The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on

whether photographer's fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art (1)_____ distinctive from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the (2)_____ to establish it as a fine art. (3)_____ the charge that photographers was a soulless mechanical duplication of (4)_____, photographers (5)_____ that it was instead a privileged (6)_____ of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and (7)_____ worthy an art than painting.

Ironically, (8)_____ photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or (9)_____ to label it as such. Serious photographers are no longer willing to (10)_____ whether photography is not involved with art, (11)_____ to proclaim that their own work is not involved with it. This shows the extent (12)_____ which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the (13)_____ of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.

Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the troubled status of the contemporary (14)_____ of art (15)_____ about whether photography is or is not art. Photography, (16)_____ Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.

Photography, (17)_____, has developed all the (18)_____ and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the (19)_____ of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity— (20)_____, an art.

A．for

B．apart

C．as

D．beside