Before photography was invented, only rich people could afford a portrait of themselves, painted or sculpted. This changed in 1850, the photographer took over the domain of the portraits. It is a fun fact that the scientific knowledge of photography was available already a long time before the invention; the relevant optics and chemistry were well known. Although the painters where excellent at their job, they felt threatened by photography. In the early days of photography, painters started to make photographs to help them in their pre-painting studies. For example, they took pictures of individual people they had to paint in a group portrait later.
Photography as Art
Far in the 20th century, almost a hundred years after the invention, photography was finally accepted as a true form of art and from then on, there were exhibitions. Analogous to developments in filming, there were two types of photography:
Documentary and press photography: in these forms, the emphasis is capturing/recording the real world and true events.
Staged photography: the photographer captures what he wants to capture. Everything is carefully staged and nothing is left to chance.
Of course many mixed forms came into existence soon, but this is still the most basic division in types of photography. A recent development in exhibitions is that the shots are presented in a monumental size and in limited editions. It’s almost like the photographers want is to forget the time that photos were collected in small albums.
Possibilities in Photography
Since the invention of photography there have been artists testing the possibilities of photography. As the poet Alphonse de Lamartine said “photography is more than an art, it’s a solar phenomenon, in which the artist works together with the sun”. However, artists kept searching for new applications of the technique, and many different genres came into existence. Nowadays, photography obtains at least as much attention as painting. Some art critics even say that photography has outgrown the art of painting. What is true at least is that photography provides for many prestigious exhibitions, in many different genres. There are also prizes to be won with photography, like the Pulitzer Price for Feature Photography and the Pulitzer Price for Breaking News Photography. The first one is for (black and white) reportage photography and the second one, as the name suggests, is for the photo that is best at summarizing the most important news fact of the year.