Jason Bagent's List: How Photography Changed Art

• When the resulting retouched picture of Occident in arrested motion was published in July 1877, it was so different from the traditional artist’s impression that it created a minor sensation.
• With the latter he was able to demonstrate that artists throughout the ages had depicted the horse in attitudes that were completely false.
• This 11-volume work had a tremendous impact, not least on artists, who were forced to reassess completely the manner in which they depicted animal movement.

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• Inspired by technological progress in optics, photography and electricity, artists in the second half of the nineteenth century and in particular the Impressionists, became convinced that the truth of an object could not be recognised in photographic reproductions. Instead it had to be broken down into its individual parts and their relationship to their surroundings had also to be examined. The Pointillists such as Georges Seurat built on the theories of the Impressionists, taking them further by consciously applying unmixed colours from the prism in the form of dots so that as the viewer moved further away from the picture the flickering play of sunlight would be recreated in the retina.

• Free to experiment, he produced works in a variety of styles and in many different media; in 1922 he began to exploit his personal variant of the photogram, which he called the ‘rayograph’, a method of producing images directly from objects on photo-sensitive paper.
• Man Ray himself equated his technique with painting, stating in letters that he was ‘painting with light’.