Photography, Like Virtual Reality, Was Once Scorned As An Artistic Medium Too

In the form of an art review, Laurie Taylor reminds us of what photography meant when it was first invented—as a way of considering what VR might mean to us today and in the near future.

For a summer 2017 exhibition called Thresholds at London’s Somerset House, the artist Mat Collishaw is “restaging” the first major exhibition of photography in the UK—it took place in 1839—in virtual reality.

The project intends to let viewers “time travel” by wearing VR headsets and headphones, which turn the white exhibition space into “the Gothic interior of King Edward’s School as it looked in 1939”. In other words, you can accurately experience the original photography show in the environment where it was shown.

Many art critics scorn VR as just another tech novelty with little artistic merit. But Taylor points out that this dismissal resembles critical responses to photography when it was first invented. The closer a copy of reality a technology can create, the less creative its use can be—or so the thinking (still) goes.