Photography as a discipline has changed rather rapidly throughout it’s history and even more so since the advent of digital technology. It has been influenced by a number of different disciplines, such as art, film, and literature. It has also had a strong relationship with technology and, since the early inception of the Camera Obscura to the DSLR and smart phone technologies of today, it has been influenced by the available technologies. As there are so many different photographic tools available, there is a tremendous variance in method, technique, processing and product within the discipline of photography.

Photography has also been used in a number of different ways, making it difficult to define it as a discipline. It has been used by the arts, news, military, science, forensics, research and documentary fields, all with very different purposes and processes. Photography has also been used to create technologies like x-rays and infra-red, that have been used in the fields of medicine or military technology. More recently infra-red has been used artistically by photographers to create stunning, almost otherworldly images that are the result of a the crossover between science and art.

Photography also cannot be separated from the arts, such as fine art, stills, cinema and architecture. Not only has it drawn inspiration from these arts, but it has also influenced them, illustrating the interrelationship between these fields. Anthropology, archaeology and the social sciences have also worked with photography resulting in a relationship between photography and cultural, historical and geographical influences.

As a field photography is an unruly discipline as it refuses to be limited or confined by the boundaries and prescriptions of a single discipline. It is by its very nature an interdisciplinary field that is constantly evolving and dynamically responding to the changing world we live in.

References: https://www.designboom.com https://edwardthompson.co.uk