Photo: A History from Behind the Lens

In the middle of the 19th century, 25 years after its invention, photography is still considered as a simple scientific curiosity. But between 1850 and 1860 a dozen of photographers, in France and in England, will get in a struggle to get photography acknowledged as an art. It will be the decade of Nadar, Le Gray, Baldus, Robison, Rejlander, Fenton. They will be the first ones to explore all posibilities of photographical creation and of its relations to reality.

This episode recounts the New Objectivity evolution in photographic practice, the symbol of which is the Dusseldorf school. For the Bechers, photography was documentary in nature.

For almost the entire 20th century, photography was mainly realist. But from the 1960s, "staged photography" was no longer considered naïve or passé, and made a major comeback, enriched by the external influences of film, theatre, performance and sculpture. This photography that was "infused" by other mediums played on the ambiguity of photographic realism.

50 years after it was invented, photography once again sought to rival painting. The debate was as old as photography itself: is photography merely a simple, mechanical "imitation" of reality, or can it interpret reality subjectively, as drawing and painting can?

Criticism of the 1920s heralded the arrival of "The New Photographer", which was a typically European phenomenon. This photographic avant-garde, often politically located on the far-left, was embodied by Moholy-Nagy, Umbo, El Lissitzky and Rodtchenko.

Photography would appear to be extravert in nature, done to show us reality, the world at large and the “other”. But in the eighties, a movement appeared that sought to escape this “objective” vocation, and to transform the camera into a daily logbook, an apparatus of introspection, a personal diary.

1839 marked the "official" birth of photography. Some seek to reduce the invention of photography to an obstacle course from which the shrewd Daguerre emerged triumphant, once the good-natured Niepce had abandoned his pursuit, and thanks to the slowness of the perfectionist Talbot and the discreet Bayard. Photography, which featured myriad technical and artistic possibilities, was multi-faceted and progressive. It revolutionised our perspective and transformed our relationship to reality.

From the 19th Century, painters have collected documentary photographs using them as models for their own works. The artistic avant-garde of the 20th Century takes hold the principle. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, a lot of artists are widely using the scrapbooking . These collections regularly leave the private circle and become a work base.

The alliance of signature photography and mainstream press led photography to become the popular image of the 20th century. The magazines that started appearing in the 1920s - such as BIZ in Germany, Vu in France, the Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post in England, and Life in the United States - broke away from the routine of the first illustrated magazines that used photography merely as an accompaniment for text. With these new magazines, photographs became primary vehicles of information.

Instead of criticising photography in the name of painting, as had been done in the past, painters (from Andy Warhol to Ed Rucha and Bruce Nauman) used photography to criticise painting, engaging in an outright attack on the notion of “fine-arts” and the elitist character of artistic creation.

Will photography survive the 21st century? With the progressive but inevitable disappearance of traditional photography, the question has been asked since the 1980s.