Artists can be inspired by anything and will use all kinds of media and materials, so you can expect to find that since the invention of photography artists have also been influenced by that. From a practical point of view, it's not unusual for portrait painters to take photographs ot a sitter to have a record of the exact pose and even get ideas for improving the portrait.
Picasso had a particular interest in photography spanning many years, and was a very keen photographer - in fact his camera was recently auctioned because it is seen as important to his work, and in 1994 there was an exhibition looking at his relationship with photography. In later years PIcasso worked together with photographers to create lithographs and other images, and this work certainly fed into and influenced his portraits and other arts. Even in earlier years, some critics have speculated that his famous Blue Period was influenced by the blue tinge of the photographs of that era.