There is a funny story This illustration from Paris in late 1839, just a few months after the first kind of photograph known as the daguerreotype was released to the world, it warned of what this little photograph foretold. In Théodore Maurisset’s imagination, the daguerreotype would cause a collective hysteria, La Daguerréotypomanie, in which frenzied crowds come from the ends of the earth and overwhelm a small photo studio. Some in the crowd wanted their pictures, but, Master Dieu, others asked for cameras to take pictures of themselves — Maurisset showed them loading contraband-like machines onto steamboats bound for foreign ports — and still others gathered just to stare at them. this novelty thing and all the crazy procedures around it. The noise was so loud that it caused a mass hallucination in which nearly everything else in the landscape surrounding the set, including the train carriage, the clock tower, the basket of the hot air balloons, was really anything. box-shaped remote, turns into a camera. As they marched to the studio, the crowd passed half a dozen gallows, where, in response to the arrival of the daguerreotype, the artists hanged themselves. People hardly noticed.
How noisy! How panicked! And why not? Until the advent of photography, painters had a near monopoly on artistic expression. Their craft is considered the main means of concocting images. (Of course, printmakers and illustrators had their own opinions on the merits of their paintings, but painters used to see them as lesser cousins.) But now , those silly photographers, are mostly amateurs or worse, disloyal or failed artists. , will get the job. Upon seeing a daguerreotype for the first time around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche, whose pupils would soon retire from photography, is said to have exclaim: “From today, painting dead!”
The history of painting’s early relationship with photography isn’t quite the same as today’s AI-generated art conundrum. Image generators such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can create an existing picture in ways no other camera can. But compare Delaroche’s cry to that of Jason Allen of Pueblo West, Colorado, who won first prize last September for AI-generated work in an art competition at the annual state fair. . The $300 prize is modest, yes, but that doesn’t stop Allen from gloating. “Art is dead, man,” he later said. “It’s over. AI has won. Humans are lost.” New tools often have a way of making big claims about their impact, and they also give us a chance to see if history teaches us anything about their prognosis.
In the 19th century, painting, at least, did not die. Or even a mild cold. The painters did not lose their jobs, and it was Delaroche who went on to paint some of his most monumental and ambitious works. I suspect that he was never really worried about being replaced, and he and the others added to the anxiety because it was such a sweet little chatter, an opportunity to stomach upset about it. tasteless or simply vulgar by critics, and really good for business.
However, Maurisset’s vision of the mob raging the landscape wasn’t entirely wrong. The number of people who want to sit in front of the camera or look for a camera for themselves is not only immeasurable but also diverse. In general, they belong to a very different set of patrons from supporting artists, who tend to be middle-class and working-class, who previously had almost zero ability to buy or create images. In an era that also included reforms to expand suffrage, early activism for women’s rights, and abolition of slavery (first in Britain, then in America), the camera brought a something of the democratic atmosphere. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave, was so enthralled with its possibilities that during his lifetime he painted over 160 different portraits of himself—more than any other. other 19th-century Americans—in the belief that through them he could emphasize his self-worth and dignity. The camera is likely everyone’s tool (it’s not exactly, but that’s the promise to babysitters like Douglass), and that’s rarely said about painting.
In those early days, the two media tended to have different markets; reaffirmation painters and photographers have difficulty penetrating the exclusivity in both training and exhibition of fine art. Even the most skilled and artistically minded photographers have always had to contend with the low status that the art establishment confers upon their craft. While painting as a studio practice had been a standard college service as early as the 1860s (in New England at least), photography took another 75 years to find its way. fragile place in higher education. It was not until the 1930s that art museums began to regularly purchase and display photographs.
