Mise en scène: photography and staging strategies in the beginnig of the modernity

Abstract

With the birth of photography, in 1839, several discussions about the artistic condition of photographic image have been opened. Many authors have defended that the photography must be just an auxiliary tool of the Fine Arts, a mirror with memory that reproduce faithfully the reality. Nevertheless, since her origins, the photography tried to reach an artistic status using staged strategies in order to create images in a dialogue with the artistic and theatrical practices of the epoch. This fictional impulse, based on the staged image, will be a constant in the photographic theories until the beginning of the 20th century. Then, the straight photography displaces the pictorial photography as the photographic main stream.