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PARTISAN REVIEW
application. Artists, on the other hand, begin to debate its artistic
value. Photography leads to the annihilation of the great profession of
the portrait miniaturist. This happens not only for economic reasons.
Artistically, early photographs were superior to portrait miniatures.
The technical reason lies in the long exposure time, which demanded
utmost concentration by the subject being portrayed. The social reason
lies in the circumstance that the first photographers belonged to the
avant-garde and drew their clientele for the most part from it. Nadar's
advance over his professional colleagues is characterized by his under–
taking to take photographs in the sewers of Paris. This is the first time
that the lens is given the task of making discoverie . Its importance
becomes greater the more questionable, in face of the new technical and
social reality, the subjective element in painting and graphic informa–
tion is felt to be.
The World Exhibition of 1855 presents for the first time a special
display of photography. In the same year Wiertz publishes his major
article on photography, in which he assigns it the task of philosophi–
cally enlightening painting. He understood this enlightenment, as his
own paintings show, in a political sense. Wiertz can thus be described
as the first to have demanded, if not foreseen, montage as a propagan–
distic application of photography. With the increasing scope of
communications systems, the significance of painting in imparting
information is reduced.
It
begins, in reaction against photography, to
stress the color elements in pictures. When impressionism gives way to
cubism, painting has created for itself a further domain into which
photography cannot, for the time being, follow. Photography for its
part has, since the middle of the century, enormously expanded the
scope of the commodity trade by putting on the market in unlimited
quantities figures, landscapes, events that have either not been salable
at all or have been available only as pictures for single customers. To
increase turnover, it renewed its objects through fashionable changes
in photographic technique that determined the later history of photog–
raphy.
GRANDVILLE, OR THE WORLD
EXHIBITIONS
Qui, quand le monde entier, de Paris jusqu'en Chine,
Q divin Saint-Simon, sera dans la doctrine,
Cage d'or doit renaitre avec tout son eclat,
L es fleuves rouleront du the, du chocolat;
