#time is a flat godforsaken circle istg

[ereh-emanresu-tresni]

Photography was invented in the 1820s and though it remained a fledgling technology in the few decades thereafter, many artists and art critics still saw it as a threat, as the artist Henrietta Clopath voiced in a 1901 issue of Brush and Pencil: "The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colors has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do."

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When critics weren’t wringing their hands about photography, they were deriding it. They saw photography merely as a thoughtless mechanism for replication, one that lacked, “that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius,” as one expressed in an 1855 issue of The Crayon. As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving. At best, critics viewed photography as a useful tool for painters to record scenes that they may later more artfully render with their brushes. “Much may be learned about drawing by reference to a good photograph, that even a man of quick natural perceptions would be slow to learn without such help,” wrote one in an 1865 issue of The New Path. But the writer’s appreciation ended there. Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.