The Photographic Image

9 programs

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`From today painting is dead!' These words, which greeted the discovery of photography, proved far from true.

The emergence of the medium of photography hastened the development of Modernist art, by clarifying the fact that the aim of art was never mere verisimilitude, and by beginning a fruitful interaction between photography and other arts. The radically cropped compositions of an artist like Degas paralleled effects occurring in photographs, while painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard employed photography in creating their paintings. Much later, photorealist artists (for example, Brendan Neiland) self-consciously emulated photographic effects, and photomontage artists created what were often politically loaded images from photographs. Photography itself, meanwhile, quickly came to be thought of as an art form in its own right, photographers often manipulating their imagery far beyond the bounds of the traditional representational image (see films 660 and 661, pages 213 and 256). Recent decades, too, have seen the emergence of the video camera as an artistic tool, creating worlds of curious, often caustic moving images (see films 618 and 619, pages 184-5).

Pamela Bone Begonia and Butterfly
From the program 'Circle of Light'