During the twentieth century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the United States, a handful of curators spent their lives advocating to put photography in such a system, with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, and Hugh Edwards the most prominent among them.

The aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed regularly, especially in artistic circles. Many artists argued that photography was the mechanical reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, then photography in the context of art would need redefinition, such as determining what component of a photograph makes it beautiful to the viewer.

Commercial photography

The commercial photographic world can be broken down to:

• Advertising photography: photographs made to illustrate a service or product. These images are generally done with an advertising agency, design firm or with an in-house corporate design team.
•  Fashion and glamour photography: This type of photography usually incorporates models. Fashion photography emphasizes the clothes or product, glamour emphasizes the model. Glamour photography is popular in advertising and in men's megazines. Models in glamour photography may be nude, but this is not always the case.
• Editorial photography: photographs made to illustrate a story or idea within the context of a magazine. These are usually assigned by the magazine.
• Photojournalism: this can be considered a subset of editorial photography. Photographs made in this context are accepted as a truthful documentation of a news story.
• Portrait and wedding photography: photographs made and sold directly to the end user of the images.
• Fine art photography: photographs made to fulfill a vision, and reproduced to be sold directly to the customer.

The market for photographic services demonstrates the aphorism "one picture is worth a thousand words," which has an interesting basis in the history of photography. Magazines and newspapers, companies putting up Web sites, advertising agencies and other groups pay for photography.

Many people take photographs for self-fulfillment or for commercial purposes. Organizations with a budget and a need for photography have several options: they can assign a member of the organization, hire someone, run a public competition, or obtain rights to stock photographs.