Classic Essays on Photography ed. by Alan Trachtenberg (1980)

(Introduction by the editor)

Photogrpahy is still a discipline which lacks a critical tradition, a tradition of serious writing. What the medium also lacks is the intellectual history of the medium, a history of ideas about photography. History of a medium can be defined as documentations / records of thinking about the medium, its evolving character, functions and its limits, and its social and cultural properties. The evolution of the medium also needs to be read against a larger sociological background in which photography plays a part.

In its earliest moment of development, photogrpahy was considered primarily a new means of communication about what reality was like. Its second stage of development has to do with the medium could be seen as fine arts in a traditional sense. The medium with its capacity for being mass reproduced and consumed was recieved and adopted differently in various cultures and socieites. However, the dominant style among different countries was pictorialism which sought after a picturequse effect in painting. Pictorialism can be seen as an extension of the aesthetics applied to painting, it ignores the unqiue characteristics of the medium. The counter-reacting style is straight photography which eschewed any manipulation of any post-shooting alterations on photographs. one of the parctioners was Paul Strand whose photographs both abstract patterns while the objective identity of the object is preserved.

Also at this stage that application of photography for different purposes expanded. Lewis Hine, following the footstep of Jocab Riis, continued to crusade for children's right with photography. Such an application of photography for socail purposes presaged the FSA projects in late 1930s.