Style

Paul Cezanne, Bather, 1885

Art moves forward. The history of the visual arts is the history of avant-gardes. Successive avant-gardes. And the changes effected through these successions are fundamental, not mere fashion. This is how art grows. Or at least, this is how painting grows. And sculpture. But not photography.

Photography has not progressed. Not in any fundamental way. Photography was representational at its inception, and it is representational today. With a few marginal exceptions, every photograph ever made has been a rectilinear object depicting its subject in an illusory space.


Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, 1992

Paintings were once rectilinear objects depicting subjects in illusory space. Strangely - or maybe not - at about the time photography was invented they started to become something else. First they lost the illusory space. Then the subjects. And over the 150 years of that transformation, Western painting became something entirely different.

But not photography. Photography has changed, if at all, only in the ways that painting used to change. Before painters realized they didn't have to carry all that representational weight. That is, changes in photography are merely changes in styles. Pictorialism to realism. Black and white to color. Engaged to deadpan. These changes are not fundamental. They are fashions.

This is probably good to remember, whatever style you’re working in.