Modernism — a Dead End in the History of Photography?

 

Pictorialism, the Post-Medium Condition, and the End of Photography's Monopoly on Reality

Does Photography Have to Photograph Reality?

For almost two centuries, photography has been associated with a particular promise: it shows us something that was actually there in front of the lens.

That promise was never entirely true. From the beginning, photographers staged scenes, selected viewpoints, retouched negatives, manipulated light, and altered prints. Even so, a special relationship between the photographed world and the resulting image remained one of the foundations on which photographic culture was built. Today that relationship is much less secure. We can create an image that looks like a photograph without taking a photograph. We can generate a person who never existed, a place that was never photographed, or an event that never happened. We can even give such an image the visual character of almost any historical photographic process.

Generative artificial intelligence does more than provide another way of making pictures. It challenges an assumption that was deeply embedded in photographic culture: that a photographic appearance must have been produced by photography.
Amanda Wasielewski argues that photorealistic AI-generated images are especially important for the history and theory of photography because they can resemble photographs while lacking the traditional relation to a photographed subject. She therefore places them within a wider discourse on photography rather than treating them as something entirely outside the medium.[1]

This is where the older history of photographic modernism becomes unexpectedly relevant.

Pictorialism: Photography as Image

At the end of the nineteenth century, photography found itself in a situation that, despite the technological differences, bears an interesting resemblance to our own.

If a camera could mechanically record reality, could the person operating it really be an artist? The pictorialists answered yes, but their answer depended on loosening the connection between photography and mechanical recording. International Pictorialism developed partly as a movement to establish photography as an art form equal to painting and sculpture. Photographers used soft focus, staged scenes, selective printing, and labour-intensive processes in order to make the photographer's intervention visible within the finished work.[2] The deeper issue was not simply whether photographs should look like paintings. It was whether a photograph could become an image in the fuller artistic sense of the word.

That question changes the way Pictorialism can be understood. It was not only an aesthetic style of atmospheric, soft and often romantic photographs. It was also a particular conception of what a photograph could be. The photographic image did not have to be the endpoint of a recording process. It could become the beginning of an act of creation. The important question was therefore something like this: how can photography be used to make an image that corresponds to an artist's vision?

Modernism: Photography Should Be Photography

During the first decades of the twentieth century, another answer gained influence. Photography did not need to imitate painting in order to become art. It could draw on qualities that belonged to photography itself: sharpness, detail, light, geometry, surface, framing, and the particular capabilities of the camera.

This did not produce a single, unified photographic modernism. In the United States, one important strand developed around Alfred Stieglitz and Camera Work. In Europe, other modernisms emerged through Constructivism, Surrealism, the German Neue Vision and a range of experimental practices. American modernism itself grew partly out of Pictorialism and remained more closely entangled with it than the familiar story of “straight photography defeating Pictorialism” suggests.[3] Alfred Stieglitz makes this transition particularly visible. He began as an important figure within Pictorialism and later moved towards a more direct approach to the photographic image. What changed was not the idea of the photographer as an author. What changed was the understanding of how that authorship could operate.

One influential modernist answer was that photography did not have to become painting because photography already possessed its own artistic possibilities. That argument gave photography a new basis for claiming autonomy. It freed the medium from the need to imitate another art form, but it also introduced a new expectation: that the artistic value of photography should be connected to qualities understood as specifically photographic. That assumption would become enormously influential. It is also the assumption that now deserves to be reconsidered.

The Modernist Victory

Modernism won.

And it won decisively. Photography became a legitimate art form with its own museums, galleries, collections, histories, canons, and critical vocabulary. Along the way, however, a particular narrative of photographic history also became established.

The process was not simply a matter of ideological planning. It was shaped by institutions, exhibitions, publications, and historians whose classifications gradually became authoritative. Beaumont Newhall's 1937 exhibition Photography 1839-1937 at the Museum of Modern Art, together with the catalogue that accompanied it, was especially influential in establishing a framework through which photographic history could subsequently be organized and taught.[4] The point is not that Newhall invented photographic history. The more interesting point is that photographic history itself was being selected, classified, and evaluated through institutional structures.

Within that process, photographic specificity became an important criterion. Pictorialism increasingly appeared as a phase that photography had to move beyond: from painterliness towards photographic directness, from manipulation towards medium specificity, from the aspiration to make images like paintings towards the idea that  photography should demonstrate what only photography could do.

That narrative was extremely effective. The question now is whether it is still sufficient.

What Does “Medium Specificity” Actually Mean?

Modernist thinking about art rested, among other things, on the idea that different artistic disciplines possess different possibilities. Painting has colour and surface. Sculpture has matter and space. Photography has the camera, optics, light, and the recording process.

From this came the search for photographic specificity.

The difficulty emerged more clearly in the second half of the twentieth century, when artists increasingly began to work across media. Photography could appear alongside film, sound, sculpture, found objects, performance, installation, and printed matter. The medium no longer provided an obvious boundary around the artwork.

Rosalind Krauss described this situation through the concept of the post-medium condition. Her argument was not that media had simply disappeared. Rather, artists were increasingly working outside inherited definitions of medium and developing their own rules, structures, and procedures.[5]

That distinction matters because it changes the question we ask about the medium. We do not live in a world in which media have ceased to exist. We live in a world in which belonging to a particular medium no longer automatically provides an obvious explanation for why an artwork has artistic value.

Flusser and the Camera as Program

Vilém Flusser offers another useful way of thinking about this problem.

For Flusser, photography is not simply the result of a human decision. It is produced through an interaction between the human being and an apparatus governed by a program. The camera is not an entirely neutral instrument. It establishes a range of possibilities within which the photographer works.[6]

For much of photographic history, the basic relationship could still be described in relatively simple terms: photographer, camera, image.

Digital imaging complicates that relationship because software becomes part of the process. Generative AI complicates it further because an image can be produced by a system that does not record the world at all.

The important point is not that Flusser predicted contemporary AI. He did not. His concept of the apparatus can nevertheless help us formulate the problem differently: what happens when an imaging device stops being primarily a recording device and becomes a generative one?

At that point, the camera is no longer the necessary mediator between reality and image.

An Image Can Look Like a Photograph Without Being a Photograph

For most of the history of photography, it was reasonable to assume that a photographic image was produced through some act of photographing. That assumption is now much harder to maintain.

Photoshop complicated it by allowing existing photographs to be transformed almost beyond recognition. Generative AI goes further because it can produce a photorealistic image without any photographic event preceding it. A person can be generated who never existed , a location can be invented, and an event can be constructed that never happened.[1]

There is an even more interesting possibility: the system can produce an image that looks as though it were made through a historical photographic process. A visual appearance associated with a nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century process can therefore be simulated without carrying out the physical process itself. Photography has not lost its capacity to represent reality. Something more specific has happened. It has lost its privileged position as the technology capable of producing images that convincingly resemble photographic evidence.

The End of Photography's Monopoly on Reality

This may be the more important transformation. For almost two centuries, photography occupied a distinctive position in visual culture because it was both an image and the trace of a physical event. Of course, photographs were never completely objective. The photographer chose the moment, viewpoint, framing, exposure, and mode of representation, and manipulation has existed almost from the beginning of the medium.

Yet one assumption remained remarkably durable: the photographic image was connected to something that had actually happened in front of the camera. Contemporary theories of photographic indexicality have made that relationship more complicated. Christopher Ball, for example, argues that indexicality has played a central role in establishing the credibility of photographs, while also proposing a broader understanding that includes different forms of reference, mediation, intention, and truth claim.[7]

AI pushes this problem further. When an image can look like documentary evidence without documenting an event, visual appearance can no longer provide sufficient evidence of photographic origin. This does not mean the end of photography. It means the end of photography's privileged position as the medium that could guarantee a particular relation between appearance and a photographed event.

Has Everything Already Been Photographed?

No.

Photography has certainly not exhausted the world. There are still subjects that have never been photographed, places that remain undocumented, and experiences that deserve new images.

The problem is elsewhere. After almost two centuries of intensive image production, novelty can no longer be guaranteed simply by finding another subject and photographing it realistically.

The same landscape can be photographed again and again. So can a portrait, a street, a sunset. None of these photographs is automatically without value. Their significance may come from the particular circumstances in which they are made: time, place, experience, social context, political conditions, or the position of the photographer.

Documentary and photojournalistic photography make this especially clear because the relationship between image and event remains central to their function. But precisely here AI creates a new problem. If an image can be generated without any corresponding event, how do we establish that a photograph actually documents something that happened? The question is no longer only aesthetic. It concerns trust.

Pictorialism Returns - But Not as a Style

This is where the history of Pictorialism begins to look unexpectedly relevant again.

Pictorialists were criticised, among other things, for interfering with the image and bringing photography too close to painting. Today, intervention may once again become one of the ways through which the artistic character of an image is defined.

That does not mean returning to Pictorialism as a style. There is no reason to reproduce salon landscapes, soft focus, or early twentieth-century pictorial effects. What returns is something deeper: an idea of the photographic image. The pictorialist was, in effect, arguing that recording reality was not enough. The photograph had to become an image shaped by an artistic intention. A contemporary artist working with digital tools, historical processes, or AI might formulate the same problem differently. The fact that a camera can record reality no longer seems sufficient. What matters is what can be done with the resulting image. Seen in this way, Pictorialism can be reread not as an obsolete phase of photography, but as an alternative conception of the photographic image - one that was largely displaced by the later modernist narrative.

Historical Photographic Processes: Nostalgia or Strategy?

This is where historical photographic processes become particularly interesting.

Gum bichromate, cyanotype, oil printing, bromoil, platinum printing, and related processes can certainly be approached as historical reconstructions. They can also be understood as contemporary strategies for making the conditions of image production visible again. At a moment when automated systems can generate images almost instantly, these processes reintroduce time, matter, choice, physical work, and uncertainty into the making of the image. Gum bichromate offers a good example. The appearance of the final print depends on the preparation of the emulsion, the pigment, the support, the negative, exposure, development, and the decisions involved in applying successive layers. The result is shaped not only by the initial photograph but by everything that happens afterwards.

Here the process is not simply a technical path to an image. It becomes part of the meaning of the work. That does not make historical processes inherently more authentic than digital ones. It makes their material conditions more visible.

This becomes especially relevant in the age of generative AI. An AI system can imitate the appearance of gum bichromate, but a simulation of its appearance is not the same thing as carrying out the physical process that produces an actual gum print. The distinction may seem obvious, but it becomes increasingly important when visual appearance can be separated from the conditions that produced it.

From Photography to Image

The history of photography can therefore be understood through a series of changing answers to the question of what a photographic image is.

Pictorialism expanded photography towards artistic image-making. Modernism sought to ground its autonomy in the properties specific to photography. Postmodernism challenged the idea of photographic innocence and emphasised signs, quotations, constructions, and contexts. The post-medium condition weakened the expectation that an artwork should remain confined to one medium. Generative AI now challenges the necessity of photographing itself. These developments should not be treated as a simple progression from an inferior past to a more advanced present. None of the earlier models has disappeared completely. They continue to coexist. What has changed is the cultural position of their arguments.

One of the most important claims of modernist photography was that the medium's own properties could provide a foundation for artistic value. Today that foundation is much less secure.

An Artwork Does Not Have to Be Recognizable by Its Appearance

Arthur Danto's 1964 essay The Artworld provides another useful point of reference. Danto examined situations in which an artwork can be visually indistinguishable from an ordinary object. His discussion of Warhol's Brillo Box demonstrated that appearance alone cannot explain why one object functions as an artwork while another does not.[8]

The implications for photography are considerable. Imagine two visually identical images. One was produced with a camera. The other was generated by AI. Looking at them without additional information, we might not be able to tell them apart. Yet they do not necessarily have the same status. Their histories of production are different. Their relation to reality is different. The role of the author is different, as is the process through which the images came into existence. Knowing how an image was made can therefore become part of the meaning of the image itself.

This is a significant change. We can no longer understand a photograph solely through what it looks like.

The Viewer Also Becomes Part of the Process

Another part of contemporary art theory complicates the old model of artist, artwork, and passive viewer.

Jacques Rancière has challenged the opposition between an active artist and a passive spectator. The viewer does not simply receive a finished message. Looking involves comparing, selecting, interpreting, and establishing relations between what is seen and what the viewer already knows or has experienced.[9] This does not mean that an artwork exists only when someone looks at it. It means that meaning cannot be located entirely in the artist's intention or entirely in the physical object. That becomes particularly important when the image itself no longer provides enough information about its origin.

An image can be technically perfect and still be banal. It can be visually imperfect and still open an important question. It can look photographic without having been photographed. It can be made by hand while resembling an image generated by a computer. The question “Is this a good photograph?” is therefore no longer enough. We also need to ask why the image was made in this way, what its relation to reality is, what process produced it, what the artist intended, and what changes once we know that history.

Was Modernism Therefore a Dead End?

The title is deliberately provocative, but the question is serious.

The argument is not that modernism produced bad photography. It produced extraordinary photography. Nor is the point that photography should simply return to Pictorialism. It should not.

The problem lies deeper. One of the most influential strands of modernist photographic thought made the medium's specific properties an important basis for photography's artistic autonomy. Historically, this was an enormously productive solution. It helped photography free itself from the requirement to imitate painting and gave the medium a strong theoretical foundation.

But the conditions have changed. A photographic appearance can now be produced without photographing. An image can be created without a camera. A historical process can be simulated without physically carrying it out. Photography can move freely into painting, printmaking, installation, film, textiles, performance, software, and AI. The meaning of an image can also depend increasingly on its process, context, intention, material conditions, and interpretation.

We should therefore not speak of the end of photography. We can, however, speak of the end of photography's privileged position as a medium capable of guaranteeing a particular kind of access to represented reality.

That distinction may seem narrow, but it changes the way photographic history can be read.

From Pictorialism to AI

Perhaps the history of photography should not be told as an uninterrupted movement towards increasingly accurate representations of reality. It might be more revealing to see it as a history of changing relationships between photography, representation, and the artistic status of the image.

Pictorialism challenged the idea that photography's artistic legitimacy depended on mechanical fidelity. Modernism responded by locating artistic autonomy in the medium's own properties. Postmodernism questioned the transparency and innocence of photographic representation. The post-medium condition loosened the boundaries separating photography from other forms of artistic practice. AI now makes it possible to produce photographic-looking images without photographing anything at all.

Seen from this perspective, the old conflict between Pictorialism and modernism becomes unexpectedly relevant again.

Perhaps the pictorialists were not simply photographers who wanted photography to behave too much like painting. Perhaps they were defending a different answer to a fundamental question:

Is photography primarily a way of recording the world, or a way of creating images?

For much of the twentieth century, the first answer remained privileged whenever photography was defined primarily through its medium-specific properties.

Today that privilege is much harder to maintain.

If an image can be made to look photographic without photographing anything at all, the old question returns in a new form:

What actually makes a photograph a photograph?

And perhaps this is where photography after photography begins.

Not with the disappearance of the camera, and not with the disappearance of reality, but with the recognition that photographic value can no longer depend primarily on how faithfully an image reproduces the world. Increasingly, it also depends on what the image can tell us about the world, the medium, the author, the process, and the act of seeing.

In that sense, the future of photography may lead us back to a question that the pictorialists were already asking more than a century ago:

Not “What was photographed?” but “What image did the artist want to create?”

Notes

[1] Amanda Wasielewski, “Unnatural Images: On AI-Generated Photographs”, Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (2024), pp. 1-29, DOI: 10.1086/731729.

[2] Museum of Modern Art, “Pictorialism”, New York: Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/pictorialism [accessed 19 September 2026].

[3] David Bate, Stephen Sheehi, Helen Ennis, Shuxia Chen, Karen M. Fraser, Heangga Kwon, Alice Heeren, Cezar Bartholomeu, Mariana Holá, “Photography”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, 2017, DOI: 10.4324/9781135000356-REMO24-1.

[4] Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839-1937, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1937; Allison Bertrand, “Beaumont Newhall's ‘Photography 1839-1937’: Making History”, History of Photography 21, no. 2 (1997), pp. 137-146, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1997.10443731.

[5] Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

[6] Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000; originally published as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie, Göttingen: European Photography, 1983.

[7] Christopher Ball, “Realisms and Indexicalities of Photographic Propositions”, Signs and Society 5, S1 (2017), pp. S154-S177, DOI: 10.1086/690032.

[8] Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld”, The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964), pp. 571-584, DOI: 10.2307/2022937.

[9] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2009.

Bibliography

Ball, Christopher. “Realisms and Indexicalities of Photographic Propositions”. Signs and Society 5, S1 (2017): S154-S177.

Bate, David, Stephen Sheehi, Helen Ennis, Shuxia Chen, Karen M. Fraser, Heangga Kwon, Alice Heeren, Cezar Bartholomeu, Mariana Holá. “Photography”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. 2017.

Bertrand, Allison. “Beaumont Newhall's ‘Photography 1839-1937’: Making History”. History of Photography 21, no. 2 (1997): 137-146.

Danto, Arthur C. “The Artworld”. The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571-584.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Krauss, Rosalind E. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Newhall, Beaumont. Photography 1839-1937. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1937.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Unnatural Images: On AI-Generated Photographs”. Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (2024): 1-29.

Museum of Modern Art. “Pictorialism”. New York: Museum of Modern Art.