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Photography : Art Medium For The Imagination

Decent Essays

When photography first began, it was recognized as a medium in which one could capture and preserve a moment in time. Photography was seen as the revolutionary way to document reality; events, places, and people. Soon, though, artists got their hands on cameras and shifted the way in which photographs were interpreted. No longer was photography only a tool to create images of the embodied world, but it became an art medium for the imagination, just the same as paint and pastels. The once honest and trustworthy photograph became a piece of artwork that could capture more than what the human eye deemed authentic. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many photographers began to challenge the common belief that photographs were created to document the world. They introduced artistic approaches to taking photographs, ones influenced by artistic movements such as cubism and surrealism. Instead of only clicking the shutter on what already existed in sight, photographers began to intervene and manipulate the rawness of the images, forming pieces of the world into something of artistic expression, just as a potter molds clay into a figure of art. Photographs had always been thought out and planned, but now the decision-making that once occurred in the subconscious minds of photographers was intentional and premeditated. Pictorialism can be defined as an aesthetic movement in which the photographer somehow constructs a photograph or alters what would usually be taken straight

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