DOUBLE EXPOSURE: TWO CENTURIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART

Two centuries after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the oldest surviving photograph, museums and galleries around the world, from Paris to London and New York, are marking the medium’s bicentenary with exhibitions tracing its evolution and influence. From those first experiments in capturing light to the proliferation of digital images today, photography has transformed not only how we record the world but how we see it. Yet amid these celebrations, another question emerges: How did a medium that once challenged painting’s very purpose become a catalyst for its reinvention?

Painters had demonstrated their mastery by reproducing the visible world with astonishing fidelity for centuries. In his Natural History, written in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder recounts the now-legendary contest between the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius to determine who could create the most convincing illusion. Zeuxis first produced an image of grapes so lifelike that birds attempted to eat them. When Parrhasius presented his own work, Zeuxis asked him to draw back the curtain concealing it, only to discover that the curtain he sought to remove was the illusion itself. The story captures one of painting’s most enduring ambitions: to create images capable of rivaling reality itself.

The advent of photography in the 19th century challenged this longstanding pursuit, introducing a technology capable of reproducing appearances without the artist’s hand. So astonishing was the new medium that upon encountering an early daguerreotype, the French painter Paul Delaroche is said to have declared, “From today, painting is dead!” Whether or not he uttered those words, the sentiment captured the anxieties surrounding photography’s emergence. In his review of the Paris Salon of 1859, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire warned that if photography were permitted to assume some of art’s functions, it would soon have “supplanted or corrupted art altogether.”

Yet even as photography provoked such anxieties, artists from Gustave Courbet to Edgar Degas were drawing on the medium, whether as a source of reference or as inspiration for new approaches to composition and perspective. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, meanwhile, recognized photography’s liberating potential, crediting the invention with having “freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.” As photographic images became increasingly pervasive over the following century, painters found inventive ways to incorporate, manipulate, and interrogate them, discovering that photography could offer more than a substitute for direct observation. It could become a starting point for entirely new forms of artistic expression that the medium’s earliest critics could hardly have imagined.

By the 20th century, photography had become not simply a means of recording the visible world but an inescapable part of how it was perceived. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), modern painting was “invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés” even before the artist began to work.

Famously, Bacon’s London studio was strewn with photographs, film stills, and reproductions culled from books and magazines, from Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of movement to portraits of friends and lovers commissioned from John Deakin. For Bacon, photographs offered a necessary distance from his subjects, allowing him to distort their likenesses without forcing them to witness the “injury” he inflicted. “Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it,” he explained to David Sylvester in 1966. Photographs, which he frequently folded, tore, and otherwise manipulated, offered a means of accessing sensations and memories that direct observation could not.

Where Bacon transformed photographic likenesses through more visceral interventions, Gerhard Richter introduced a different kind of uncertainty through his characteristic blurring. Beginning in the early 1960s, he translated family snapshots and newspaper photographs into paintings whose softened contours and indistinct details suggested both the fallibility of memory and the limits of photographic representation. By recreating the effects of photographic blur through paint, Richter drew attention to the camera’s capacity to obscure as much as it reveals.

Richter’s engagement with photography developed alongside that of his Düsseldorf contemporary Sigmar Polke, with whom he helped establish Capitalist Realism in 1963. Where Bacon and Richter had drawn on photographs associated with personal memory and experience, Polke turned his attention more broadly to the images circulating through newspapers, magazines, and advertising, exploring the processes through which they were mechanically reproduced and disseminated.

In his Rasterbilder (raster paintings), begun in the 1960s, Polke painstakingly recreated the halftone dots of newspaper photographs and magazine illustrations, deliberately altering their size and arrangement — an approach that shared Roy Lichtenstein’s fascination with commercial printing but challenged its illusion of mechanical precision. Seen from a distance, the images resolve into recognizable subjects; up close, their irregular patterns dissolve into abstraction. “Nothing is so effective as raster pictures when it comes to destroying the naive acceptance of technical pictures as depicting ‘things from the world on a flat surface,’” he observed.

From glossy magazine spreads and billboards to Hollywood publicity portraits, photography had become central to the construction of public desire. These images did more than document the world; they helped shape how people wanted to imagine it. Where Polke painstakingly recreated the appearance of mechanical reproduction by hand, Andy Warhol embraced the machinery itself, making it central to his artistic practice. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” he declared in 1963. Using commercial silkscreen techniques, he transferred photographs drawn from Hollywood publicity, newspapers, and other mass-media sources onto canvas, depicting subjects ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to car crashes and electric chairs.

For Warhol, the significance of a photograph lay not only in what it depicted but in how widely and repeatedly it had been disseminated. By repeating the same image across a single canvas or an entire series, he explored how even the most emotionally charged subjects could lose their impact through sheer familiarity. Warhol also used Polaroid and 35mm cameras to document celebrities and social gatherings, as well as ordinary details of everyday life. Whether appropriated from mass media or taken by Warhol himself, photographs became inseparable from a practice in which the boundaries of authorship were increasingly difficult to distinguish.

As borrowed imagery became increasingly central to artistic practice, these questions of authorship and originality took on new significance. In his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes had challenged the notion that a work’s meaning was determined by its creator. For a new generation of American artists, the transformation of an image no longer necessarily required altering its appearance. Selecting, reproducing, or reframing an existing photograph could itself become an artistic act.

Among the artists associated with the Pictures Generation — a loosely affiliated group that emerged in New York in the late 1970s — were Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler, whose work examined how images acquire meaning through their creation, reproduction, and circulation. Beginning in the late 1970s, Prince rephotographed advertisements and magazine images, isolating them from their original contexts and presenting them as works of art. In his celebrated Cowboys series, he appropriated images from Marlboro cigarette advertisements, transforming the familiar figure of the American cowboy into a meditation on masculinity, desire, and the manufactured myths of popular culture. Levine pursued a related approach, rephotographing works by established photographers, most famously Walker Evans, and exhibiting the resulting images under her own name. In both cases, the act of reproduction challenged the assumption that artistic originality depended on creating an image from scratch.

Nearly four decades later, Prince turned to an entirely new source: Instagram. In his New Portraits series, begun in 2014, he reproduced screenshots of other users’ posts as large-scale inkjet prints on canvas, often adding his own comments to the images. “The iPhone became my studio,” he recalled. The transition from magazines to social media reflected a profound change in how photographs were produced and circulated — and by whom — even as Prince’s underlying questions about authorship and ownership remained remarkably consistent. In a world where images could be created, shared, and reproduced almost instantaneously, the boundaries between artist, subject, and audience had become increasingly fluid.

Photography challenged painting’s claim to faithfully reproduce the visible world two centuries ago. Yet rather than rendering painting obsolete, it became a catalyst for its reinvention, transforming not only how artists represented the world but how they engaged with the images already circulating within it. Today, social media and generative artificial intelligence are raising new questions about how images are created, circulated, and understood, particularly as technology makes it possible to produce convincing images without a camera or even a corresponding subject in the physical world. As the history of photography demonstrates, technological change need not signal the end of an artistic tradition. It can instead pull back the curtain on possibilities that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined.