Questions about knowledge are not, historically, photography’s first line of
defense. The earliest controversies center on the question of whether
photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine did not
prevent it from being a fine art—as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm
of science, and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling kinds
of information was obvious from the beginning. Photographers only started
worrying about what they knew, and what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a
photograph supplies, after photography was accepted as an art.) For about a
century the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish
it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical
copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against
ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.
Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make. Since photography
has become so entirely respectable as a branch of the fine arts, they no longer
seek the shelter that the notion of art has intermittently given the
photographic enterprise.
