Fine-art photography is photography created in line with the vision of the photographer as artist, using photography as a medium for creative expression. The goal of fine-art photography is to express an idea, a message, or an emotion. This stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events, literally representing objective reality, rather than the subjective intent of the photographer; and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.
History
Invention through 1940s One photography historian claimed that "the earliest exponent of 'Fine-Art' or composition photography was John Edwin Mayall", who exhibited daguerreotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer in 1851.Gernsheim, Helmut. Creative photography: aesthetic trends 1839–1960. New York: Dover, 1991, p. 73. Successful attempts to make photography a fine art can be traced to Victorian era practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander and others. In the United States, F. Holland Day, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were instrumental in making photography a fine-art, and Stieglitz was especially notable in introducing it into museum collections.
In the UK as recently as 1960, photography was not really recognised as a fine-art as reported by S. D. Jouhar in The Photographic Journal.
Until the late 1970s several genres predominated, such as nudes, portraits, and natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams). Breakthrough 'star' artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Farber and Cindy Sherman, still relied heavily on such genres, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic approach.
In the mid-1970s Josef H. Neumann developed chemograms, which are products of both photographic processing and painting on photographic paper. Before the spread of computers and the use of image processing software the process of creating chemograms can be considered an early form of analog post-production, in which the original image is altered after the enlarging process. Unlike works of digital post-production each chemogram is a unique piece.Hannes Schmidt: "Bemerkungen zu den Chemogrammen von Josef Neumann. Ausstellung in der Fotografik Studio Galerie von Prof. Pan Walther". in: Photo-Presse, no. 22, 1976, p. 6.Gabriele Richter: "Joseph H. Neumann. Chemogramme". in: Color Foto, no. 12, 1976, p. 24.Harald Mante, Josef H. Neumann: Filme kreativ nutzen. Photographie Verlag, Schaffhausen 1987, pp. 94–95., Thema 3 (Stadtjournal) Westdeutscher Rundfunk (in German)
American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA), have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine-arts. MoMA's establishment of a department of photography in 1940 and appointment of Beaumont Newhall as its first curator are often cited as institutional confirmation of photography's status as an art.
1950s to present day
There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to "discover" it ready-made. Photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, and Jeff Wall are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography have opened a new direction in full spectrum photography, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector's market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.
According to Art Market Trends 2004 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004.Art Market Trends 2004 Around 80 percent were sold in the United States, although auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales. There is now a thriving collectors' market for which the most sought-after art photographers will produce high quality archival prints in strictly limited editions. Attempts by online art retailers to sell fine photography to the general public alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional major photographers such as Ansel Adams.
In addition to the "digital movement" towards manipulation, filtering, or resolution changes, some fine artists deliberately seek a "naturalistic", including "natural lighting" as a value in itself. Sometimes the art work as in the case of Gerhard Richter consists of a photographic image that has been subsequently painted over with oil paints and/or contains some political or historical significance beyond the image itself. The existence of "photographically-projected painting" now blurs the line between painting and photography which traditionally was absolute.
Genres and approaches The principal genres of fine-art photography are inherited from painting and include landscape, portraiture, the nude, and still life. Several of these genres have commercial or utilitarian counterparts from which fine-art practice is conventionally distinguished, though individual works often move between categories. The categories are not mutually exclusive: the typological grids of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example, have been received as both urban landscape and conceptual photography.
Landscape
Landscape is among the oldest subjects in fine-art photography, distinct from commercial and survey work in its aesthetic intention and institutional reception. It encompasses both natural and built environments.
Natural landscape Fine-art natural landscape photography draws on nineteenth-century American survey work, particularly Timothy H. O'Sullivan's photographs for the Government Surveys (1867-1879), whose large-format prints were later received as fine-art. Twentieth-century recognition came through Group f/64 (founded 1932) and through Ansel Adams's photographs of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, which came to define American fine-art landscape photography.
Urban landscape Fine-art photographers have engaged the built environment since the late nineteenth century. Eugène Atget's documentation of Paris (1890s-1927) was received as fine-art through the surrealists and through Berenice Abbott, whose Changing New York (1935-1939) followed. From 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher's deadpan typological grids were embraced by conceptual art; the Bechers taught the Düsseldorf School including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff, whose work entered major museum collections. The 1975 New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House brought human-altered landscape into the fine-art museum as a critical aesthetic position.
Portrait
Since the medium's invention, portraiture has been a sustained focus of fine-art practice. Fine-art portraits emphasise aesthetic, psychological, and conceptual content rather than producing a record or likeness for practical use. The portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron described her aim as "to ennoble photography and to secure it for the character and uses of high art", a fine-art positioning of the medium shared by her contemporary Félix Nadar. August Sander's Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts became a foundational work of New Objectivity photography, and Richard Avedon's minimalist white-background portraits were the subject of a 2002 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nude
Photographers have worked with the nude as a fine-art subject from photography's earliest decades, drawing on the pictorial tradition of the nude in painting and sculpture. Fine-art treatments emphasise formal and conceptual qualities of the body, in contrast to commercial erotic and pornographic photography. The nude entered photography shortly after the medium's invention as a teaching aid for painters and sculptors; by the early twentieth century, it had become a central subject of fine-art practice in the pictorialist work of F. Holland Day and the modernist nudes of Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham of Group f/64. Later fine-art nude photographers include Bill Brandt, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, and John Coplans.
Still life
Still life has been a fine-art genre in photography since the 1840s. According to David Campany, the intertwining of art and commercial photography is nowhere more evident than in still life, whose rise to equal status with landscape and portraiture followed the rise of commodity culture. Within fine-art practice, still life functions through the deliberate arrangement of objects to carry symbolic or formal meaning, drawing on the seventeenth-century Vanitas tradition in painting. Pioneers including William Henry Fox Talbot produced still life images that functioned as documents, aesthetic compositions, and proto-advertisements at once. In the 1920s, modernists including Albert Renger-Patzsch and Edward Weston worked between fine-art still life and commercial advertising, and Karl Blossfeldt's plant studies entered the New Objectivity movement after the 1928 publication of Urformen der Kunst.
Street
Distinct from photojournalism in its artistic rather than reportorial intent, street photography developed as a fine-art genre. Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1952 book The Decisive Moment articulated the decisive moment concept and is widely regarded as foundational to the genre. John Szarkowski's 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition New Documents described the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand as redirecting documentary photography toward "more personal ends".
Conceptual and staged From the mid-1960s, the Conceptual Art movement used photography as a vehicle for ideas, performance documentation, and multimedia installation rather than as an autonomous image. Photographers and artists working in this idea-based mode included John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha; the Art Institute of Chicago's 2011 Light Years exhibition credited the period with bringing photography "definitively into the mainstream of contemporary art". The typological grids of Bernd and Hilla Becher were also embraced as conceptual photography. From the late 1970s, staged photographic tableaux developed as a fine-art mode in which the photographer constructs the scene rather than recording a found subject; Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), drawing on commercial and mass-cultural imagery, were reviewed in The New York Times in 1981 as exemplary of photography's post-modern turn.
Abstract and experimental
Abstract photography circulates within fine-art through international survey exhibitions and critical anthologies. The Italian Futurists pioneered avant-garde photographic theorisation with Anton Giulio Bragaglia's 1912 Fotodinamismo futurista, and at the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy's "New Vision" (Neues Sehen) used unexpected framings and angles to challenge habitual ways of seeing. Contemporary cameraless and direct-process practitioners include Wolfgang Tillmans (the Freischwimmer series, begun 2003), Marco Breuer, Walead Beshty, and James Welling.
Overlap with other genres Although fine-art photography may overlap with many other genres of photography, the overlaps with fashion photography and photojournalism merit special attention. The catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art's 2004 exhibition Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 described the relationship between these categories as "a particularly fruitful moment in the exchange between fine-art and commercial photography."