Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #814

The early 20th century witnessed a profound shift in artistic representation, spurred largely by photography's emergence. Previously, painting bore the primary responsibility of capturing reality with fidelity, but the camera rendered this function redundant. Far from rendering painting obsolete, however, this technological displacement liberated artists to explore interiority, abstraction, and subjective experience. It forced them to question the very essence of visual art, moving beyond mere imitation to embrace forms that could express a deeper, non-literal truth. Thus, photography, by taking over the task of objective reproduction, paradoxically spurred painting toward new frontiers of interpretive expression.