Seduced by Art: The Problem of Photography

At the end of 2012, London’s National Gallery hosted its first large-scale, temporary exhibition of photography, Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present. Coming a full 75 years after photographic shows became commonplace at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, this was an important departure for the National Gallery which until then had been exclusively devoted to Western painting from the 13th century onwards. Yet painting (‘Art’) still provided the frame of reference within which photography was viewed and judged. The exhibition offered a series of carefully staged comparisons between high cultural practice and the newer medium. In an attempt to co-opt photography into the realm of Art, the transition from painting to photography was presented as apparently seamless, inevitable and triumphant: photography had ‘come of age’. Both this narrative and the curatorial strategies at work in the exhibition are, however, open to challenge.