The 19th century debates about the possibility of photographic art seem, from our twenty first century vantage level, hopelessly misguided. But this is largely as a result of we’re the recipients of an understanding of what can count as art that has been altered by the event of reproductive applied sciences like photography and movie. Throughout a lot of the 19th Art & Media century, it seemed obvious to a large number of critics that the mechanical nature of pictures excluded it straightforwardly from consideration as art. Charles Baudelaire for instance, in his Salon of 1859, worries that the general…