Photography and the Scholar/Critic

Abstract

Devoting an entire issue of the Art Journal to photography is not likely to raise any eyebrows these days. Once barred from the precincts of “fine art”—relegated by the discipline of art history to the status of (at best) a useful art, a mere instrumentality for tracing accurate impressions—photography seems now to enjoy full rights as a “legitimate” art. That peculiar and invidious distinction in which gestures of the hand are valued over the snap of the shutter seems to have faded away, and departments of art history now rush to embrace photography, to establish it as a distinct field within the academic curriculum. So much to the good. Perhaps the study of photography will win thereby a kind of rigor and seriousness too often missing in the skimpy body of criticism so far accumulated.