THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

DescripciónFollowing the appearance of the earliest Daguerreotypes in the late 1830s and above all after the subsequent discovery of photograph ic printing on paper, the relationship between photography and painting became an extremely close one. The cameras artificial eye in the work of photographers such as Le Gray, Cuvelier, Nadar and Disderi, to mention just a few, stimulated Manet, Degas and the youn g Impressionists to develop a new way of looking at the world. Impressionism used the medium not just as an iconographic source but was also inspired by it technically in its scientific observation of light, its representation of an asymmetrical, truncated pictori al space and its exploration of spontaneity and visual ambiguity. In addition, the new Impressionist type of brushstroke led some ph otographers to become interested in the materiality of their images and to look for ways of making their photographs less precise an d more pictorial in effect. The key position that photography now occupies in the context of contemporary art has encouraged a renew ed interest in art-historical studies with regard to the impact of its invention on the visual arts.