Photography: artistic creation or reflection of nature ?

We are confronted with images every day – moving and still, in public spaces and in private. We see them in the media, take millions of photos with our smartphones worldwide every day, and save them, show them, forward them. We will also soon be able to move our own bodies through the imagery of virtual reality worlds.

Art historian Eva Ehninger notes that images are often accorded an emancipatory quality, especially within artistic practice: “They can break taboos and make us think in a way that, for instance, helps us perceive society differently and thus frees us from norms and traditional values.” Ehninger – now a professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since March 2017 and previously Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel – says, however, that the history of photography justifies a critical discussion of its alleged emancipatory power.

Photographs have been credited with having a special relationship to reality. They were considered (and often still are) as objective, unfiltered mirror images of their environment. “The alleged ‘naturalness’ of the photographic image makes it especially attractive for political or ideological appropriation. Photographs can seem emancipatory but they can also be used as tools for normalization or control,” says Ehninger.

Made by a machine, not an artist

The question of whether or not photos are actually art became a point of contention among experts as soon as imaging technology was invented. Photography is said to have been born in 1839, the year that the first daguerreotype was presented in Paris. In the early days, most people saw photography as a scientific discovery. For them, the new technology was very truthful – the images were, after all, thought to produce themselves and replicate nature. Doctoral student Paul Mellenthin describes this notion as “self-evidence”: “The image is no longer created by the artist’s hand, but by a machine.” The photograph as a mirror image of the world, created without the intervention of an artist was considered a further step forward in an era full of technological innovations.

For obvious reasons, the first photographers in France and the UK had to use motionless subjects: architecture, static objects, archaeological views, still life images. Ehninger explains that photography’s scientific roots can be seen in early images taken using microscopes, and in stellar photography. Citizens also wanted to use photographs to record their belongings; politicians wanted to use them to document wars. Portrait photography quickly became popular. A new type of career developed, large business segments opened up, and a mass market began to emerge. The first “snapshot” cameras became commercially available around the turn of the century and were affordable for the middle classes. As well as explaining how to take photos, the instructions also told users which subjects were best-suited to being photographed.

Royal photographs for the people

“With photography developing at such a fast pace, theory formation lagged a long way behind practice,” says Ehninger, who herself investigated the impact of images by studying the mass dissemination of photographic portraits of Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819 –1901). “These traditional depictions of a ruler also exploited photography’s pretensions to truth in order to produce a contemporary image of the monarchy,” says Ehninger. The queen was thus pictured at different ages, in different clothes, and sometimes even as an ordinary citizen. “The small-format portraits could be found in every corner of the empire. People collected them in albums and used them in collages.” Oil paintings had never achieved such a huge circulation.

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