By Jay Tolson

Shortly before introducing the daguerreotype in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre boasted that his new invention would not merely draw nature but give it "the power to reproduce itself." Daguerre was an artist, yet from the beginning, and for fully a century, the seemingly autonomous power of the camera to reproduce the seen world raised doubts about photography's status as art.

Such doubts were compounded by a fateful coincidence: Photography was born at a time when the ascendant styles of Western art–naturalism and realism–were devoted to the exact reproduction of what the artists saw before them. And as Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, points out, it was not just because photography produced pictures "in perfect perspective" that it intrigued and disturbed such artists. It was also, Galassi explains, "because the new medium was born to an artistic environment that increasingly valued the mundane, the fragmentary, the seemingly uncomposed."

At first, photography's proponents were generally modest about its artistic standing. Some saw it simply as an aid to the artist, particularly the portraitist. And a number of great painters accepted the help, using daguerreotypes to execute portrait commissions without the time-consuming business of live sittings. But while artists were happy to have the resources of photography at hand–it was also useful for documenting their work and for studying masterpieces without traveling abroad to see them–some began to resent these "sun etched" images. Artist and critic John Ruskin at first championed photography as helpful to the naturalist painter, but he began to devalue visual literalism in favor of more subjective qualities that he saw, for instance, in the late work of the painter J. M. W. Turner. An even harsher critic, Charles Baudelaire, derided the inclusion of photography–"the refuge of all failed painters," he wrote–in the 1859 Exhibition of Fine Arts at the Palais de l'Industrie.

But most photographers advanced their craft heedless of aesthetic debates until the advent of an international movement called Pictorialism. Concerned with expressiveness rather than fact, the pictorialists produced their share of derivative, artsy fluff, but also many great works, including Alfred Stieglitz's famous Steerage. Indeed, by following the Ashcan School of painters in their preoccupation with urban subjects, Paul Strand and others returned art photography to a grittier realism, showing that fact and beauty need not be opposing objectives. The Depression-era photographers of the Farm Security Administration, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, drove home the point.

And the official art world acknowledged almost as much in 1940, when the Museum of Modern Art created a department of photography under Beaumont Newhall and began collecting and showing the work of these and other "modernist" masters. As replicable objects, however, photographs still ranked far below other established art forms in one notable area: the marketplace. At a small MOMA exhibit in the early 1950s, for example, original prints by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were bought right off the walls for under $25 apiece.

Still, says Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography, museum recognition settled a big question: "Photography was art, case closed." But to some degree, says Phillips, Newhall perpetuated the uncertainty about what kind of art it was. Creating the photographic canon, he still preserved a distinction between pictorial and documentary efforts. But if the custodians of modernism insisted on that distinction, many photographers of the last third of the 20th century would demolish it.

They did so, in part, because these artists were products of a culture that lived by and for the image–an endless flow of images spewed forth by advertising, journalism, public relations, and the movie and television industries. The photographers' response to the many manipulative uses of the image was to subvert them–and to turn them to artistic ends. Whether called conceptualists or postmodernists, they often used the crude, documentary look of the small-scale hand-held camera to achieve subtle and sophisticated effects. In the hands of Diane Arbus, what seems like a harmless family photo of a backyard scene becomes a troubling statement about suburban ennui. Following Andy Warhol, conceptualists like Vito Acconci and Robert Smithson employed photographs as just one of many elements in the production of a "piece," further eroding the differences–in price as well as prestige–between photography and other art forms. More recent disturbers of the peace create pseudo industrial and corporate art (Andreas Gursky), picture themselves in "stills" from imaginary films (Cindy Sherman), or rephotograph great photographic works to challenge the idea of the unique genius of the artist-photographer (Sherrie Levine). And their works sell at prices–$270,000 for a Gursky at a Christie's auction last fall–that match, or exceed, those of paintings or other contemporary artwork. The digital camera allows artists to go further in manipulating the image, rearranging scale and perspective, or adding and removing elements from a picture. Taking such manipulation to its logical conclusion, Craig Kalpakjian creates a haunting and wholly made-up view from within an air duct. But in the deepest sense, none of this is really new. "Some of Gursky's outrageous digital manipulations are continuous with ways photography has been lying for 150 years," MOMA's Galassi says. And lying for a paradoxical reason: to show the truth that is in the eye of the beholder.