On the impact of photography on the Impressionists, for one, see Pierre Schneider, The World of Manet (New York and Canada: Time, Inc., 1968) 98 ff. Among his insightful comments are the following.

"Perhaps what photography contributed most to painting was an enlarged vocabulary of seeing. Dramatic perspectives such as that of the Paris Blvd... ; bold compressions of depth between figures in a scene and between figures and the background; the blurring or freezing of action; and the brutal and often arbitrary cutting off of a figure or an object by the edge of a photograph. But most important of all of this new understanding of the visual world was the sense of the instantaneous, of the fleeting impression of reality frozen for all time. It was this, above all, that would become the chief preoccupation of the Impressionist painters and endure as a quality of much of Modern art. These new approaches to picture making, so different from the formulas of well ordered, well balanced, timeless compositions of much academic painting, might have come forth from artists working independently. But certainly photography speeded up the discovery, acting as a kind of catalyst.

In the end, far from causing the death of painting, as some feared photography would, or forcing painting to depict "reality", which it thought photography could do much better, the craft of the camera evolved its own artists and its own aesthetics. And in the process, it revitalized painting, forcing redefinitions of old concepts, urging new perceptions of the world and creating a huge, new audience that took pleasure in seeing."