Photography

Photography is the process and practice of making images by the action of light on a light-sensitive material, as well as the images so produced. Invented in the late 1830s through Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype and Talbot's calotype, it quickly transformed ideas of the image, the document, and memory. Photography spans a vast range, from scientific recording and photojournalism to Pictorialism, modernist experiment, and conceptual art. Over the twentieth century it established itself as a full art capable of an autonomous aesthetic. Ukraine has a rich photographic tradition: the travel writer and photographer Sofia Yablonska, and later the internationally celebrated Kharkiv School of Photography (among its members, Boris Mikhailov), which developed a sharply social and poetic approach. The digital revolution democratized the medium and made it ubiquitous, while sharpening questions of truth, authorship, and the ethics of the image in an age of mass visual culture.