Britain still treated photography as a mere craft as late as 1960
Photographers were making deliberate art from the 1850s, yet as recently as 1960 a British enthusiast founding a fine-art photography association complained that his country saw the medium as nothing more than a craft. America had moved faster: New York's Museum of Modern Art had opened a photography department twenty years earlier.
Fine-art photography is made to express an idea or emotion chosen by the photographer, as opposed to photojournalism, which documents real events, or commercial work, which sells products. One historian credits John Edwin Mayall as its first practitioner, for daguerreotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer shown in 1851. Victorian artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, pushed the idea further. In the United States Alfred Stieglitz was especially important in getting photographs into museum collections.
MoMA's photography department, founded in 1940 with Beaumont Newhall as its first curator, is often seen as the moment the art world officially accepted the medium. Until the late 1970s, nudes, portraits and landscapes in the manner of Ansel Adams dominated. Later stars such as Cindy Sherman and Sally Mann reworked those same genres, while others embraced a casual snapshot look.
Techniques have multiplied. In the mid-1970s Josef Neumann began making chemograms, combining darkroom processing with painting directly on photographic paper, so every piece is one of a kind. Gerhard Richter has painted in oils over photographs. Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall build elaborately staged and lit scenes rather than waiting to find them, and digital cameras allow full-spectrum work that filters across ultraviolet and infrared as well as visible light.
It has become a serious market. Around 7,000 photographs sold at auction in 2004, and prices rose an average of 7.6 percent a year over the preceding decade, with about 80 percent of sales in the United States. Leading photographers issue archival prints in strictly limited editions, and finely printed photobooks with short runs that are seldom reprinted have become collectable in their own right.
Source: Fine-art photography
