In England the first photographic processes and materials were available only to those who had paid a licence fee to inventors and patent holders to use them. In London, Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet bought the rights to the daguerreotype process, thus keeping instruction and training, such as it was, in their own hands. (In France and other countries there was a free-for-all.) A similar situation pertained to the calotype, although as far as amateurs were concerned, more in theory than in practice, and groups like the Calotype Society (1847) formed to share and disseminate knowledge of the process. Propagating the ‘art and science of photography’ was a principal purpose of the Photographic Society of London (1853); in the words of its secretary, Roger Fenton, ‘Such a Society will be the reservoir to which will flow, and from which will be beneficially distributed, all the springs of knowledge at present wasting unproductively.’ Similar bodies appeared in other cities. This network of organizations, and the qualifications awarded by the Royal (from 1894) Photographic Society, became a significant channel of photographic education. Particularly during the pictorialist era, both in Britain and abroad, societies played a vital role in mediating the complex skills identified with ‘art photography’. Even today, clubs and societies, especially those endowed with facilities like darkrooms, continue to pass on photographic technique and experience.
Polytechnic institutions, and military organizations like the Royal Engineers, also provided training in the 19th century. So too, for their employees, did many of the increasing number of commercial studios. Especially in Britain, apprenticeship remained the dominant form of professional training until after the Second World War, although the foundation of the City and Guilds of London Institute in 1880 and the Professional Photographers' Association in 1901 opened the way for today's system of formal qualifications that can be studied for at colleges of further and higher education across the country. Elsewhere, patterns of training have varied considerably. In the USA, before the late 20th-century burgeoning of university-based courses, a significant role was played by private schools, which in New York alone included the establishment founded by Clarence White in 1914, which trained many major photographers of the inter-war period; the classes run by the Photo League; and the Famous Photographers distance-learning school. In Central Europe, although apprenticeship became firmly established, there was pressure from professional organizations, as photographic practice diversified and the numbers employed increased, for the creation of photographic courses at technical colleges and other institutions, and the foundation of publicly funded photographic schools. The first of these in Germany was the Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie in Munich (later the Munich Photo School), a joint venture between the South German Photographers' Association, the city of Munich, and the Bavarian state. It opened for men only in 1900, and admitted women from 1905. Other institutions offering photographic training before 1914 included the Berlin Lette-Verein, the Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna and the Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig, which in 1913 offered a chair to the German-American painter-turned-pictorialist-photographer Frank Eugene. After the First World War photography established itself at the Folkwang School in Essen, the Dessau Bauhaus (from 1929), the Stuttgart and Zurich Design Schools, and Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus (1937-8) and its successors in Chicago.
Viewed in retrospect, these developments foreshadowed the late 20th-century phenomenon of the photographer as fine artist (complete with dealer and market valuation), or the fine artist as photographer (often in conjunction with other media or art forms, such as installations or body art). Its concomitant was photography's increasing integration into degree-level or postgraduate fine-art, journalism, and design courses at universities, Kunsthochschulen, or art academies. This is reflected in the backgrounds of many leading figures on the contemporary (art) scene. Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky, for example, are graduates respectively of the Munich and Düsseldorf academies, Rineke Dijkstra of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, Philip-Lorca diCorcia of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Jeff Wall of the University of British Columbia and the London Courtauld Institute. Interesting though this development is, however, its implications should not be overstated: in the future some vocationally trained (and even self-taught) photographers will doubtless continue to achieve recognition as artists, while many art-school graduates will eventually earn their living in commercial photography or teaching.
— Richard SadlerRichard Sadler/Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- also society for photographic education.
- Zakia, R., Malone, R., and NeJame, F., “‘Photographic Education’”, in L. Stroebel and R. Zakia (eds.), The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography (3rd edn., 1993).
- Yochelson, B., Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (1996).
- Pohlmann, U., and Scheutle, R. (eds.), Lehrjahre, Lichtjahre: Die Münchner Fotoschule 1900-2000 (2000).
- Siegel, E., and Travis, D. (eds.), Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1931-1971 (2002)
