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Photography has never been quite sure what it is or where it's going. It grew up in the heyday (or one of the heydays) of the cult of the artist, yet its purely technical uses were too important to be ignored. It was almost from the beginning an easier technique than painting, and quickly became something which could be done by amateurs. So the photographers felt that they had to prove that they were artists, not unfeeling technicians, and that they were continuing the traditions of Great Art. This caused them to become fixated in Romanticism when it was dying in the other arts.
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Photography is also an inherently (though not inevitably) representational medium. When representational art started going out of style, the photographers found themselves both stuck with a white elephant which they had to defend and forced to make what they could of a bad business. Romanticism increased.
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