The nineteenth century debates about the potential for photographic art appear, from our twenty first century vantage point, hopelessly misguided. But that is largely as a end result of we are the recipients of an understanding of what can rely as art that has been altered by the event of reproductive technologies like photography and movie. Throughout many of the nineteenth century, it seemed obvious to numerous critics that the mechanical nature of pictures excluded it straightforwardly from consideration as art. Charles Baudelaire for instance, in his Salon of 1859, worries that the common public is starting to confuse images …
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