Emily Morgan Talbot

This project analyzes the integration of photography into the production and interpretation of pictorial art made in Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In contrast to traditional narratives of cross-media exchange that emphasize artists’ visual responses to new technologies, this dissertation shifts attention from the visible to the invisible realms, arguing that photography’s effects reveal themselves through a discursive history and theory of artistic practice. By examining methods of making and the critical language used to describe works of art, the study establishes that photography unseated painting as the medium most closely aligned with “picturing” during the last decades of the nineteenth century, transforming the ways that painters, photographers, and their publics conceived of art and the processes through which it was made.