Surrealist works of the 20th century include Man Ray’s “Violon d’Ingres” (1924) and Dora Maar’s “Pere Ubu” (1936) and Hans Bellmer’s “The Doll”. Eadward Muybridge was the first to capture photographic images of animals in motion, but was widely known as a landscape photographer.

One of the first works of modernist photography is Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Steerage” (1907), a photograph of lower-class passengers on a boat traveling from New York to Germany. Examples include Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s allegorical photomontage “The Two Ways of Life” (1857), Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Light and Love” (1865) staged to resemble the Christian nativity scene, and the many still-life photographs of Roger Fenton. The earliest examples of fine art photography tended to mimic paintings and sculpture in theme, composition, and posing of models, if any.

Today, it is abundantly evident that photography is indeed a fine art, and far from the mere literal representation of objective reality that it was once thought to be. He founded a group of photographers called the Photo-Secession and, in 1905, opened a fine art photography gallery aptly called Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. At the turn of the 20th century, photographer and gallerist Alfred Stiegler did much to promote photography as a fine art. In an effort to have photography recognized as a “high art,” enthusiasts founded the (now venerable) Royal Photographic Society in London in 1853 to champion the cause, and similar societies were founded around the globe. However, it would take decades before art critics and the general public would accept photography as an art form, as its practical applications (documenting events and people for posterity) would initially overshadow its purely aesthetic possibilities.

Building upon knowledge gained from the trials and errors of others before him, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, 1826, finally produced the first stable photographic image (a negative) upon silver nitrate-coated paper within a camera obscura.

Fine prints