Richard Woodfield 
Photography and the Imagination1 
Debates over the status of photography as an art form have more than 
a theoretical interest, they have practical implications as well. It was only very 
recently that the Tate Gallery in London allowed photography into its col-
lection of modern art. The previous policy was to collect artists' photographs 
on the basis that their interest was parasitic on the artist's actual artworks. 
Thus Paul Nash's photographs were held on the basis that they were impor-
tant to his creation of paintings, they were, if you like, documents for the 
study of his practice, and Richard Long's photographs were collected on the 
grounds that they documented or, even, authenticated his land art. Given a 
choice, the gallery would still prefer to collect photographs on the basis of 
their links with a centrally acknowledged art world than on the basis of their 
links with general photographic practice. While one finds documentary 
photography included in the history of photography as an art form the Tate 
has, up until this moment , declared a strong lack of interest in collecting 
works by leading documentary photographers . Photographs have been col-
lected on the basis that they have been used to document art but not on the 
basis that they are interesting as a documentary art form. 
In the British artworld, the most important collections of photographic 
art are housed by the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, which is in the 
Provinces and therefore artistically marginal, and in the Victoria and Albert 
Museum, which is the country's leading museum of decorative arts. While 
there have been strong arguments over transferring the V&A's collection of 
drawings by J o h n Constable to the Tate, there have been no similar argu-
ments over its photographic collection. 
Looking at the photography that the Tate is currently in the process 
of collecting one may see that it has a pedigree in sculpture on the one hand 
and conceptual art on the other. In the same way that back in the 70's The 
Art of the Real was conceptualized as effectively two dimensional sculpture 
or three dimensional painting, Tate sponsored photography has been con-
ceptualized as a two dimensional realization of a three dimensional subject, 
1 This is the first part of a tripartite paper on the possible status of photographs as 
works of art. The first part of the paper is historical, the second part will have a 
theoretical perspective and the third part will be philosophical. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA Supplement), pp. 2 71-2 78 271 
Richard Woodfield 
as in the work of Andy Goldsworthy, or as a material realization of a thought, 
as in the work of Victor Burgin. This isn't confined to the Tate. It is a cur-
rent curatorial practice. There is a growing sense of a difference between 
artists' photographers and photographers ' photographers in the terms in 
which critics describe their work and the galleries in which their work is 
exhibited. 
This is where we get to the starting point of my paper. It is the artworld 
which determines whether or not photography will achieve recognition as 
an art form and it is the artworld which provides the rationale. In the same 
way that titling and context of production have a bearing on our response 
to Dan to's fictional red paintings, described at the beginning of The Trans-
figuration of the Commonplace, strategies of curation and criticism have a bear-
ing on the ways in which we might be invited to respond to photographs. 
With this in mind, I would like to turn to Baudelaire's famous Salon of 
1859in which he celebrated »Imagination, the Queen of the Faculties« and 
berated photography for its at tempt to achieve the same status as Art. 
Photographs had previously been exhibited in the Great Exhibition 
held in Paris in 1855 but on that occasion they were excluded from the Palais 
des Beaux-Arts and included in the Industry section. In 1859, the Société 
Française de la Photographie persuaded the Ministry to allow it to exhibit 
at the same time as the Salon des Beaux-Arts, in the same building, but in a 
different area; it had to be entered by a separate door. 
Baudelaire's paid employment, as a critic, was to review the art so he 
concentrated his attentions on the painting, on which he spent 56 pages. 
He also spent 12 pages on sculpture, probably more out of a sense of duty 
than conviction. And he spent 3 to 4 pages on photography, using those 
pages to reinforce his attack on the contemporary taste for realism in paint-
ing. For him, photography was a minor issue; there could have been no way 
in which even the best photographs could have been a match for his favorite 
paintings. One can't even be sure that he bothered to look at the photo-
graphs as we know f rom his correspondence with his fr iend Nadar that his 
Review had been written with little regard for the work actually on exhibi-
tion. As he described it, his review offered »something like the account of a 
rapid philosophical walk through the galleries«.2 His central concern was the 
state of contemporary painting, which he saw as suffering f rom the blight 
of realism. 
In his rather brief discussion of photography, his central concern was 
the way in which it might offer an absolute value in terms of the possibili-
2 »The Salon of 1859« in Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions reviewed by 
Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, London 1965, p. 144. 
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Photography and the Imagination 
ties of realistic depiction. As he said, the realist painters and their admiring 
audience shared the creed 
»1 believe in Nature , and I believe only in Nature ... . I believe that Art 
is, and canno t be o ther than, the exact reproduct ion of Na tu re ... T h u s 
an Industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the 
absolute of art.« 
Thei r wishes were answered 
A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this mult i tude. Daguerre 
was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: »since Photography 
gives us every guarantee of exactitude.. . , then Photography and Art are 
the same thing.«3 
From a rhetorical standpoint, it was only necessary for Baudelaire to 
warn of the absurdities of photographic practice which aspired to the con-
dition of art in order to be able to condemn realist painting. He had already 
set the stage for his attack on painting by addressing the subject of the dis-
cord between their titles and their appearances: 
Amour et Gibelotte! Doesn ' t that immediately whet the appe t i t e of your 
curiosity? »Love and Rabbit-stew!« Let me try and make an in t imate 
combinat ion of these two ideas, the idea of love and the idea of a rabbi t 
skinned and made into a stew. I can hardly suppose that the pain ter ' s 
imagination can have gone so far as to fit a quiver, a pair of wings and 
an eyebandage upon the corpse of a domestic animal; the allegory would 
be really too obscure. I imagine that the title has been invented u p o n 
the recipe of Misanthropie et Repentir. The true title would thus be Lovers 
eating a Rabbit-Stew. Now you will ask, are they young or old, a laborer and 
a working-girl, or perhaps a tired veteran and a waif, in some dusty bower? 
I really ought to have seen the picture!4 
There is an obvious gap between what the artist thinks that he is achiev-
ing, an Idea, to use the jargon of academic theory which was still very alive 
in the nineteenth century, and what he actually achieved, which was a scene 
of the utmost banality. The artist used his title to pitch his painting at a higher 
level of accomplishment than he was actually capable of achieving. In an-
other context, speaking of the 'painter of modern life', Baudelaire spoke 
of his desire that the artist should amalgamate the actual with the ideal. The 
flâneur, the solitary man »gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly jour-
neying across the great human desert« is looking for a quality called »mo-
dernity« 
He makes it his business to extract f r o m fashion whatever e lement it may 
contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal f r o m the transitory. 
3 Ibid, p. 152. 
4 Ibid, p. 150. 
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Richard Woodfield 
... By »modernity« I mean the ephemera l , the fugitive, the cont ingent , 
the half of art whose o ther half is the e ternal and the immutable . 5 
Baudelaire's criticism of the painter of Amour et Gibelotte was that his 
image was rooted in the merely contingent and a contingency which would 
make no demands upon a complacent audience. He was as hostile to the 
audience which admired the painting as he was to the painting itself despite 
the fact that he hadn ' t even seen it and that it might be half decent. 
He underl ined the discordancy between ambition and result by imag-
ining a photograph which tackled a subject of the highest artistic value, a 
history painting: 
Strange abominat ions took form. By br inging together a g roup of male 
and female clowns, got u p like butchers and laundry-maids at a carnival, 
and by begging these heroes to be so kind as to hold their chance grima-
ces for the t ime necessary for the pe r fo rmance , the opera tor f la t tered 
himself that he was reproduc ing tragic or e legant scenes f r o m ancient 
history. Some democrat ic writer ought to have seen here a cheap m e t h o d 
of disseminating a loathing for history and paint ing a m o n g the people , 
thus commit t ing a double sacrilege and insult ing at one and the same 
t ime the divine art of paint ing and the noble art of the actor.0 
Baudelaire is, here, actually engaging in a thought exper iment . He 
invites his readers to imagine the clash between a heroic subject and a real-
istic representation of the models who would normally pose for the subject. 
He was as well aware as everyone else that the figures in such paintings were 
supposed to be idealized products of the imagination; the true artist would 
never leave his model uncorrected. Uncorrected models are bad enough in 
the imagination, they simply exist at the level of bad drawings, bu t bad 
models in photography are worse than that: they are downright ungainly if 
no t plug ugly. Remember that Baudelaire was writing for a middle class 
audience, which prided itself on its airs and graces. He is asking that audi-
ence to believe that its most cherished ideals could be represented in the 
form of butchers and laundry-maids, practitioners of smelly, stench-gener-
ating trades. As there could be nothing to admire in such people, why should 
realist painters believe that there is anything to admire about their subjects: 
5 The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 12-13. 
6 Salon of 1859, p. 153. Note also George Bernard Shaw's observation in Wilson's 
Photographic Magazine, L VI (1909): »There is a terr ible t ru th fu lness abou t 
photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as 
well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath , 
and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same girl, 
he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no 
good - it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.« 
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Photography and the Imagination 
the painterly equivalent of butchers and laundry-maids was people devoid 
of any human interest. 
It might be thought that Baudelaire's enthusiasm for the painting of 
modern life might have opened his mind to the possibilities of photographic 
practice. But in its state of technical development in 1859, that would have 
been only a remote possibility, demanding a more imaginative response to 
the image than Baudelaire was prepared to offer. Baudelaire 's favorite 
»painter of modern life« was Constantine Guys whose interest in the fugi-
tive aspects of life was developed through his use of the sketch and whose 
subject was the crowd »responding to each one of its movements and the 
flickering grace of all the elements of life«.7 The long exposure times de-
manded by photography in 1859 rendered it incapable of simulating flicker, 
indeed its central problem, in artistic terms, was the complete continuity of 
detail in its imagery: it did not offer the possibility of selective focus, as did 
painting. If the painter of modern life could focus on the transitory changes 
of fashion, that neckline or that collar, the photographer could not be so 
selective. That neckline could be easily undermined by that neck! 
The problem with realistic painting, for Baudelaire, was its at tention 
to technique as the expense of an imaginative treatment of subject. In 1859, 
Baudelaire felt that photography's 
t rue duty,. . . is to be the servant of the sciences and arts ... (L)et it be the 
secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exact i tude in 
his profession ... But if it be allowed to encroach u p o n the doma in of the 
impalpable and the imaginary ... then it will be so much the worse for 
us.8 
While Amour et Gibelotte, like photography, tied the imagination down, 
Guys' sketches released it. For later critics Baudelaire's mistake was not to 
underestimate the possibilities of photography, it was to hold up Guys as a 
hero rather than his fr iend Manet. For the historian of photography, 1859 
was early days and, as Lady Eastlake observed, in her very thorough essay 
for the London Quarterly Revieiu two years earlier, there were a great many 
technical problems still to be overcome. 
At the end of his Short History of Photography Walter Benjamin, who was 
one of Baudelaire's greatest admirers, commented : 
O n e th ing ... was no t grasped ... by Baudelaire, and that is the direct ion 
implicit in the authenticity of the pho tograph . It will no t always be pos-
sible to link this authent ici ty with repor tage , whose clichés associate 
themselves only verbally in the viewer. T h e camera will b e c o m e smaller 
7 The Painter of Modern Life, p. 9. 
8 Salon of 1859, p. 145. 
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Richard Woodfield 
and smaller, more and m o r e prepared to grasp fleeting, secret images 
whose shock will br ing the mechanism of association in the viewer to a 
comple te halt. At this poin t captions must begin to funct ion , captions 
which unders t and the photography which turns all the relations of life 
into literature, and without which all pho tographic construction must 
remain b o u n d in coincidences.0 
This is, of course, a typically inscrutable Benjaminian remark: what can 
we make of it? He was certainly not interested in elevating photography to 
the status of Art. As he declared in his essay on the work of art in the age of 
its mechanical reproducibility: 
... m u c h futi le t h o u g h t had been devoted to the quest ion of whe the r 
pho tography is an art. The primary question - whether the very inven-
tion of pho tography had not t ransformed the entire na ture of art - was 
no t raised.10 
What he is talking about is the use of the photograph as an object of 
social insight: 
Not for no th ing were pictures of Atget compared with those of the scenes 
of a crime. But is no t every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? every 
passerby a pe rpe t r a to r? Does no t the p h o t o g r a p h e r - de scendan t of 
augurers and haruspices - uncover guilt in his pictures. It has been said 
that »not he who is ignorant of writing but ignoran t of photography will 
be the illiterate of the future.« But isn't a pho tog raphe r who can ' t r ead 
his own pictures worth less than an illiterate? Will no t captions become 
the essential c o m p o n e n t of picture? Those are the questions in which 
the gap of 90 years that separates today f r o m the age of the daguerrotype 
discharges its historical tension. It is in the light of these sparks that the 
first pho tog raphs emerge so beautifully, so unapproachab ly f r o m the 
darkness of ou r grandfa thers ' days.11 
Benjamin took the view that the spectator who was sensitive to history 
and to social life would experience the shock of confront ing the optical 
unconscious in the photographic image. Photographs of the Parisian bour-
geoisie betrayed, for him, their very social being, their mode of existence in 
social life, in the same way that August Sander's photographs revealed, for 
him, the very structure of contemporary German society. If photography was 
to be an Art then it would be one produced by the imaginative caption writer, 
no less a person than Walter Benjamin himself. Benjamin was one of the 
many writers for whom the business of being a critic was co-extensive with 
9 »A Short History of Photography« reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic 
Essay on Photography, New Haven 1980, p. 215. 
10 »The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction« in Walter Benjamin, 
Ruminations, translated by Harry Zohn, London 1970, p. 229. 
11 Ibid. 
276 
Photography and the Imagination 
being an artist. Photography stood in need of completion and he was the 
person who was going to complete it. 
As the saying goes, what comes around turns around. In 1981 Roger 
Scruton published an essay in Critical Enquiry on Photography and Repre-
sentation and like Walter Benjamin before him he discussed both photog-
raphy and film.12 Working f rom the notion of an »ideal photograph«, an 
ideal based on the essential differences between painting and photography, 
Scruton came to the conclusion that photography cannot be an art form: 
In looking at an ideal photograph, we know that we are seeing someth ing 
which actually occurred and seeing it as it appeared . Typically, therefore , 
our at t i tude toward photography will be one of curiosity, no t curiosity 
a b o u t the p h o t o g r a p h bu t r a the r a b o u t its subject . T h e p h o t o g r a p h 
addresses itself to our desire for knowledge of the world, knowledge of 
how things look or seem. The photograph is a means to the end of seeing 
its subject; in painting, on the o ther hand , the subject is the means to its 
own representat ion.1 3 
One way of looking at this conclusion is to say that it is massively naive. 
Classic photography, meaning photography of the photographers ' kind, is 
an art because of the distinctive qualities of vision it embodies in looking at 
the world. This is not simply a matter of making the world look beautiful, as 
Scruton might hold, but also a matter of capturing something which might 
have escaped the ordinary spectator's attention. Quite apart f rom the spe-
cific qualities which attach to a well p roduced print, qualities which are 
shared by other graphic arts, a good photograph is a product of the pho-
tographer's vision. Not just vision in the literal sense, but vision in the meta-
phorical sense as well. It is a vision which offers us a grip on our lives and 
our experience of the world. But this is not the art institutional way to deal 
with Scruton. One only needs to point out that in 1981 the art world is a 
different place from what it was in 1857. 
It is extremely difficult to maintain after Duchamp and the adventures 
of modernism, not to say postmodernism, that arguments about the simi-
larities or differences between painting and photography carry any weight 
in debates about Art any more. The argument is more, now, about what the 
photographer brings to the creation of an image and the critic bring to its 
appreciation. If the photographer chooses to work in a gallery or museum 
environment there are tacit understandings of the issues and practices which 
maybe addressed. Alternatively, the photographer may simply choose to opt 
12 Roger Scruton, »Photography and Representation«, Critical Enquiry 7(1981) reprinted 
in The Aestetic Understanding, Manchester 1983. 
13 Ibid, p. 114. 
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Richard Woodfield 
out altogether and simply be as successful as possible in practicing the trade. 
The rewards are different. 
This situation is no t particularly new. In the earliest days of photogra-
phy there were practitioners who celebrated its existence as an industry and 
pursued its potential mass appeal. There were others who wanted to remain 
exclusive and not get involved in the tedious business of commerce; their 
ambition was to produce art. The difference between art and commerce was 
def ined in terms of a difference between an appeal to an élite and an ap-
peal to the mass. This is a view now shared by Roger Scruton. He has argued 
that it is precisely because the masses can make photographs, photography 
cannot be an art: 
the ability to create, to appreciate, to resonate - the ability to stand back 
f r o m the world and record its mean ing in an aesthetic j u d g e m e n t - is 
the proper ty of the few.'4 
He has failed to recognise that it has been by stategies of curatorship 
and criticism that photography has, actually, become an art form. 
14 Roger Scruton, »But is it Art?«, Modern Painters 2 (1), Spring 1989, p. 65. 
278