — or photographic drawings, the plaintiffs successfully established that the development of photographs in a darkroom was part of an operator’s creative process. In addition to setting up a shot, the photographer needed to coax the image from the camera’s film in a process resembling the creative output of drawing. The camera was a pencil capable of drawing with light and photosensitive surfaces, but held and directed by a human author. Copyright protections helped photography commercialize in nineteenth-century France, but rather than clarifying what the photographic process was doing, this development codified it as both art and documentation simultaneously.

If the court had ruled that photographs weren’t protected because the camera performed the bulk of the work, then an entirely new set of problems would have emerged with respect to the creative process. What of the painter who employed a team of apprentices in a large studio? An engraver that sold hand-made etchings based on famous paintings? Could a well-dressed portrait sitter exert some claim over the artistic process once the work was completed? Might the gardener of a meticulously maintained landscape declare authorship over a watercolorist’s portrayals? Establishing photography’s dual function as both artwork and document may not have been philosophically straightforward, but it staved off a surge of harder questions.

Over the nineteenth-century, most western art markets established some form of copyright protection for photography, ceding that the medium involved substantive creative human input. In the popular imagination, however, photographers were still viewed largely as technicians. By 1899, Alfred Stieglitz lamented the view that “after the selection of the subjects, the posing, lighting, exposure and development, every succeeding step … require[ed] little or no thought.” Human intervention in the photographic process still appeared to happen only on the ends — in setup and then development — instead of continuously throughout the image-making process. Photography won its legal designation as an art form in the nineteenth century and spent the bulk of the twentieth convincing skeptical museum curators why.