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Photography occupies a unique place in the world of visual art, at once a scientific process, a creative language, a tool for documentation, and a medium for imagination.

At its core, photography is the art and science of capturing light to create images, whether on a light-sensitive surface or, in the digital age, through electronic sensors.

The term photography derives from the Greek phōs (light) and graphē (drawing), meaning "drawing with light." While early photographers viewed it primarily as a means of recording reality, artists quickly recognized its expressive potential.

By the mid-19th century, photographic societies began forming, bringing together amateurs and professionals who explored the medium's aesthetic possibilities and helped establish photography as an art in its own right.

As photography matured, it developed its own visual language (composition, tonal range, perspective, and timing) while also borrowing from painting, printmaking, and later, cinema. Today, photography spans documentary, conceptual, fine art, commercial, and experimental practices, each contributing to its status as a central pillar of contemporary visual culture.

The origins of photography lie in the early 19th century, when inventors sought ways to fix images produced by the camera obscura, a device known since antiquity. The breakthrough came with Nicéphore Niépce, who created the first permanent photograph in 1826 or 1827 using a pewter plate coated with bitumen. His partner, Louis Daguerre, refined the process into the daguerreotype, introduced in 1839, which produced highly detailed images on silvered copper plates.

Other early innovations included Calotype (1841), a paper-negative process created by William Fox Talbot, enabling multiple prints; the wet collodion process (1850s), offering faster exposure times and sharper images; and albumen prints, the first commercially viable photographic paper. These developments coincided with the rise of photographic societies and salons, which fostered artistic experimentation and public appreciation.

Photography's relationship with the visual arts evolved through several major phases, such as pictorialism in the late 19th-early 20th century, in which photographers sought to emulate painting through soft focus, atmospheric effects, and elaborate printing techniques, a movement that argued passionately for photography's legitimacy as fine art; modernism in the 1920s to 1960s, during which artists like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams embraced sharp focus, abstraction, and formal precision, making photography a medium of clarity, structure, and truth; documentary and photojournalism, where the camera became a tool for social observation, from Jacob Riis's urban reform images to the Farm Security Administration's Depression-era documentation; color photography and new processes, such as the introduction of color film and, later, digital sensors, expanding the expressive palette of photographers; and contemporary and conceptual photography, which is used in installations, mixed media, staged scenes, and digital manipulation, pressing the boundaries of what a photograph can be.

Photography encompasses a wide range of techniques, each shaping the final image. These include film techniques (daguerreotype, calotype, tintype, silver gelatin printing, darkroom manipulation, and large- and medium-format film), digital techniques (sensor-based capture, RAW processing, digital post-production, and high dynamic range), and creative and experimental methods (long exposure, multiple exposure, infrared photography, pinhole photography, and alternative processes).

The versatility of photography has produced several genres, including portrait photography, landscape photography, documentary and street photography, fine art photography, fashion photography, architectural photography, wildlife photography, macro photography, abstract and experimental photography, and commercial and advertising photography.

Photography pioneers, modernists, documentarians, and contemporary artists include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Sebastião Salgado, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Man Ray, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Lee Fiedlander, and Annie Leibovitz.

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