The Importance of Materiality in the Separation of Art and Vernacular
Photography.
Since photography was first announced in 1839, it has been a medium of duality. It
has been utilised as an extremely powerful tool for documenting, with applications to
areas like science, journalism and commerce, due to its ability to represent.
Photographs created for these informational or everyday purposes are considered
vernacular photographs, meaning they serve a purpose. However, it has also been
used as a medium for creating art, and since it was recognised and accepted for its
artistic potential, art photography and vernacular photography have stood as two
separate entities. But what is it that allows us to separate these two types of
photography? How do we decide what can be classified as an “art photograph”,
especially in a world where we are being constantly bombarded by images more than
ever before? As David Bate postulates in his book Art Photography (2015), “If there
were no contextual information available, would it be possible to say whether a
photographic image was from art or advertising?” (Bate, 2015, p. 7).
Lucy Soutter states in her book Why Art Photography? (2013) that:
“An image is an infinitely reproducible visual form that can be enlarged or
reduced, translated from one form to another, retaining its recognizable identity.
Whether viewed on a page, wall, screen or other surface, a photograph is never
just an image – it always takes specific material form” (Soutter, 2013, p.113).
Soutter is essentially stating that a photograph is an image and a physical object,
which is supported by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, who assert in their book
Photographs Objects Histories (2004), that “photographs are both images and
physical objects that exist in time and space” (Edwards and Hart, 2004, p.1). I argue
that materiality and this idea of the photograph as an object is what allows us to
distinguish a photograph as art and differentiate between art and vernacular
photography. I propose that for something to be considered art, it must be in this object
form, and I challenge the common assumption made both at the beginning of
photography and in the digital age that image content is more important than the
physical form of a photograph. This argument is important as materiality is what
anchors photography in the tangible world and acts as this physical vehicle for us to
receive a photograph. If its importance is diminished or ignored, not only are we losing
valuable context and sensory engagement, but it would also be extremely difficult for
us to separate art photographers from those who are simply snapping away on their
phones.
This essay aims to dissect the importance of materiality in the separation of these two
types of photography. I will discuss the “inherent tension between image and object in
the photograph” stated in the article Photography’s New Materiality? (Plummer, Riches
and Wooldridge, 2011), examining both how this has unfolded historically and how it
persists today. Even in a world where technologies like the digital screen have led to
this misconception that photography has supposedly become dematerialised,
materiality is playing the same critical role today so I will finally shift the focus to the
digital age and explore the relevance of this debate today. In this essay, I use the term
image to refer to this “infinitely reproducible form” and the visual content alone that
Soutter discusses (Soutter, 2013, p.113) and use the term photograph to refer to an
image and its specific material form together.
The invention of a representative “machine”
In this discussion of materiality’s importance in the separation between art and
vernacular photographs, it is crucial to consider how photography has been treated
since its invention and how these two distinct types were established. At the beginning
of photography, a photograph was not typically thought of as an object nor was it
thought of as art. This race throughout the 18th and early 19th century to capture and
fix projected images set photography up to be all about the subject matter and
representation. Art historian Laurie Taylor states in her book The Materiality of
Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era (2021) that “it was the image that
“grabbed the attention and the imagination of a public who had never before witnessed
the apparent ‘magic’ of captured reality” (Taylor, 2021, p.18). This was expected, as
photography truly was a revolutionary invention, but it was commonly thought of as a
medium of truth and truth only, with critic Lady Eastlake stating in her essay
Photography (1857) that it was photography’s job to “give evidence of facts… as, to
our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give” (Eastlake, 1857, p.94). It was
viewed as an objective, factual tool that could provide information and be applied to
areas like science, meaning the image content was seen as far superior to the physical
properties of the photograph. This is reinforced by Lyle Rexer’s statement in his book
Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde (2002) that “the primary social impetus
behind photography was the desire for neutral, accurate renderings of the world,
mediated not by an artist’s hand but by a machine” (Rexer, 2002, p.17). In other words,
photography was not needed as an art form and was all about recording. Therefore,
naturally, the material properties of the photograph seem to be deemed less important
than what was actually in it, the image content. At this point in history, photographs
were clearly not commonly viewed as art, made clear by Eastlake and Rexer.
In Four Photographers (1995[1964]), Art critic and essayist Clement Greenberg writes
that “It is in choosing and accosting his story or subject… Everything else - the pictorial
values and the plastic values, the composition and its accents – will more or less derive
from these decisions” (Greenberg, 1995 [1964], p.183), suggesting that image content
is far superior to the materiality of the photograph and that material values derive from
decisions about subject. Whilst he made this claim in 1964, the view he holds was
particularly prevalent at photography’s inception. It is clear that he believes a
photograph is just about the content and in some ways he is correct. There is no doubt
that image content has always been crucial to photographs. As stated in Photographs
Objects Histories (2004), image content “is our familiar way of thinking about
photographs at the simplest level” and is usually why photographs “were purchased…
for the indexical appeal… is one of the photograph’s defining qualities” (Edwards and
Hart, 2004, p.2). This is undeniably true, as we usually need to know what we are
looking at in order to understand an image. Particularly in fields like science or
journalism, image content is what has given us the information we need and allowed
us to make breakthroughs. For example, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous The Horse in
Motion photographs, evident in Figure 1, which break down the movement of a horse
running, allowed us to understand how a horse’s body moves when it runs. These
photographs showed us that there is a point where all four of its hooves are off the
ground at the same time, which greatly improved our knowledge of animal locomotion.
In this example, whilst the photographs would have inevitably had a material presence,
it is the image content that was most useful to us. It mattered less how the images
were presented and much more that the information was there.
Photography’s reproducibility also pushed photographs to be viewed just as images
as opposed to material objects. It was the invention of the calotype by William Henry
Fox Talbot in 1839 which introduced this idea of reproducibility to photography, as the
process involved creating a negative image on paper, which could then be used to
create positive copies and could be pasted into books or other media. This gave
photography the potential to reproduce images on a much larger scale and to share
them in ways that were not possible with the prior invention of the daguerreotype,
ultimately setting it up for its future of mass reproduction and dissemination. This
potential was made evident to the public by the first commercially produced
photobook, created by Fox Talbot in 1844, an extract of which is evident in Figure 2.
The inventor himself used his process within this book, titled The Pencil of Nature,
alongside text which details the various uses for his new invention. In this book, the
calotypes are simply pasted onto the pages, which, when coupled with the text
explaining how the process could be used, would have shown to readers and viewers
that photography could be shared and reproduced in a way that wasn’t possible
before. The calotype preceded wet-plate photography, which almost replicated the
high quality of the daguerreotype in a reproducible form, and then by other
reproducible processes like dry-plate photography and celluloid roll film, both of which
were more convenient for users (Rexer, 2002, p.17). The further the technological
advancements and the more reproducible processes to exist, the easier and more
available it was to reproduce images which further established photography’s
vernacular uses. For example, photographs in newspapers portrayed photography as
a supposedly truthful medium to an even wider audience of viewers than ever before.
Processes like these meant that a photograph didn’t have to be a unique piece. It
enabled one single image to exist in multiples, which challenges its importance as an
object and suggests that getting the content out there was much more valuable. Walter
Benjamin writes extensively on this subject in his seminal text The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2008 [1936]). Whilst he writes about art generally
as opposed to just photography, he interestingly states that:
“Uniqueness and duration are as tightly intertwined in the latter as are
transience and reiterability in the former. Stripping the object of its sheath,
shattering the aura, bear witness to a kind of perception where ‘a sense of
similarity in the world’ is so highly developed that, through reproduction, it even
mines similarity from what only happens once”. (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p.10).
Benjamin describes reproduction as “stripping the object of its sheath”, essentially
detaching the art from its physical form which suggests it loses its individual
importance. This ability of photography to mechanically reproduce supported its place
in fields like science and journalism, and equally encouraged its rejection from art,
which establishes this idea of a vernacular photography being about information and
image content, and art photography being about the material, viewed as objects.
Photography as more than just reproduction
Despite these assumptions that photography was just about representing and that the
image content was what it was useful for, materiality has always been an extremely
important part of photography and how we read photographs. How we relate to and
handle photographs has always set out how we have understood them. For example,
when we open and look at images in a newspaper, we know we are looking at
supposedly factual, documentary photographs. If we took these same images and
mounted them in a frame on the wall of a gallery, suddenly they seem to become art.
Returning to Greenberg’s assertion that decisions about material are secondary to the
subject matter of photographs (Greenberg, 1995 [1964], p.183), if this were true, how
would we categorise photographs? We have used the material properties of
photographs to distinguish between art and the vernacular from the very beginning.
This is made clear even by the first processes to be announced. As Plummer, Riches
and Wooldridge explain, “From Heliograph to Daguerreotype to Calotype, each
seemed to depend on its own chemical and material constitution” (Plummer, Riches
and Wooldridge, 2011). Examining the daguerreotype and the calotype in more detail,
these were both very different in terms of how their materials functioned. The
daguerreotype process produced a sharp, unique image on silver plated copper,
whereas the calotype process produced a reproducible image with a “soft-edged
painterly appearance” (Rexer, 2002, p. 17), with the details dispersing into the fibres
of the rough paper. Immediately, these material qualities impacted how the processes
were used and what they were applied to, as daguerreotypes thrived in the world of
portraiture due to their high level of detail, whereas calotypes were seen as more
artistic as their lack of detail created a sense of mystery.
Laurie Taylor states “that the calotype had a more handmade appearance is significant
because it demonstrates the ability of the material surface to act as an agent between
the artist and the viewer” (Taylor, 2021, p.24). This indicates that this handmade and
rougher look allowed the work to function as an object, hinting at the maker’s process
and making the viewer aware of the work’s material properties. Therefore, even though
photographs were commonly thought of as just images, their materiality has always
been important and this idea of photographs being objects has always been there,
even if it wasn’t recognised and acknowledged. Taylor also argues that “these two
distinct objects”, referring to the daguerreotype and the calotype, “with distinct physical
characteristics represented the poles between which photography would be divided -
commerce and art” (Taylor, 2021, p.7), which illustrates how from the moment of
photography’s birth, we have used material to categorise art from non-art.
Photography needed to separate itself into art and vernacular photography in order for
art photography to be established. One of the ways in which it did this can be seen in
the emergence of the Pictorialism movement which surfaced in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. In an attempt to emphasise the artistic potential of
photography, Pictorialism emerged as photography’s first own movement and was
crucial in proving that photography was more than just a mechanical reproduction. In
Photography’s New Materiality? (2011), the authors state that “It fell to early
Pictorialism and abstraction … to reject the automaticity of the photograph and make
apparent its manipulation by hand” (Plummer, Riches and Wooldridge, 2011), which
supports this idea of there needing to be this push to make something that did not look
like a photograph in order to establish its artistic possibilities. This is extremely relevant
to this argument for the importance of materiality because many ways that
photographers did this was by considering their materials.
Just one key example of this is Robert Demachy’s photograph Struggle, shown in
Figure 3. While this looks like a charcoal drawing, it is made with this gum bichromate
process where emulsions are applied onto thick paper with brushes which gives the
maker the ability to control how they are revealing their image and give it this painterly
feel. In this photograph, the individual strokes of the maker can be seen which reveals
their process and calls attention to the materials they have used in a way that wasn’t
usually desired in photography. As stated in Peter Bunnell’s article Pictorial
Photography (1992), “a tenet” of Pictorialism “was that in issues of craft or technique,
the act of making a fine photographic print was analogous to the creative and tangible
articulation of materials in any medium” (Bunnell, 1992, p.11), suggesting that this
movement was all about creating something physical and tactile, comparable to the
way in which a painter applies their brushstrokes to a canvas or sculptors mould their
clay. This image and the many others produced in this attempt to establish
photography as art showed to the world that photography was more than just a
mechanical reproduction or recording and simultaneously brought attention to the
importance of materiality.
As David Bate states, “Pictorialism is a rather loose assembly of ideas about what
makes a good art photograph” (Bates, 2015, p.31). As we know that using and
exposing the material to make photographs not look like photographs was how
Pictorialists achieved this, this assertion from Bate essentially suggests that a display
of material is what makes a good art photograph and separates it from the vernacular.
Pictorialism is key to consider in this discussion as it lays the foundation for what we
are seeing today. It is essentially the first example of art photographers exploring
photography’s material possibilities in order to separate their work from non-art and
evidence ways in which photography wasn’t just a mechanical image, which we are
seeing today with the digital age.
The “immateriality” of today
This same debate about image content and materiality is still prevalent today. In a time
when digital technology has changed the face of photography and brought new
questions of materiality, it is commonly believed that it is still just the image that
matters. If anything, this debate that materiality is seen as secondary to image content
has become even more extreme because we seem to be under the impression today
that the digital is not material. As Katherine Fackler explains in her article Of
Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital
Photograph (2019), “Together with their “palpable,” tactile qualities, photographs seem
to have lost their claim to the real. As photographs can no longer be handled as before,
they appear to evade human observers’ grip on the material world” (Fackler, 2019,
p.519). This idea of photographs losing their claim to the “real” is paradoxical as tactility
is required in order to use digital technologies like the screen, but this will be discussed
in more detail subsequently when breaking down these misconceptions about
photography’s supposed dematerialisation. Janne Seppänen suggests a similar idea
in their article Unruly Representation: Materiality, indexicality and agency of the
photographic trace (2017), when they state that in digital photography “the first form
of the trace is analogous and invisible and needs to be amplified before its conversion
to digital code ... what happens to the trace in this conversion? Is it a moment of
transition from materiality to immateriality?” (Seppänen, 2017, p.115). This reminds us
of the fact that digital photos are made of digital code, something we cannot physically
touch, which is where this argument against materiality today originates. It is common
perception today that if we cannot physically touch a photograph, it doesn’t have a
physical presence, which really shuns the importance of materiality.
Social media has had an extreme effect on our perception of materiality and content
in visual culture. Photographs have always surrounded us, in the form of magazines,
newspapers, billboards and many others, but today more than ever, we are simply
inundated with visual imagery, particularly through the constant use of our phones.
Fred Richin goes as far as to state that we are “deluged by torrents of imagery” (Richin,
2009, p.10), which is undeniably true. The term “torrents” suggests an unstoppable
outpouring of imagery is hitting us, which is exactly what it can feel like when browsing
online. With one quick scroll on platforms like Instagram or Facebook, we are able to
completely refresh our feed of information and are bombarded with a whole new series
of visual content. With it being so easy to access imagery, it is extremely unsurprising
that most people do not even think about the photograph as having a material
presence anymore. Photography has become so reproducible and so accessible to
the point where people are craving to see new things and are obsessed with the
content of images.
Digital photography has complicated this idea of art photography separating via
materiality as we are often using the same material, in this case, our phones, to view
absolutely everything. Whilst I have made the argument that vernacular photography
has been about the photograph as an image and art photography has been about the
photograph as an object, the invention and ubiquity of the phone allows us to view art,
entertainment, medical and news photographs in the same way, by swiping, zooming,
tapping and more. Laurie Taylor highlights this in her unpublished article
‘Screenscape’: Immateriality, gesture and alienation in the digital image ecosystem
(2025) and states that “photographs in a multitude of contexts… all live together on
the same material vehicle of the screen, united by their shared surface and by the
physical gestures we use to access them” (Taylor, 2025, p.4-5). In a world where we
have access to both art and non-art on the same physical device, how are we to
separate them?
It is easy to see how many people believe that materiality is not important today in
photography when we share the same equipment and materials for everything, but it
cannot forever be thought of as dematerialised. A different way of thinking about
photography, one which encompasses digital photography as having a material
presence, must be assumed, for how would we be able to view these images if they
had no physicality? Photography has not died a death as discussed by the authors of
Photography’s New Materiality, who consider photography’s “frequently cited crises,
anxieties and ‘ends’ provoked by the digital image” and suggest that the field of
photography today “frequently resembles a panicked crowd” (Plummer, Riches and
Wooldridge, 2011). We are simply engaging differently with photographs in
contemporary life and materiality is still crucial, even if it is not acknowledged by all.
Art photography is still separating itself by being objects as opposed to just the content
we are ambushed with today, but it has become increasingly difficult for people to view
it as its own separate entity when we have become so used to viewing all types of
media on one physical device.
A return to material?
Despite these misconceptions that photography today has become dematerialised,
materiality is still the key factor that allows us to distinguish between different types of
photography and should be valued just as highly as the image content of a photograph.
Returning to Lucy Soutter’s statement discussed previously that “a photograph is
never just an image – it always takes specific material form” (Soutter, 2013, p.113), all
photographs have a material presence. Whether this is in the form of a paper print, a
digital screen or even a projection on a wall, all images are related to the physical in
one way or another, so this notion that photography today is immaterial simply is not
true. As stated by Katharina Fackler, “Touch screens now invite new forms of intimate
tactile engagements with photographs. As they, for instance, allow users to haptically
enlarge photographs, they simulate and go well beyond the sense of proximity
generated by the handling of a print photograph.” (Fackler, 2019, p.527). This
assertion suggests that we are almost able to get closer to digital photographs, by
being able to move them on the screen, zoom into them and see every detail. The
smooth surface and connotations of the screen should be viewed as just as much of
a presentational choice as is printing onto a specific paper type, as the screen greatly
impacts our reading of an image.
Sandra Plummer, Harriet Riches and Duncan Wooldridge propose the question of
what “propels this return to materiality and the emergence of an object-based practice
in recent photography?” (Plummer, Riches and Wooldridge, 2011). Whilst this idea of
photography becoming dematerialised is a misconception as I have articulated in prior
discourse, there seems to be this panic of photographers wanting to create something
that the average person cannot, supporting this idea of the art photograph as an object
as it seems that when we deliberately use the materials to create something physical,
whether a beautifully mounted and framed print or a photo sculpture, it separates itself
from the vernacular photographs that so many are obsessed with taking today. An
example of this can be seen with the 2009 exhibition The Photographic Object. This
exhibition showcases art photographs as objects and photography’s material potential,
featuring work from artists like Wolfgang Tillmans, who physically manipulates by
folding and creasing his photographs, Maurizio Anzeri, known for stitching into his
work, Gerhard Richter, who paints thick layers of oil paint on top of his photographs
and Walead Beshty, whose work will be dissected in more detail subsequently. The
aim of this exhibition was to contrast the “advent of digital photography” and the
“current state of image saturation” with a “physical or tactile quality of experience” (The
Photographer’s Gallery, 2009, p.4), directly supporting this idea of art photographers
relying on the materiality of their work and considering how their work functions as an
object to separate it from the mass of vernacular imagery surrounding us.
In Lucy Soutter's text Why Art Photography (2013) and Charlotte Cotton’s The
Photograph as Contemporary Art (2014), both of them discuss the work of Walead
Beshty, who is an interesting example to examine as the materiality of his work could
almost be considered the subject matter. Beshty is a contemporary photographer well
known for his photograms, which could be considered “strong declarations of the
unique materiality of photography” (Cotton, 2014, p.230). He creates his photograms,
an example of which can be seen in Figure 4, by folding large sheets of photographic
paper in the darkroom into three-dimensional shapes, before exposing them to light.
Therefore, his work speaks about and showcases a process of making, which could
be compared to the work made during the pictorialism movement as each of the folds,
creases and small tears in the paper are on display for the viewer to inspect, in the
same way that viewers could see the brush strokes in Robert Demachy’s Struggle,
discussed earlier.
What I find particularly interesting in this specific example is that even though this
piece is this declaration of materiality, which speaks about the sculptural and threedimensional
nature of his materials, he has still mounted this and presented it in a
white frame. This quite traditional presentation indicates that the materiality of the
paper and the process of making is also his content, which greatly opposes
Greenberg’s statement that form “works best when it barely succeeds in converting its
subject into art” (Greenberg, 1995 [1964], p183). This example is extremely relevant
to this discussion as Beshty’s photograms are a clear example of art photographs
being objects. It functions clearly as a three-dimensional form which reveals the
sculptural processes of the maker and relies on materiality in order to function as an
art photograph. In other words, Beshty’s process and materiality are his art.
No one is putting their phone screen on the wall in a photography exhibition space,
they are still printing their images out and presenting them in frames. In fact, it is
difficult to think of many examples of photographers using screens to display stills not
videos. The ‘durational photographs’ presented on screens by Owen Kydd could be
considered an example of this as the movement in his work is so minimal that it is
barely perceptible, creating the illusion of still photographs. One example of this is
evident in Figure 5, titled Knife, which features a knife laying still with only reflections
on it changing intermittently. Often, a single wire hangs from the screens, making
viewers aware that they are viewing a digital screen, not a print on the wall. However,
in almost all of his work, there is some kind of movement which makes them video
pieces. Video functions differently in this discussion as there are limited ways of
presenting it, other than the digital screen and as a projection. Stills however, have the
ability to be printed out onto almost any material, and few photographers are utilising
the screen as a way of displaying these. We are therefore still using materiality to
separate art photography from everything else, so this argument that materiality is less
important to a photograph than the image content stands incorrect.
Having examined this example where the materiality has become the subject matter,
I finally turn to the work of JR to exemplify and dissect the importance of materiality in
the separation of art and non-art photography. Some of French photographer and
graffiti artist JR’s work very clearly displays materiality’s role in the definition of art
photography, separating it from what we might consider to be vernacular photography.
His work is often political and holds a powerful meaning, bringing people together in
unconventional ways, yet if the image content was taken out of its context and if its
material properties were removed, they would look rather like vernacular photographs.
One example of this is his Face 2 Face series titled Israël, Palestine, a section of which
can be seen in Figure 6. In this series, JR and Marc Berrebi took portraits of both
Israelis and Palestinians, before pasting them face to face at a large scale onto walls
around cities in both Israel and Palestine to demonstrate the similarities between them
and to show that they are all people. Whilst this series deals with extremely important
and serious political concerns, without the material properties and the process of
pasting them onto the walls, the image content, essentially selfies, could be read as
vernacular. The images themselves feature these people pulling faces at the camera
and if we saw these whilst scrolling Instagram, would we think of them as anything
more than vernacular photographs? Returning to David Bates question asking whether
we would be able to differentiate art photographs from advertising, essentially non-art,
“if there were no contextual information available” (Bate, 2015, p.7), in this case of
JR’s work, would we necessarily know this was art without its material properties?
In his 2009 book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, author Geoff Dyer discusses how
the materiality of a photograph can transform something very ordinary into art. He
boldly states “Blow ’em up big enough and they looked … Well, they looked like shit,
frankly, but they looked like art too” (Dyer, 2009, p.103). Whilst this quote is amusing
and extremely frank, it supports this idea of the art photograph being all about this
object form. The minute the physical properties of an image are considered, even the
most banal moments are transformed into art. Whilst information is central to
vernacular photography, art photographs are therefore very clearly about the object
form.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I propose the question, what is photography without the physical? What
would we be looking at if we removed everything physical from a photograph? I find it
extremely difficult to think of any examples of any kind of photography that exists
without some kind of material involved. It wouldn’t be an image on our phones as the
phone screen is still a physical object that we interact with. One could argue that the
answer to this question would be NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which use blockchain
technology to validate ownership of a digital artwork. Author Bobby Hundreds
compares NFTs in his 2023 book NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs are the Future to a “house
deed or art certificate” (Hundreds, 2023, p.9), but whilst these serve as records of
authenticity for physical assets, digital NFTs do so for non-tangible assets. These are
unique and are essentially digital files that represent ownership with no actual
physicality. But even in this case, the digital artworks must surely still be viewed
physically. There must be physical, tangible material involved like screens, projectors
or even virtual reality technology to view the art, so can even this really be considered
‘immaterial’?
Materiality is essential within photography as it physically connects us to a photograph
or piece of work. The way we handle photographs and how we use our bodies to
interact with them affects how we understand them greatly and even though what we
are looking at, the image content, is still very important, photography is about more
than just vision. It is a medium that, to me, requires all of our senses for full
comprehension. We must start considering photographs as both images and objects,
as their material forms, whether printed on a rough paper in a frame, presented on a
screen or even projected, have the ability to change the way we read the image as
well as how we categorise it. An art photograph has always been about the object form
and still is today, so materiality’s importance cannot go ignored. As Joanna Sassoon
states in her essay Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2004),
it is up to those interested in photography’s materiality to “ensure the survival of
photographic materiality and meaning in the age of digital reproduction” (Sassoon,
2004, p.201), so we must, now more than ever, not ignore its significance.
I therefore conclude by turning to the future. In an age where we are looking at all
kinds of visual imagery on these small screens that we take everywhere with us, the
distinction between what we consider to be art and what we consider to just be
information is increasingly dissolving. As photography continues to grow in
accessibility through digitisation, art photography is moving forward by looking back.
Analogue technologies, alternative processes and photo sculptures are thriving in
photography today as it is almost a way for art photographers to prove their skill and
put work into their photographs that the average person is not able to. As technologies
like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and even these NFTs continue to grow in the
world of photography today, I find myself wondering what the future of art photography
will look like. Will the ubiquitous phone screen ever be considered “material” enough
to be used alone to exhibit in galleries and how will art photographers continue to
navigate the challenges of these technological advancements?
List of Illustrations
Figure 1: Muybridge, E. (1878). The Horse in Motion. [online image]. Available from:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-19th-centuryphotographer-
first-gif-galloping-horse-180970990/. [Accessed 21 December 2024].
Figure 2: Talbot, W.H.F. (1844-46). Articles of China, Plate 3 from The Pencil of
Nature. [online image of photobook]. Available from:
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/pencil-of-nature/. [Accessed 21 December
2024].
Figure 3: Demachy, R. (1904). Struggle. [halftone print]. Available from:
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/11458/struggle-robert-demachy. [Accessed 29
December 2024].
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