Photography as we know today has long evolved from its humble beginnings in 1840, when Alexander Wolcott, the inventor of the camera first made it possible for photos to be taken and not fade away. Ever since, man has long been fascinated with this simple yet marvelous invention. Today the ability to share a moment through a photograph from one end of the world to the other is an exceptional reality.
Photographers today are more privileged than any other throughout the ages with advancements such as the digital camera, editing tools such as photoshop and an array of lenses to bring additional depth, beauty and emotion to their photographs. But in this age of advancement, the question could be posed; is photography an art or is it simply the documentation of reality?This debate has long been raging since 1839 when the first adequate method of developing photographs was discovered with the daguerreotype. Still Images were capable of lasting. This in turn had a huge percussion for artists at the time whose profession was at risk. Up until this time these artists were the only documentors of events using illustration.
It worried artists as they were forced out of their
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Paintings were created from traditional schemes, attitudes and skills of old, but photographs were simply taken. This raised the issue of a new order and begged the question; How could this automated mechanism have the ability to produce meaningful pictures with a clear point of view whilst also incorporating the artistic elements? The answer unfortunately would not be found by those who were confined to old artistic traditions. Instead the answer would be found, in large part by men who could "abandon their allegiance to traditional pictorial standards- or by the artistically ignorant, who had no allegiances to break. (Szarkowski