I've said it before and I'll say it again: There are indeed legitimate reasons to say that photography isn't an art, or if it is an art, to ask in what the art consists. After all, most photographs are just exact copies of the way some object looks in space.
So let's have a go at it: In what does the art of photography consist? Perhaps mainly in choosing a concept, an iconography in the art-historical and almost in the religious sense, i. e., in choosing the subject/object and the way of portraying it.
There are certain standard and wanted-to-be-standard subjects in photography which would probably never have been born if not for their history in painting. They are not 'natural' subjects.
The Romantic and Orientalizing theme of the seraglio or the bathhouse full of women is among them. So is the odalisque. It could be that there are various natural reasons for people to want to paint naked women. It's also likely that the nude presents special social problems which, like all problems, search for their own solution - after all, you may want to sell paintings or photographs of your neighbors nude, but if you're not careful, you'll get into trouble doing so. Romantic and Academic painting have long since found a solution: call the nude scene a seraglio or a bathhouse in Turkey, or call the lady an odalisque. The lovely ladies then become the subject of legitimate anthropological curiosity, an educational subject. And now it's all right to paint them that way: it doesn't matter that they're nude: they're foreign; they're not like us; we wouldn't allow ourselves to be painted like that. The history of painting proves that this is not the only solution to the problem, and it may not be a natural or obvious one which would occur wherever the problem exists. It may be an extraordinary solution which appeared only in the special circumstances of Western Europe in the Nineteenth Century. And which was then taken over by a painting-conscious photography to solve those same problems.
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