Is Photography an Art?

__"From The World Is Beautiful to The Family of Man: The Plight of Photography as a Modern Art" by Roger Seamon, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Summer 1997), American Society for Aesthetics, Haggerty Museum of Art, 404 Cudahy Hall, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee, Wis. 53201–1881.__

Since its beginnings more than a century ago, photography has remained something of a stepchild to the art world. The poet Charles Baudelaire bitterly attacked its earliest aspirations to high-art status in 1859, calling it an intrusion of "industry" into art that had "greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius."

There have been a number of very different attempts to explain the low status of photography, notes Seamon, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. In the 1960s, French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu asserted that photography was considered a middlebrow form because it depicted, or appealed to, ordinary people, whereas "high" modern art "systematically refuses... the passions, emotions and feelings which ordinary people put into their ordinary existence." Recently, Kendall Walton and Roger Scruton, professors of philosophy at the University of Michigan and England’s Birkbeck College, respectively, have stirred fresh debate. They claim that photography is entirely devoid of an aesthetic dimension. The photograph is not an interpretation of reality but merely a representation of it, they say.

Seamon believes that none of these arguments get to the heart of the matter. Although it was a product of modern technology, he argues, photography was a creature of classical values in art. But, with the rise of modernism in the 20th century, aesthetic standards changed. Photography, however, continued to express the "official" values of Western culture. "The beauty and moral dignity (the two are really one) of the ordinary is at the heart of what we might call democratic classicism, but to top-level intellectuals... that ethos is aesthetically heretical," Seamon observes. Yet these were the values on display in the work of the great 20th-century photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Henri CartierBresson—values epitomized in the famous 1955 exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man.

Since the 1970s, Seamon notes, photography has enjoyed wider critical acceptance, as some avant-garde photographers have abandoned "pure" photography for what he calls the romantic aesthetic. Their work, Seamon argues, "emphasizes the eccentric, ironic, allegedly ‘individual’ response, whereas photography is an expression of communal ideals." The question, Seamon suggests, is whether by embracing the romantic aesthetic, photography is losing many of its unique and most important characteristics.