Painting & Photography

Since its discovery in 1839, photography has sought a place for itself among the fine arts. Many contemporaries considered the technical production of an image too uncreative. What is more, photography’s documentary value seemed to threaten painting’s right to existence as a medium with the function of representing reality. A close relationship nevertheless developed between the two: Around 1900, photographers experimented with photographic methods of emphasizing ‘the painterly’, while painters, for their part, adopted photographic principles such as the segment-like character of a snapshot. In contemporary art, if not earlier, the boundary between painting and photography has become blurred. The deliberate play with the distinction between the two mediums and the issue of the reality of an image’s content pose a constant challenge to the viewers’ perception.