Kracauer makes the point that a single photograph’s meaning can only be temporary. With current photographs, we can understand the details of the photograph within its intended context, and thus can derive meaning from the picture. With older photographs, we can’t fully understand the context of the photograph, so we see the details but cannot derive meaning from them. The details are effectively stripped of their meaning with the passage of time. He ultimately seems to conclude that photography is not a valuable art because of this temporary quality to its meaning.

How does this make photography different from traditional painting? Doesn’t an artist of a painting also operate within his own time period’s context? Wouldn’t a future audience be unable to understand the implications of certain details in a painting?


I think that this specific argument Karcauer makes isn’t very strong. Yes, photographs must be understood within a certain context. However, I think this is also true for every other endeavor of the liberal arts. It’s as if he assumes other artwork is immune to the passage of time. While certain paintings might arguably allude to universal, eternal, unchanging Truth, these paintings all employ techniques to portray this “Truth”. These techniques are a product of a time period, and can thus be misunderstood by audiences from a different time period. To one culture and time, a picture of a mother and child might allude to some eternal Truth about the importance of family and the bond between parent and child. To another culture and time period, this image might allude to some spiritual truth viewed through the lens of Christianity’s Mary and Jesus. Painting is just as susceptible to losing its meaning as time wears on as photography.







Gray states that photography has caused us to “admire painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence.” Painting no longer needs to create accurate and realistic replicas of nature, because photography will always do a better job. Before in this class, we’ve discussed whether painting can ever produce a perfect replica of nature. One could argue that the painter’s subjectivity and view of the world always enters into his rendition of nature. Gray seems to believe now that we have photography, we’ve found a way to replicate nature. Painting might have failed, but now we’ve found something that succeeds. Is this true? Can photography provide us with accurate, unbiased representations of nature? Or is photography always a product of the subjectivities of the photographer?

Obviously, from the way I phrased the question, I think that photography is subjective. The photographer gets to make all sorts of creative decisions: where to take the picture, what time of day to take the picture, what subject to have in the picture, what angle to tilt the camera for a certain artistic effect. Even if the photographer were attempting to remove himself from the process, he would never succeed. So, maybe this leads us to a better question. If both painting and photography fail at giving unbiased, accurate representations, can any technology one day be developed that will succeed? I guess this question might take us as far as to question whether some unbiased, accurate reality even exists. Is there even a Truth (with a capital “T”)? Am I digressing? Probably. But a person can’t really go around talking about the effectiveness of replicating reality without a clear definition of what this reality was to being with. And defining reality seems like a much trickier question. It’s also the question that is at the root of the arguments about replication in art, so the existence (or nonexistence) of a definition of reality is pretty essential to this whole discourse.