THE DESIRE TO LEAVE OUR MARK, our fingerprints, our personal representation of this world, is one of the things that makes us human. Stenciled hands found on the walls of El Castillo, a cave in northern Spain, are believed to be more than 40,000 years old. By the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E, cave painters were utilizing abstraction, stylized figuration, and representational forms, revealing an innate need to make pictures.
The idea of photography existed long before the invention of the camera. A primary function of visual arts originated in the urge, demonstrated above, to create a likeness of someone or something deemed worthy of commemoration. This human impulse to make pictures that augment ...
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