However the idea of photography as art is still a topic that many people struggle with today. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet and essayist who also was known as art critic. Some of his concerns about the creative situation for the artist in a mechanically progressive age are displayed in this commentary on photography from the Salon review of 1859, the year most Baudelaire scholars consider his most brilliant and productive. ), then photography and art are the same thing." Imitating nature had nothing to do with art. In ca. According to Baudelaire, photography showed the world in a realistic and truthful way, which could never be beautiful. 1863 French photographer Etienne Carjat took a Woodburytype photograph of poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who described photography in “The Salon of 1859” as “art’s most mortal enemy.”Baudelaire’s head is in focus, while the edges of the portrait are softened. In the paper we can read his opinion about photography. Charles Baudelaire was a French poet known for his controversial volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). And now the faithful says to himself: "Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools ! Apparently Baudelaire did not see photography as art since it was focused on "optical reality." I thought that as a artist himself (I consider poetry an art) Baudelaire would understand the artistic beauty in photography. Charles Baudelaire, father of modern art criticism, was deeply ambivalent about modernity. He says that “It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me…. Baudelaire does not recognise photography as an art because of its realism. Learn more at Biography.com. Baudelaire felt that the public taste for photography was caused by a love of truth which was contrary to the inner human beauty which art was supposed to depict: