In the beginning of this chapter, the author talks about photography’s acceptance into the mainstream in the early 1980s, however this seems to have taken about 20 years to come to full acceptance. This is because photography had always been considered a lesser form as it wasn’t unique and could be copied and was accessible to all people unlike painting and sculpture. A practitioner mentioned in this chapter is Walter Benjamin who, in his 1936 text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ wrote ‘The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.’ As the 1980s progressed, photography radically transformed itself and improvements within colour technology helped the art form become more accepted as contemporary art.
Moschovi then continues to discuss how photography gained more acceptance from the art community and says, “The market invention of the limited edition and monumental size, which were meant to recuperate the aura of the uniqueness of the copy and reinvent its objecthood, would now justify photography’s place in the museum both in terms of exhibition and exchange value.” By making limited prints of a photograph and creating bigger prints (because bigger pictures have more presence over smaller pictures) photography was able to gain some uniqueness and therefore made progress to becoming contemporary art.
The author concludes the chapter discussing how photography has been accepted into the mainstream and continues to revolutionise itself. Reading this chapter led me to question whether a simple copy of an image retains the same quality of beauty and artistic taste of its original.