인천 풍경

Abstract

Photography emerged at a time when painters were not only seeking a new realism, and when western cultures were establishing a new awareness of the natural world. Photograph's ability to record a scene was equally matched by the increasing concern with light and time, which was to reach its apogee in the work of the Impressionists. By implication, a medium whose name meant 'light writing' was well suited to the instant recording of natural process and energy. If landscape photography fed from earlier developments in landscape painting and aesthetics, then the photography of the city has its foundations in the way urban spaces were beginning to be viewed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We need to remember that photography established itself in a period when the growth of the city and industry had already provoked a formidable literature and art in response to the increasing influence of urban areas. Photography takes its place in this process, but does so in a consistently active sense, simultaneously responding to the variety and multiplicity of urban life and experience, and to the question of how urban space was to be perceived and represented. In brief, its underlying response has always been in relation to the visual complexity of a city as both an image and an experience.