A Cornell professor argues that some of photography's defining visual qualities appeared in Western painting long before the invention of the camera.
Andrew Moisey develops that case in “The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography,” published Sept. 15 by Yale University Press.
A challenge to a familiar art history
The conventional account holds that photography's realism forced painters to pursue more subjective styles, helping drive impressionism, modernism and later experimentation.
Moisey, an associate professor of the history of art and visual studies, said that chronology misses qualities already present in early modern painting. He describes those qualities as immediacy, takenness and embodiment, which together form what he calls photography's “mechanical subjectivity.”
Immediacy places a depicted event in the same perceived moment as the viewer. Takenness suggests an image has been drawn from the world rather than simply constructed by an artist, while embodiment creates the first-person feeling of standing within a scene.
Moisey said photography was the first medium to combine all three consistently, but painters had explored them separately for centuries.
Photography offers a situated view
European painters depicting daily life often positioned viewers at a distance, comparable to an audience watching a stage. Moisey describes that as a severed perspective that encourages moral judgment from outside the scene.
Photography instead places the viewer in a particular time and location. Its perspective resembles ordinary perception by suggesting that the person making the image occupied the scene.
Moisey's path to the project began in film studies rather than traditional art history. He earned a doctorate in film, studied photographic technique and later turned to painting after seeing George de La Tour's “Musicians' Brawl” at the Getty Museum.
The large-scale photographs of Andreas Gursky also shaped his thinking. In graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, Moisey began comparing Gursky's images of industrialized landscapes with early modern landscape painting.
A different history of two mediums
Moisey reviewed paintings and prints from four centuries, focusing particularly on travel and geographical images designed to transport viewers to another place.
That research led him to connect photographic ways of seeing with works created before the daguerreotype appeared in 1839. The book reframes photography's development as part of a longer visual history rather than only a scientific and technological invention.
It also asks art historians to study painting through perceptual features instead of relying entirely on genres such as portraiture, landscape and still life.
Moisey acknowledged that the argument may draw disagreement because it treats photography and early modern art as closely related traditions. He said the goal is to offer scholars a new path into the history of both fields.
The book grew from research that began during his college years, developed into his dissertation and continued for about two decades.
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