Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography

Notes on historiography of photographs from India

“…Despite her departure from Worswick's Orientalism, Gutman nevertheless proclaimed that “Indian photographers used the camera to reflect and extend an Indian conception of reality” (Gutman, 1982, p. 5; quoted in Pinney, 1997, p. 95). To justify her position, Gutman cited Peter Galassi's argument about how early photographs from Western Europe, in their technicality and aesthetic, were a “legitimate child of Western pictorial tradition” and directly inherited the specific deployment of monocular linear perspective of seventeenth‐century Flemish paintings (Galassi, 1981, p. 12 and passim ). Analogously, Gutman traced the aesthetic origin of photographs by Indians to precolonial and pre‐modern Indian artistic traditions, especially miniature and scroll painting traditions (Pinney, 1997, p. 95).…”

Why Photography Mattered (1847) As Art More Than Ever Before

“…What's odd about this description, of course, is that it would hardly take a hundred years for this mission to become that of the photographer, but what's made particularly acute-in transposing the figure of the landscape painter with that of the documentary photographer-is the end-of-ART question it raises. For it was precisely such a photographer -Timothy O'Sullivan -(whose 1860s While O'Sullivan's photographs had occasionally landed on the museum walls, 3 it was their inclusion in Peter Galassi's 1981 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, an exhibition establishing the medium's "relationship to the traditional arts" (Galassi 1981, 11) and "its relationship to painting," (Galassi 1981, 12) that secured the landscape photograph's polemical status, one that prompted Krauss to redouble her efforts through O'Sullivan in bringing the "definitive ruptures" in that tradition to light (Krauss 1979, 44). If Galassi's ambition was "to show that photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition," (Galassi 1981, 12) Krauss's aim was precisely to leverage photography to discompose that tradition.…”

“…For it was precisely such a photographer -Timothy O'Sullivan -(whose 1860s While O'Sullivan's photographs had occasionally landed on the museum walls, 3 it was their inclusion in Peter Galassi's 1981 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, an exhibition establishing the medium's "relationship to the traditional arts" (Galassi 1981, 11) and "its relationship to painting," (Galassi 1981, 12) that secured the landscape photograph's polemical status, one that prompted Krauss to redouble her efforts through O'Sullivan in bringing the "definitive ruptures" in that tradition to light (Krauss 1979, 44). If Galassi's ambition was "to show that photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition," (Galassi 1981, 12) Krauss's aim was precisely to leverage photography to discompose that tradition. For Krauss, it was because O'Sullivan was not any kind of painter and because the emergence of the photograph -something guided by causal, indexical relationships -ought not, she thought, be understood as an episode in the history of Art, that the landscape photograph could serve to displace rather than extend that tradition.…”

Fotografia, Pós-fotografia e História da Arte: abordagem preliminar a partir de três fotógrafos

“…A tese de Galassi (1981) é a de que existe uma continuidade entre a Pintura de Paisagem e as técnicas que seus artistas utilizavam para produzi-la (câmera escura, o esboço em lápis de carvão/grate ou esboço em tinta a óleo, ambos elaborados em campo, seguidos da nalização da obra no estúdio) e a invenção da fotograa (entendida como técnica aprimorada de esboço ou rascunho ou fonte de modelos e esquemas de formas naturais -do corpo humano à paisagem).…”

“…Para o autor, a Pintura de Paisagem é a responsável por essa transformação dos modos de olhar e de expressar o que o pintor vê, quando sai com seu cavalete ou com seu bloco de esboços para passeios em busca de temas. Galassi (1981) argumenta, assim, que as experimentações pictóricas de pintores como Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), John Constable (1776-1837), John Linnell (1792-1882), Thomas Jones (1742-1803 e Friedrich Wasmann (1805-1886) estabelecem uma nova sintaxe "de percepções sinópticas imediatas e de formas descontínuas inesperadas (...) É a sintaxe de uma arte mais devota ao singular e ao contingente do que ao universal e estável. É também a sintaxe da 4 "The Renaissance system of perspective harnessed vision as a rational basis of picturemaking.…”