Fine art photography emerged as a reaction against photography's documentary uses and as a move towards emphasizing aesthetic form over social context. Key figures like Alfred Stieglitz promoted photography as an art focused on composition, tone, and using the gallery space to elevate photographs to an art status. Over time, fine art photography incorporated more genres and subjects while still emphasizing the formal qualities of an image.

1. Fine Art Photography

2. • “Photography is not art, but can be
made into art” - De Zayas 1913
•Reaction against photography's use by painters (i.e.
Courbet) to help them paint
•Reaction against the documentary tradition of late 18th and
19th C – move away from a Humanist or people/societal
centred approach
•Linking the aesthetic ethos of art (fascination with
form, tone, light, colour)
Fine art takes in
all other genres!

3. • Photos began to
develop own codes
as art; no
manipulation of
reality-straight-pure-
form-no reference
to the subject as
such
• Composition is more
important than
context
• Alfred Stieglitz;
driving force behind
fine art photography

4. • Photographer
does not
record, but
creates
• Landscapes, as
popular theme
link to higher
ideals
• Stieglitz’s
Equivalents
series seek ideal
form and were
displayed in wide
white mounts to
emphasise purity

5. •Stieglitz was
committed to the
gallery as an ideal
•Gallery’s
contextualised art
photographer against
the wider history of art
•An art print gains
value from being hung
in an opposite way to a
documentary imaged
that is mass produced
•Art photography is
often envisaged as
such

6. • “The fullest
realisation of the
potential of the
subject through
the use of
straight
photographic
methods” - Paul
Strand

7. • Edward Weston:
Emphasis on form
• Body transcends
into natural shapes
• No longer a human
or cultural product
but part of the
wider
metaphysical
(almost spiritual)
world of shape
and form that
artists aspired to

9. • The nude continues to be a seminal subject
for fine art photographers
Ruth Bernhard Sylvie Blum

10. • Ansel Adams
keeps fine
arts concern
with purity
and form and
makes the
ordinary into
something
unique

11. His
landscapes
follow
formal
conventions
of painting
whilst giving
unique
photographi
c intensity

12. • John Paul Edwards & William Van Dyke were contemporaries of
Adams and Weston and together were some of the members of f.64;
a group dedicated to intense scrutiny of the world through the lens
and in a way that moved against earlier pictorial or painterly styles

13. Once photographed, the
object transcends
everyday to become art
• Imogen
Cunningham

14. • Other art
photographers do
focus on culture
• Paul Strand: works
within active world
of human meaning
– a documenters
approach?
• Movement (implied
sometimes) and
subject fit into
larger structure of
society

15. • Paul Strand Wall St 1915

16. • Minor White: Expressionist; A movement in the arts during
the early part of the 20th century that emphasized
subjective expression of the artist's inner experiences

17. • Aaron Siskind: Abstract expressionism
• Taking reference from painterly forms yet still
focus on transforming the ordinary

18. • Ernst Haas Nature and Machine 1975
• Colour begins to get used in art photography
• B&W seen by purists as truer to intention of capturing
form

19. Harry Callahan Kansas City 1981

20. • Martin E Newman Coney Island 1 1953

21. • Andreas Gursky

23. ed
• Gregory Crewdson from Beneath The Roses
• Contemporary fine art can include the dramatic and staged
and create a sense of narrative that does refer to society

25. • Jeff Wall A Sudden Gust Of Wind
• Wall often recreates paintings, as such his style is very formal still

26. • Philip Lorca DiCorcia's hustler series
• alternates between informal snapshots and iconic
quality staged compositions

27. • Masahisa Fukase's Ravens
• Example of how contemporary art photography can be
a personal reference point

28. Summary
• Fine art photography began as reaction against
how photography was used in the art world and
as a reaction against the documentary ethos of
social engagement
• Focus on form (shape, pattern, line, texture etc)
• B&W holds elitist status (still?)
• Context of viewing is important
• Fine art can include other genres, even docu!
• Contemporary images often attempt to engage
the viewer more