Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought to be so evidently
in need of defense as a fine art, the line of defense was far from stable. Julia
Margaret Cameron’s claim that photography qualifies as an art because, like
painting, it seeks the beautiful was succeeded by Henry Peach Robinson’s Wildean
claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In the early twentieth
century Alvin Langdon Coburn’s praise of photography as “the most modern of the
arts,” because it is a fast, impersonal way of seeing, competed with Weston’s
praise of photography as a new means of individual visual creation. In recent
decades the notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic;
indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography has acquired as an
art form comes from its declared ambivalence toward being an art. When
photographers now deny that they are making works of art, it is because they
think they are doing something better than that. Their disclaimers tell us more
about the harried status of any notion of art than about whether photography is
or isn’t one.
