“Photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all,” celebrated writer Susan Sontag asserted in On Photography, a collection of polemical essays published in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. “Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made….Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, andAtget‘s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry.”
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Although Sontag later partially refuted positions established in the book, her initial impulse to enforce arbitrary hierarchies in art is as commonplace as it is trite. Since its invention in 1839, gatekeepers of the art world have resisted including photography within its hallowed halls; perhaps it was too commercial, too practical, or simply too democratic for the cultural elite to accept, let alone embrace, as an object to which they could attach exorbitant price tags.
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Despite its long-standing marginalization, photography underwent a radical shift in the 1970s, catapulting it into the realm of fine art. Under John Szarkowski’s direction, the Museum of Modern Art staged a series of seminal exhibitions and wrote the landmark 1973 book, Looking at Photography, which reframed conventional notions of the relationship between photography and art. Recognizing that photography was not invented to serve a specific purpose, Szarkowski understood that its inherent plasticity of purpose made it the perfect medium for use by artists from all walks of life.
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