Photography by Siegfried Kracauer ~ Dustin Muhn

I am really intrigued by the comparison and contrasting of photography and paintings as art forms. We have talked about it a little bit in class, but Siegfried brings it up a couple times in his entry. He mentions that "when viewed under a magnifying glass, photographs show minutiae which the naked eye would never have discovered". He talks about how this new capturing of nature left out no details and only held truth. The outcome of the image at first did not depend on the imagination and creativity of the creator. Rather, it was dependent upon the subject material itself. While a lot of people were hesitant to accept this at first, photography eventually found its way next to painting as a form of aesthetic work.

Later in his piece, Siegfried talks about how modern photography branches out to become abstract. The very thing that set it apart from painting in the beginning was now the goal of some artists. They are now making a new kind of art based on the experiments of photography. "It sounds paradoxical that, of all media, realistic photography should thus have contributed to the rise of abstract art." This one fact is reason enough to justify photography as an art form. Even though the justification came 100 years into its history, the direct contribution photography has given to art over the past few decades is payment enough for its acceptance into the art community. The competition alone for painters to survive has increased the quality and creativity of their work. Siegfried notes that we should look at Duchamp's 1912 Nude Descending the Staircase. This is a prime example of art inspired by the advances of photography in the beginning of the 20th century. The closeness of photography and traditional painting has become quite close despite the even further technological advances made over the past century. Two rival art forms, both primitive in form have come to bounce ideas off of one another and advance each other further than would be possible without each other. Competition has bread success, making the line between reality and abstraction in the two fields non-existant.