The Industrial Revolution: The Invention Of The Camera

The Industrial Revolution was an explosive moment of historical economic, political, and social change. The emergence of technology and resulting societal transformation inspired art movements that reevaluated the perception of and around art and artists. One essential product of the Industrial Revolution was the invention of the camera. Through analysis of its effect, we can timeline the way the camera and new technological processes affected the perception of value in art originals vs reproductions. The imperative issue for industrial age work was that of originality, authenticity, uniqueness, and meaning. Society began to question the value of realist artistic representation of the world/life when it became possible to obtain a similar
Depicting everyday moments no longer held the same importance and worth. This pushed realist painters to refocus their work, transitioning from pleasant scenes of the bourgeois in

theaters and cafes to a narrative focus that expressed the negative industrial effect on society and nostalgia for a more natural world – in line with their emotions towards the Industrial Revolution.
This movement is appropriately referred to as Realism. Other reactions were focused elsewhere and as with any major art movement; some artists rose in opposition to the threat on their traditional system – directly rejecting technological influence and retreating into history to classical fine art methods and subjects. With the threat of the camera and machine displacing craft by hand, influential individuals like John Ruskin and William Morris encouraged a return to more traditional creative philosophy and focus. John Ruskin was worried that workers were becoming automatons, disconnected from life, community, nature, and beauty. He created a school for workmen and laborers to learn to draw, and taught them to see the world in a different way. The influence of
This movement is accompanied by various texts by William Morris like his “Ideal Book” essay that deplored the new use of technology in printing / book arts and criticized its carelessness. From type, to layout, to ornament, to binding – Morris preaches a return to detail and craftsmanship– a microcosmic critique of the changing art scene as a whole (Morris).
In Walter Gropius’s “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus” he explains the way the arts exist in isolation, and can be rescued only through conscious cooperative efforts of the craftsman. He