When Daguerre introduced the first practical photographic process in 1839, many feared it spelled the end of painting, since photography could capture reality with a precision no painter could match.

Instead, photography's rise paradoxically liberated painting from its traditional documentary responsibilities — freeing artists to pursue increasingly expressive and eventually abstract approaches, while photography itself began developing its own artistic traditions, from Pictorialism's soft, painterly aesthetic (championed by Alfred Stieglitz) to the sharp-focused "straight photography" of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother demonstrated photography's continued power for direct social documentation, while later artists like Cindy Sherman used photography conceptually, exploring questions of identity and representation through staged, cinematic-style self-portraits.

Today, photography stands as a fully established fine art form in its own right — Andreas Gursky's large-format 99 Cent became one of the most expensive photographs ever sold, even as digital technology continues to raise new questions about authenticity and originality that photography's earliest practitioners never had to confront.