A note on Photographic Exceptionalism

The pictures are of early morning light on tree roots of red river gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis,) in Benbibuta Creek in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. They were made with a Rolleiflex TLR whilst I was on a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome in 2021. When I came back to looking through this archive in 2025 I realised how the idea of photographic exceptionalism and its art historical narrative had informed my approach to photography and how that narrative was misleading.

Photographic exceptionalism is the idea of medium specificity that is predicated on the view that photography was able, by virtue of its special optical-chemical properties, to do something its competitors could not. This was usually understood to be realism and its telos of the ever greater refinement of realism.

We need to think both more in terms of the historical pre-photographic commodity cultural context of visual media ie., the whole terrain of visual representation out of which photography emerged; and the interrelationships between photography, print making and other visual media. From. this perspective photography is understood to be part of the history of all picturemaking,’ i.e. part of a general visual culture.

This implies a shift to a study of light, colour, and gradation of tone, rather than the traditional photographic concern to a realism corresponding to what we see in nature with our own eyes. In contrast, photographic exceptionalism is the conviction that the phenomenon of photography can be properly understood only by detaching it from any comparison with the other visual media (and with printmaking in particular).

Photographic exceptionalism still substantially informs thinking and writing on art photography within the art institution’s mainstream formalist and modernist conception of photography, namely, medium-specificity and the purity of the medium’s deployment of its own material conditions. Sadly, this art historical approach of MoMA , underwritten by the stubborn conviction of photography’s essential difference, has given rise to photography’s separatism, relative insularity and parochialism.