Words on Pictures

Why did the art market in photographs arrive so late? Some Considerations  updated and addended 10-01-2026    The emergence of a serious art market in photographs in the 1960s was not simply the result of suddenly enlightened taste. It arrived late because of deep structural, ideological, and economic conditions that had constrained photography since its invention in 1839. To understand why it took so long one has to look at both the extended debate over photography’s legitimacy as art and the ways its support systems evolved outside the conventional art market    From the vantage point of the 1960s, the emergence of a serious art market for collectible photographs can look like a belated but straightforward correction: museums began to collect, galleries began to sell, critics began to write, and photographs finally took their “rightful” place alongside painting and sculpture. But if you trace the medium’s history from 1839 forward, the lateness of that shift i...

Cinema and the Document "The slow appreciation of the cinema as an art form may be laid at the oversight of dual but compatible functions of all art, of all pictorial productions. While the moving pictures document and record realistically that which we have seen, experienced and heard, nevertheless they are designed and produced under the same basic principles which condition all other types if pictorial composition. Consideration of any film discovers that the amount of story-telling elements and the subjective content is slight when compared to the amount of production craftmanship required to make the finished work. Photography in the moving film form has within its projected image every element of art, merged into a whole by editing, direction and conception of the relations of time sequences of events portrayed, of images moving and the balance of tone, light, sound and shape. And just as other art forms, moving pictures are good sources for facts... All films,...