PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN AMERICAN ART: SOURCES, IDEAS, AND INFLUENCES
1890s to the Present

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center hosted a three-day symposium, Thursday, July 6 through Saturday, July 8, 2006, in celebration of the Research Center’s fifth anniversary. Thirteen well-known leaders in the art world from around the United States participated in "Painting and Photography in American Art: Sources, Ideas, and Influences, 1890s to the Present." Their presentations explored and offered new insights into the relatively uncharted history of the exchange of ideas between painters and photographers that has influenced both mediums since photography came into being in the 19th century.

"Because making photographs is a mechanical process, photography was first viewed as something separate from and unequal to the art of painting," says Barbara Buhler Lynes, Museum Curator and The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. "Photographers first sought to legitimize their work as a fine art by infusing it with painterly qualities, but by the early 20th century a new generation of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz, challenged the Pictorialists by claiming that photography could achieve stature equal to painting if photographers used and asserted the distinctive characteristics of their medium. As 20th-century photographers explored and realized this objective, painters and photographers increasingly turned to what was being produced in each medium as sources of ideas for their own work. This symposium explores the history and significance of this fascinating exchange, as well as how each medium influenced and shaped the development and history of the other."

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