Photographic Style Evolution
The history of photography is short, yet many stylistic schools have emerged within it. They intertwine, entangle, and clash, driving photography’s change and development. It is difficult to find a linear trajectory in the development of photography. But if we view it as an artist’s growth story, the evolution of photographic styles becomes much clearer.
At photography’s birth, before its artistic status was established, talk of “style” was irrelevant; its simplest path of development was to imitate painting, another visual art. Thus early pictorial photography was tightly controlled and carefully produced, with harmonious, well-composed images that favored grand narratives and melancholic emotion. During this period there was high-art photography influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, impressionistic photography that sought soft, blurred effects, and “collage photography” (jijin sheying) founded by China’s first generation photojournalist Lang Jingshan — all falling into this category.
Gradually pictorial photography shifted from posed studio work toward attention to natural landscapes and social life, giving rise to naturalist photography. It mainly reflected fragments of middle-class and working-class daily life and expressed a utopian longing for goodness and beauty, but it often neglected truth. Other subjects included landscapes, cities, and women, children, and the elderly. Although still focused on expressing goodness and beauty, photography began to show concern for reality.
Photography then entered a rebellious phase. Eager to break free from dependence on painting and to find its own independent artistic status, movements such as the Separationists and Purists emerged. They advocated severing ties with traditional pictorial photography and emphasized finding beauty in ordinary things, even using macro, close-up, or partial-object depictions. This pursuit of objectivism represented photography’s exploration of its own nature. This stage also coincided with modernist developments in which photography and painting advanced side by side. Photography took part in avant-garde experimental movements — Dadaism, Surrealism, Bauhaus — and many other experimental arts.
In the course of locating its artistic identity, documentary photography matured. Its heyday corresponded with major global upheavals: world wars, ideological confrontation between East and West, social injustice, national liberation, racial conflict… Photography, with its truthful qualities and powerful intellectual and emotional communication, rose to prominence in the art world of this period. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the “decisive moment,” Robert Capa, and Magnum Photos were among the leaders. Photojournalism, reportage, and feature photography are all branches of documentary photography.
Subsequently, under the context of contemporary art and aided by various technologies, photography entered a new era of development, experimenting widely as an independent art form. From documentary photography grew a new documentary focused on “social landscapes,” which examined the relationship between people and cities and gradually abandoned the pursuit of beauty. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp’s provocative work Fountain opened the curtain on contemporary — or conceptual — art, and conceptual photography developed within this wave.
Conceptual photography, as the name implies, aims to express the photographer’s ideas and thoughts. Its practitioners rejected traditional artistic modes, arguing that, like language, photography can best express creative concepts. Because of photography’s mechanical, objective recording nature, it can embody the essence of conceptual art. Consequently, conceptual photography often requires a clear proposition before shooting and relies on deliberate selection and arrangement, frequently using staged scenes to bare the intended ideas without embellishment. But for viewers to make the associations intended by the image, both audience and creator must share a common collective system of knowledge; this shared referential relationship belongs to semiotics.
Coincidentally, modern cultural semiotics rose in the 1960s, the same era during which conceptual art emerged. In semiotics the highest level of symbolic meaning is ideology; conceptual artworks are filled with promotion of various “-isms” — feminism, commercialism, egalitarianism, and so on. Perhaps semiotics is the progenitor of conceptual art, or perhaps conceptual art is a beast unleashed by semiotics — we cannot know. But such radical modes of expression have often been exploited by ill-intentioned people. For example, this shooting approach can recall Nazi propaganda against Jews or the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s posters “sweeping away the Four Olds,” with straightforward, blunt imagery. Since these works first appeared framed as explorations of art rather than politics, public understanding of conceptual photography was for a while foggy and confused.
Literary critic Irving Howe once noted that “modernity exists in the rebellion against popular modes; it is an unending angry assault on orthodox order.” In the torrent of struggle against traditional art, conceptual photography charged forward, embodying contemporary art’s spirit of struggle and rebellion. Yet amid the mêlée of concept and art, there have always been impostors. Some who brandish the banner of conceptual photography have opportunistically abused its methods while abandoning the spirit of contemporary art. Taking advantage of conceptual photography’s de-emphasis on artistic form, they produce meaningless images filled with expressionless people or lifeless objects — images that are dull, pointless, indifferent, and mediocre. Some even resort to ugliness, vileness, or vulgarity to attract attention and sensationalize. As if denying the beauty of their work were equivalent to denying the expression of their ideas — a truly petty tactic.
