The invention of photography changes the role of the artist

The invention of photography challenged artists to find new ways of expressing their ideas and offered them both assistance and inspiration.

By the 1830s, early daguerreotype photographs were demonstrating the potential of this amazing new invention. Some artists believed it would fundamentally undermine painting. J.M.W. Turner declared, "This is the end of Art. I am glad I have had my day." Paul Delaroche echoed this remark, saying, "From today, painting is dead!" Yet, from the outset, artists derived positive benefits from the invention. It could be more effective and cheaper to work from a photograph, rather than a model. Artists such as Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, and John Millais began using photographs from as early as the 1850s.

Painters were also fascinated by what a photograph could capture. Early cameras required a long exposure, so anything that moved would appear blurred, or would leave a ghost image on the photograph. The crowds in Claude Monet's bustling street scenes are indistinct, while the foliage in Camille Corot's romantic landscapes is slightly out of focus, as if gently stirring in the breeze. These effects were inspired by "halation," in which a bright light blurs the forms of surrounding, darker shapes, as happens in photographs of sunlight filtering through leaves.

The length of exposure time reduced as photographic technology advanced and this enabled artists to see things that were not visible to the naked eye. For generations, artists had conveyed the speed of a racehorse running at full tilt by showing it with all four legs off the ground. This "flying gallop," shown vividly in the Theodore Gericault's painting of the Epsom Derby, became a cliché of racing and hunting pictures. However, Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering, frame-by-frame studies of moving animals, A Horse in Motion (1878) and Animal Locomotion (1887), proved that this was a fallacy, and artists were able to paint animals with new insight and naturalism. The same was true

20 Epsom Derby

Théodore Céricault, 1821

of the movement of the human figure, which was studied in photographic sequences of athletes by Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins, among others.

Photography also altered the way that painters constructed their compositions. Previously, artists had treated their pictures as self-contained units, in which the subject was presented in a clear and balanced manner. As instant photographic images became available, however, some painters adopted a more informal approach. Edgar Degas's figures are often cropped at the painting's edge, their heads are hidden behind posts, or they gaze at something unseen, beyond the confines of the picture. These images are framed fragments of a larger reality and reflect the sorts of images captured with a camera.

One of the most important impacts of photography was its ability to capture detail. Until the middle years of the nineteenth century, artistic skill was judged by the level of detail achieved. Artists were expected to finish their work to a realistic perfection. Now that cameras could achieve this, artists were able to paint in ways that produced alternative images of the world. At first the Romantics and Impressionists were deemed incompetent by many critics because they seemed to have failed to finish their work sufficiently. In time, however, their looser style and ability to offer their own interpretations of reality were valued above mere naturalism. Because photographers could capture the real world, artists were now free to change reality.

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