Photography and Art: Documents and Dreams

The photographers discussed in depth in this essay have all engaged with the everyday or the quotidian, yet they are a small sampling of the numerous photographers who have engaged with this subject. Work by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha, Thomas Struth, Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans, to name a few, could have easily been included. Any history of photography is also a history of photographic technology, but it also a history of photography's distribution - where it was reproduced and how it was used. This history involves the rise (and fall) of picture magazines, such as Life, and the entrance of photography into the art museum and the art market. Even within the art world itself there is an interesting history of the use and influence of photographs (and photographers), such as the celebration of Eugène Atget's work by the Surrealists or the adoption of Bernd and Hilla Becher by conceptual artists in the 1870s. Anne Blood