Photography is the art of taking pictures with a camera. When photography was first invented in the 1820s and 30s, people questioned whether photography could be considered art, and painters both feared and admired the new technology. But over the next 50 years, photography became established as a new art form. Portrait photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson captured people’s personalities and the way they live, while photojournalists such as Dorothea Lange used the medium to tell important stories. Landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams depicted the beauty and power of nature. Photography also has an important role to play in science.

The invention of photography had a huge influence on the world of painting. At first, painters were suspicious of photography, fearing that it would one day take over from painting and make their work irrelevant. But other painters saw it as a different way of capturing an image of the world around them.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–90) and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) argued that photography would never replace painting because it created only an accurate image of a subject, while a painting could capture emotions.

The first photographers were inspired by painters. They composed their photographs carefully, sometimes staging scenes from literature or myths. They used soft (rather than sharp) focus to give their photos character, making them look mysterious or suggesting emotion.

Sometimes photographers used special lighting effects when composing their photos to create strong contrasts between light and dark areas in the picture. This technique, called chiaroscuro (Italian for "light-dark"), was borrowed from painting, and was originally used by artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Joseph Wright of Derby. The use of chiaroscuro helped create powerful, atmospheric images.

Before photography, portraits could only be paintings or silhouettes (cut-outs of a person’s profile), which were expensive to buy. But because a photo was cheaper—and quicker—to make than a painting, portrait photography soon became popular. The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) was well-known for her portraits of famous people, such as the scientist Charles Darwin (pictured left) and the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Photographers were not able to capture moving subjects, because a photograph needed a long exposure, and anything moving would become a blur. So people having their portrait taken might have to sit absolutely still for 10 minutes, with their head supported by a brace to prevent any movement.

With the invention of rolls of film and the box camera in the 1880s, photographers could move around with their cameras. Now they could capture (or “document”) more natural scenes of everyday life, as well as historical events. Their photographs could be used to illustrate—and tell—stories. At the same time, new printing technology meant that photographs were becoming easy to reproduce in newspapers: documentary photography was born.

In the 1890s, Jacob Riis (1849–1914) photographed the slums (poor, crowded housing) in New York City, and his work helped to change living conditions for poor people. During the Great Depression in the US in the 1930s, photographers such as Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) took pictures of farm workers and homeless people, raising awareness of their terrible living conditions.

It was not just professional photographers who captured everyday life. The arrival of cheap box cameras in the shops made it affordable for lots of people to have a go at photography. In 1888 Kodak advertised a new camera with the slogan “You press the button ... we do the rest”. Amateur photographers no longer needed to know how to develop film in a darkroom. They could now take photos and then send their camera back to the manufacturers to develop the film.

In the early 20th century, photographers began taking a new style of photo which did not try to imitate the qualities of paintings. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) took a photograph of people travelling aboard a ship bound for Europe, called The Steerage (1907). It was widely considered to be the first modernist photograph: it captured people in their natural environment, while at the same time being beautiful to look at.

Stieglitz had an important influence on photography. As well as being a photographer himself, he set up galleries in New York in the early 1900s to exhibit the work of other photographers. It was largely because of his efforts to promote photographers' work that people began to recognize photography as an art form, and art collectors became interested in buying photos.

By the 1920s, nearly all photographers were working in the new modern style. An American landscape photographer called Ansel Adams (1902–84) became famous for his black-and-white photos, full of fine detail, of the American wilderness.

In the 1920s American artist Man Ray (1890–1976) made striking close-up portraits of writers and artists, including the painters Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and the author James Joyce. Working in Paris in the 1920s, he took many photos of the artist's model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) as well as African subjects. He also produced photograms, which he called "rayographs" after himself. These were photographic images made without a camera by placing objects directly on to photographic paper and then exposing it to light.

The Family of Man

In 1955, there was a huge photography exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), called The Family of Man. It showed the work of more than 250 photographers from 68 countries, and was designed to try and capture a portrait of the world at the time. The exhibition’s director Edward Steichen called photography a “universal language”—a way of communicating that could be understood by everybody, no matter where they came from. The exhibition was so popular that for the next eight years, it was shown all over the world. It remains the most-viewed photography exhibition of all time.

Modern portraiture

After World War II, new styles of portraiture became popular. Irving Penn (1917–2009) took dramatic pictures of models and famous people against plain white backgrounds in the 1940s and 50s. His minimalistic portraits skilfully capture their subjects’ personalities. Annie Leibovitz (born 1949) became famous for her 1970s portraits of musicians for the magazine Rolling Stone. Peruvian photographer Mario Testino (born 1954) is known especially for his portraits of celebrities published in the fashion magazine Vogue.

As well as being an art form, photography has many practical uses. In medicine, photography is used to collect information about the human body. Tiny cameras can take photographs inside the body, which are used to diagnose illnesses or share new findings in medicine. By attaching a camera to the eyepiece of a microscope (photomicroscopy), biologists can photograph minuscule creatures and plants, producing what are called micrographs. Photography is also important in astronomy (astrophotography). Using long-term exposure by digital cameras linked to telescopes, images of objects otherwise invisible to the human eye, such as dim stars, nebulae and galaxies (above), can be made. Forensic investigators (right) take pictures of a crime scene to collect photographic evidence that may be used in a trial.

Many artist photographers still shoot on film, but others have adopted digital photography to make their artwork. British artist Martin Parr (1952–2025) was known for his colourful photographs of holidaymakers. Jeff Wall (born 1946) uses photomontage (joining together several pictures) to create images that look like scenes from films. Cindy Sherman (born 1954) makes self-portraits that explore ideas about identity, by dressing up and posing for photos that look as if they are candid (un-posed).

Photography today

Cameras were built into phones from the early 2000s, meaning that everyone with a smartphone carries a digital camera in their pocket. People can now easily document their everyday lives as well as events such as political protests or incidents that occur unexpectedly. The popularity of social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram allow photographs to be shared more quickly and widely than ever before—between 3 and 3.5 billion photographs are uploaded to the internet each day.