structural:reformatting, information:extraction
Art

During the 20th century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the United States, a handful of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, F. Holland Day, and Edward Weston, spent their lives advocating for photography as a fine art.At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles. This movement is called Pictorialism, often using soft focus for a dreamy, 'romantic' look. In reaction to that, Weston, Ansel Adams, and others formed the Group f/64 to advocate ' straight photography ', the photograph as a (sharply focused) thing in itself and not an imitation of something else.

The aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed regularly, especially in artistic circles. Many artists argued that photography was the mechanical reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, then photography in the context of art would need redefinition, such as determining what component of a photograph makes it beautiful to the viewer. The controversy began with the earliest images "written with light"; Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and others among the very earliest photographers were met with acclaim, but some questioned if their work met the definitions and purposes of art.

Clive Bell in his classic essay Art states that only "significant form" can distinguish art from what is not art.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible – significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.

On 7 February 2007, Sotheby's London sold the 2001 photograph 99 Cent II Diptychon for an unprecedented $3,346,456 to an anonymous bidder, making it the most expensive at the time.

Conceptual photography turns a concept or idea into a photograph. Even though what is depicted in the photographs are real objects, the subject is strictly abstract.

In parallel to this development, the then largely separate interface between painting and photography was closed in the second half of the 20th century with the chemigram of Pierre Cordier and the chemogram of Josef H. Neumann. In 1974 the chemograms by Josef H. Neumann concluded the separation of the painterly background and the photographic layer by showing the picture elements in a symbiosis that had never existed before, as an unmistakable unique specimen, in a simultaneous painterly and at the same time real photographic perspective, using lenses, within a photographic layer, united in colors and shapes. This Neumann chemogram from the seventies of the 20th century thus differs from the beginning of the previously created cameraless chemigrams of a Pierre Cordier and the photogram Man Ray or László Moholy-Nagy of the previous decades. These works of art were almost simultaneous with the invention of photography by various important artists who characterized Hippolyte Bayard, Thomas Wedgwood, William Henry Fox Talbot in their early stages, and later Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the twenties and by the painter in the thirties Edmund Kesting and Christian Schad by draping objects directly onto appropriately sensitized photo paper and using a light source without a camera.