Information and discussion on all aspects of British photographic history

HoP Research Seminar: An Axis Between Old and New: Exhibiting Photography at the National Gallery

Photography is an art form of modern times, but it also arises from artistic traditions that long predate its advent. The new National Gallery exhibition, Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, is a three-way project which argues that historical art was an engine for early photographic invention, and that both those precedents inspire today’s photography.

This exhibition takes a different tack to surveys of well-known relationships between fine art and photography. This is not a review of photography’s many ruptures with the past, nor does it inventory the coincidences with contemporaneous art, whether Pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, or surrealist. Photography’s debt to historical art is more than imitation or homage; historicism validates new art in the conventional terms of the old. Seduced by Art aims to develop an artistic dialogue between past and present, and this seminar will address that axis with an introduction to the exhibition.