Photography History

History of Photography

I have heard, more than once, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Although I can’t quote who said it, I could not agree more. A photograph is a very powerful tool, capable of telling a complete story with just one picture; let’s just hope the story is true. If taking out of context, a photograph can also be misleading. In addition with all the digital advances and different software in the market, it is relatively easy to manipulate a photography and therefore, reality. We could say that this is one of the results of the law of unintended consequences. As faithful as a photo can be to reality we still need to trust the integrity of the photographer and hope that he or she is not manipulating the picture
There is no composition involved, no skillful drawing or painting; it is only the process of pointing the camera and pressing the button. Nothing is farther away from the reality than to believe that photography is not art. Modern Photography with Hansel Adams, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus among others, has shown us that to each of these people the photograph unites the internal vision with the external vision. Feelings are not well described with words and pictures add to the depth of expression of feelings. Photography is now used as an expression of art as well as science. Like Edward Steichen once said “The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and
Digital imagery and the use of the computer allow the medium to be used quickly and with great accuracy. As the silver that formed the basis of photography becomes less plentiful the electronic world takes over. Digital future is sure to hold as many advances in the art as the old processes did over the 160 year history of photography. There is an issue that needs discussion about digital photography. You can manipulate the photos undetectably. Once people see firsthand how easy photo manipulation is in the digital era, they never look at others’ photographs the same way again. With the rapid growth of amateur digital photography, millions of people are suddenly looking at “others’ photographs” in a new light. Will these facts take away the realistic look of photography? Will the meaning of an unaltered photograph be different than the one that has been altered? If we do not know the difference between the two, will we look at photography the same way we did in the past? Will we be able to trust photography? The law of unintended consequences will never stop to surprise us. After all these years of evolution we came up with a new technology that is suppose to make photography easier, nicer, faster, better, just to find out it took us right back to point zero, where we started more than a hundred years