For people who believe that money settles all disputes in fin de siècle America, the question of whether photography is art was answered in 1993. That year, Sotheby's auctioned off a Man Ray photograph for $194,000 and Christie's sold an Alfred Steiglitz photo of Georgia O'Keefe's hands, with thimbles, for $398,000.
While there may still be some critics who refuse to place an image by, for example, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange in the same category as works by the Great Masters of painting, the issue seems generally settled, according to Vicki Goldberg, the photography critic for The New York Times, who delivered the Georges Lurcy Lecture Oct. 4 in Goldwin Smith Hall. The lecture is organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and made possible by a grant from the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust.
Goldberg's lecture, attended by about 75 people, complemented the exhibition "American Photographs: The First Century," a selection from the Isaacs Collection in the National Museum of American Art, which currently is on display at the Johnson Museum.
Goldberg is an author who has written an award-winning biography of Margaret Bourke-White, renowned photojournalist and Cornell alumna.
The first time photography was subject to a legal definition of whether it could be considered art was in France in 1862, when one photographer sued another for using his photos, Goldberg related. In its first decision, the French court ruled that only art could be copyrighted, and since photography was not art, it was not subject to copyright laws. That decision was overturned on appeal and from then on photographers could copyright their work, although they did not enjoy respect as artists.
Even photographers' initial respect as craftsmen dwindled after 1888, when George Eastman began to market his Kodak cameras, which allowed anybody to take snapshots. At the turn of the century, as many painters turned to realism, photographers turned to artsy images that mimicked Romantic paintings, Goldberg said. Some of these images in the Johnson Museum exhibit depict nude women draped artistically against trees, enveloped in mist.
Alfred Steiglitz was an ardent advocate of photography-as-art, Goldberg said, but it wasn't until 1910 that the first photography collection was bought by a respected American museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) didn't mount an exhibition of photography until 1937.
The debate still raged in 1955, when MOMA presented an important photography exhibit which the New York Herald Tribune critic declared proved photography is an art form. The New York Times critic, Goldberg pointed out, would grant only that photography is "the folk art of our time."
Life magazine featured many of the great photojournalists, including Bourke-White, and its photos of major news stories like the civil rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War were burned into the national consciousness, so much so that artists like Andy Warhol began to appropriate photos in their art.
By the 1980s, the art market was so flush with money that people began to look for new expressive media; this caused a reevaluation of the work of many photographers, Goldberg said, including works of the 19th century.
Goldberg said photography is still a young art, and she questions what direction it will go in the future with new computer technology. She would not specify a current photographer who is "as good as the greats of not so long ago," or who "has come up with a new 35 mm black-and-white aesthetic."
But digitization may completely alter the way we look at the world, she said, noting that young people, primed by the imagery of MTV, "could be a generation more interested in an aesthetic more guided by computer than by realism."