The beginings of Photography takes us to the 19th Century, but it was mainly born as a medium to inform, because the eye of the photographer could see what we might have been missing.

The MNBA keeps a photo by Sara Facio, from 1974, taken during the days of Juan Domingo Perón's funerals. While she worked as a reporter for a foreign newspaper covering the death of the President, she decided to make a small series (just 14 pictures) for her keeping. Although titled "The funerals of President Perón", the coffin never appears, only the sad faces of the people gathered to mourn him.

Los muchachos peronistas, by Sara Facio (series Funerales del Presidente Perón, 1974)

Technique: B&W Photography / Measures: 14 x 20 cm - MNBA

The picture is small, however, as curador Rodrigo Alonso said, it transmits the conceptual and emotional force of the photo, truly becoming a document of an important social event. In the picture  you can see members of the Peronist Youths and the Argentine flag with a crape.

Now, when was it that the photo stopped being a mechanical copy of reality to gain real soul? Which was the vanguardist change that decided to "see something more" in pure journalistic material? The truth is that photography becomes art when it's accepted by museums...

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is actully presenting an exhibition with thirty five works by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), an English photographer of great sensitivity. By 1870, she already described photography as art because, as with painting, it pursued beauty in all its forms.

Pomona, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1872)

MetropolitanMuseum of Art - New York

Her photos look so up-to-date that they can be compared to those by American artist Cindy Sherman, who, some time ago, had a personal exhibition at the MoMA, with pictures of contemporary women from the American society. Maybe the comparison is a bit exagerated, but Julia had to find her own place in a world of men, so she made her mark with photos full of sensuality, where her subjects almost always had their hair loose. A catholic and mother of six, she liked taking photos of young people with a clear natural beauty. The result was so vivid they all seemed to be actually breathing.

Christabel, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1866)

Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York

By the first years of the 20th century, Alvin Coburn said that Photography was the most modern of arts, because it's quick and impersonal. With the improvement of the technique, new photos challenged viewers with a trick between what we saw and what really was there. Let's analyse this example by Edward Weston: we believe to see the back of a human nude, when in fact it's a... pepper.

Pepper, by Edward Weston (1930) 

Nowadays we have museums solely dedicated to Photography, such as the Jeu de Paume, at the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in Tokyo, Japan.

Keep reading... On Photography, by Susan Sontag (1977), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA.