Reflection on “Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859”

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet and essayist who also was known as art critic. In the paper we can read his opinion about photography. Baudelaire does not recognise photography as an art because of its realism.  He says that “It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me…. I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.” Although the general modern opinion on photography contradicts with Baudelaire’ we have to remember that he was talking about photography in the end of 19th century. That was the beginning of the history of photography so it was much more constrained that all other arts that was familiar to Baudelaire. Under such technical difficulties it is really hard to reveal for yourself art nature of some new technical innovation. I think, it would be very interesting to ask Baudelaire’s opinion about photography as art nowadays after a couple of centuries of photography history full of experimenting, breaking rules and exploring the ways of perception of the world.