The Photography Effect: John Everett Millais's Ophelia

1) The photography effect had a great impact on the way art was viewed in the 19th century. Photography caused a shift to Romanticism, which emerged as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It searched for a direct connection to nature rather than subject itself to scientific, industrial rules and regulation. It created an alternate world, one that appreciated the beauty and simplicity of nature, in response to the materialism of the industrialization. This is evident when viewing John Everett Millais’s Ophelia.
Photography also impacted people’s everyday lives. According to Jonathan Crary, to understand the photography effect, “one must see it as a crucial component of a new cultural economy of value and exchange” (Techniques of the Observer). The introduction of photography initiated many fundamental changes in society that had a domino effect. For example, the invention and development of photography greatly impacted the methods through which humans remember things. As Roland Barthes effectively summarized, “what the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once” (Camera Lucida). A photograph serves as a permanent memory, one that could easily be relived when viewing the image. As a result, photography soon began to be used to document history. Everyday events could now be captured with a click of a button …show more content…
The picture to the right is his first photograph and is actually the view of Paris from his window. When photography first came forth, it could take anywhere from several hours to multiple days to take a picture. Yet photography seemed to carry a certain allure, despite all these difficulties. As Diana Arbus explains, she always thought of photography as “a naughty thing to do…and when [she] first did it, [she] felt very perverse” (Diana Arbus). This could be seen in a photograph she took, as shown