Photography's impact on fine art, illustration and graphic design

Hip hip hooray for light drawings! They, from the beginning, have had an impact on fine art, illustration and graphic design. Their beginnings were very humble but what a change they brought around. Many cultures are obsessed with taking pictures, even our own. Pictures provide us with a somewhat accurate instance of time, captured for us. In the beginning, however, these 'light drawings' took hours to develope and we are so blessed that now it only takes a split of a second, if not less. These light drawings as they developed soon replaced wood engravings in the illustration world. They were more cost effective. Before it replaced wood engraving, photography was used as a research tool to produce more realistic wood engravings. Today, it is still used as a reference tool for painters and other artists in the fine art world. Instead of setting up models and the such, who had to sit still for hours and had to be paid. So, it replaced illustrations in newspapers and the like and replaced models in the fine art world putting illustrators, wood engravers, and models out of work. So, where does this leave graphic designers. Well, graphic designers are problem solvers so it would be hard to put a true graphic designer out of work. If anything it gave them more material to work with. They have photos to reference and play with in photoshop. If it wasn't for the invention of photography there may not have been a photoshop. It was once thought a photograph was an all knowing truth teller, but from the beginning this wasn't so. Just think about the man, Matthew Brady, who spent a hundred thousand dollars of his own money on taking pictures of the Civil War and then went bankrupt. Perhaps, he lost all his money in a fit of instant karma since he set up his war photos to make the scene more dramatic by moving a dead body here or there. Now, designers have taken this a step further and edit photos on the computer to produce a sway in people's opinion like the photograph of OJ Simpson, mentioned in class. In the photo his skin was made more darker then it actually is in real life and this was done because it's know that we have an association with really dark skin that is not good and not in a innocent until proven guilty kind of favor. So,a lot has happened with photography to make our lives better, make things more cost effective, and to even sway the opinions and spark the creative process in people. It's effect on the whole is awesome. I like my digital camera and all four hundred pictures in it and as you know by today standards that is not a lot of photos.