UCI Baudelaires Critique of Photography Discussion

After reading Charles Baudelaire’s essay On Photography, write about his feelings toward modernity, the new invention of photography, what he thought photography was good for, and what it needed to be considered art in a two paragraph essay.  Charles Baudelaire was a seminal French critic, poet, and writer.  He had a lot to say about photography.

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In Charles Baudelaire’s essay “On Photography”, he expresses strong opinions and feelings towards modernity, photography, and art as a whole. Baudelaire felt a sense of disdain for the middle-class “mob” of the time, which he felt held extremely shallow values that were below him. This way of thinking was further strengthened in Baudelarie’s mind with the occurrence of several events, including Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power and the invention and successive boom of photography. With the rise of Daguerreotypomania in France, there were endless varied opinions on what photography should be used for, if at all. Some artists openly embraced it as a new and modern way of creative expression, while others feared it as a threat to their livelihoods and art as a whole. Regarding the use of photography, Baudelaire states in his essay “On Photography” that it should “be the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exactitude in his profession—up to that point nothing could be better”. While Baudelaire did think that photography was a useful innovation for certain fields, his opinions regarding its relationship with art were much more passionate and concrete.Regarding the relationship between photography and art, Baudelaire felt very strongly that the former was missing many crucial things that prevented it from being an art form. In his eyes, art was the domain of imagination, creativity, and generally everything developed by the human mind, whereas photography was a scientific process that simply captured what was in front of it. The key difference that Baudelaire argued between the two was that works of art, like paintings, drawings, or sculptures, were developed by a human soul and ultimately expressed something the artist attempted to convey, whereas photographs were produced by a machine and had no air of imagination. In the essay, Baudelaire states that due to the popularity of photography, “each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees”. Baudelaire felt this was massively destructive for art, as the influence of photography and the concept of seeing something as it is–as opposed to what it could be–removed the creative aspect in favor of minute accuracy. In Baudelaire’s mind, to be considered art, photography would have to be something truly creative; not a documentary tool, but a truly blank canvas that would act as the basis for the expression of imagination.