After the Photograph

The story goes: photography arrived in 1839, painting could no longer compete at likeness, and so painting went off to do something else, which is modern art.

It is too tidy, and the untidiness is more interesting.

Start with who actually lost their livelihood. Miniature and portrait painters, immediately and comprehensively. Portrait miniatures had been a substantial trade (the affordable likeness, carried or kept at home) and within two decades of the daguerreotype it was finished. Practitioners retrained as photographers or as colourists tinting prints by hand. That is a specific, documented commercial extinction.

Landscape painters were not similarly destroyed. Nor were history painters, nor decorators, nor anyone whose product was not primarily a cheap accurate face.

Then notice what painters did next, which was not to flee from photography but to use it. Delacroix had photographs made of models and studied them. Degas photographed and painted from photographs, and the odd croppings and off-centre figures in his pictures are a camera's way of seeing. Sickert worked from newspaper cuttings. Bacon's studio floor was carpeted in reproductions and Muybridge plates. The prohibition on working from photographs is a studio taboo, not a historical fact.

Photography also taught painters things they could not otherwise have known. In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge, settling a bet for Leland Stanford, photographed a galloping horse in sequence and showed that the flying gallop (all four legs extended, fore and aft) does not occur. When all four feet are off the ground they are gathered under the body. Painters had drawn the flying gallop for centuries because that is what everyone believed. The photographs ended it, and Géricault's Derby at Epsom is both wrong and still a great painting.

So what did the camera do, if not simply cause abstraction?

It made a question unavoidable: what is painting uniquely for, once a machine does likeness cheaply and better?

That question does not have one answer, which is why the twentieth century produced several incompatible programmes and each of them can be read as a reply. Painting is for expression, for the inner state that no lens records. Painting is for the painted surface itself, which photography has no equivalent of. Painting is for the concept, and the object is a means. Each answer generates a body of work, and the disagreements between them are real.

The causation therefore runs through an argument rather than through unemployment, which fits the timing much better: abstraction arrives seventy years after the daguerreotype, not seven.

There is a closing irony worth sitting with. While painting was abandoning finish, likeness and illusion, photography spent its first fifty years trying to acquire them. Pictorialism (soft focus, allegorical subjects, classical poses, elaborately handworked prints) was an argument that the camera could be more than a machine, made by imitating exactly the qualities painters were walking away from.

Each medium was trying to become what the other was escaping, and both arguments were conducted in public, by serious people, at the same time.