Turner Collection, 1995

Over the course of the second century of its existence, photography made a relatively rapid transit from scientific experimentation to major art form. In the beginning, photography’s unstable chemistry and the difficulty of fixing its images in emulsions of common table salt or silver nitrate made more of a marvel than a medium out of these images. Already during the American civil war photography had begun to replace the draughtsman, but only in the twentieth century did it begin to approach painting by means of the growing capacity to manipulate its images. Today, some photographs not only command prices equivalent to those of contemporary paintings, they also are being made by the same or similar pictorial means as those adopted for painting. While a comparison between the manipulation of photographic images by Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol and the means developed by Thomas Ruff or Andreas Gursky for making their pictures is obvious, differences between photographs and painted pictures stubbornly refuse to disappear – perhaps because rather than in spite of the new pictorial status of photography... [+]