(http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/searchdetail.asp?num=15210)
"Photography was born of science and art, and its identity is linked to both disciplines. Notwithstanding, photography seemed predestined to be closely associated with painting. Its inventors were not only scientists, but artists intent on compensating for their inability to draw well. Their lenses were ground according to the demands of picture-making. The Englishman William Henry Fox-Talbot, who pioneered a paper negative process ("calotype") at virtually the same time the Frenchmen Nicphore Nipce and Louis Jacques Mand Daguerre announced their polished-silver technique ("daguerreotype"), called once of his procedures "photogenic drawing," and titled his album of 1844-46 The Pencil of Nature. Despite its advantages for the artist, photographs were never exhibited in mid-nineteenth-century fine art exhibitions. Photography was considered a mechanical procedure and thus relegated to the industrial sections of expositions. With the simplification of photography in the 1880s, when George Eastman first offered the Kodak camera and film that could be returned for processing, photography became a popular and personal art, with a significant percentage of the populations of Britain and America owning cameras. In order to distinguish themselves from the banal productions of the masses of amateurs, certain photographers formed associations to promote the advancement of their craft as art. Believing photography's infinite detail and illusionistic depth to be overly clinical and inexpressive, they condoned manipulation of the print to convey individualistic moods and fashioned their compositions after contemporary painting. Thus, the first coherent international photographic movement, which flourished until the end of the First World War, was termed "Pictorialism." Photography achieved limited success when it adopted the conventions of painting, whether replicating subject matter or simulating painterly effects. The result was deemed either intolerably artificial or inappropriate to the medium's unique potential to record facts. Despite its drawbacks, however, Pictorialism succeeded in gaining entry for photographs into art museums around the world, in having photographs included in fine arts exhibitions, and in establishing that photography was not merely a mechanical process, but a creative act. While photographers today are less likely than painters to be referred to as "artists," photographs regularly hang in our museums and galleries and command high prices from assiduous collectors--the medium is universally regarded as one of the fine arts. Certainly, from its inception, there have been practitioners of photography whose work constitutes visual art. Yet, there is no agreement as to what constitutes photographic art. Visual art, being the product of human activity, must partake of that which is distinctly human--namely, the ability to think and to feel. Thus, visual art comprises those images that stimulate the mind or the emotions, conveying ideas or associate responses (whether pleasant or disturbing) by means of physical description, intellectual symbolism, or abstract design. "