Can photography be art?

Fair enough. To me art is joy not work. It is something that works at an emotional/intuitive level.

FWIW, I'm told beer is quite good. Having consumed it, including some certifiably good stuff, through my student years, I conclude that, for me, it is not. Why work at enjoying beer when I can just sit down with a nice glass of wine instead?

This is how I see art. LeeJay can assert that, for him, photography is not art. He cannot make that assertion for me.

FWIW, I'm always open to re-visit something I did not use to like. Things change.

Just because I don't think it's art doesn't mean I don't enjoy it. I have a lot of gear and over 400,000 images in my catalogs. I look at them nearly every day.

But they did create the scene. I defy you to go to the location where any photograph was taken and see that location as represented in the captured image.

The exact lighting, camera settings, atmospheric conditions, photons, post processing used to create that image are not there any more. They do not exist except in the photograph the artist created.

There's an interesting turn of discussion ... shifting from esthetics to ethics. I guess it invites the speculation that observers might at some point "cancel" various examples of what is/was widely considered art (including a lot of photography), and declare those things non-art going forward because the earlier views were not right. In other words: "People used to think that was art, but now we know better."

Respectfully, history documents innumerable instances of the fact that photography is art. To use just one example, copies of William Eggleston's "Greenwood, Mississippi" (aka The Red Ceiling) are in the permanent collections and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles). Prints have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), the Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), and many other museums & galleries around the world. Eggleston's solo exhibition at MoMA in 1976 is widely recognized as the ascendance of color photography to a position alongside black and white as an artistic medium. Sotheby's has recently estimated the value of a print at between $150,000 and $200,000.

By any rational metric - being exhibited as art, reviewed and praised by critics, historians, and large sections of the public as art, appraised, sold, and collected as art - Eggleston's photography is art. The same can be said for many photographers whose works have passed the same threshold over the last 150+ years.

To deny this is no different from denying that any accepted medium (painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture, etc.) is art. If you'd like to discuss or debate which photographic artists or photographic works of art are the greatest in history, that sounds like a fun thread. If you'd care to discuss or debate Eggleston's standing - or color photography in general - as near the pinnacle, middle of the road, or somewhere else in the Pantheon of contemporary art, that also sounds like a fun discussion.

But to deny that photography is art in the face of the historic fact to the contrary seems rather a waste of time.

Bill, I really think people should be allowed to decide for themselves what constitutes art and what doesn't. Quoting dollars doesn't mean a heck of a lot Bill and neither does some written word that says what art is. Personally art is a feeling, I can't be forced to have that feeling just because a piece of paper or history says so.

I do what is called graphic art and a lot of it, but that doesn't stop me personally thinking it's not art at all and I don't consider myself an artist even if others do. I sell a heck of a lot of it, but to me, it's not art.

Danny.

I did not say, nor did I mean to imply that you do not enjoy your photographs. I most cerainly hope you do thought. 😊

You sir, are always most respectful. There ought to be a site award for that. 😊

I know it is generally accepted that photography is art, and I think it is as well. The point I'm trying to make is that what is and is not art is very, very personal.

LeeJay does not get to decide for the rest of us whether or not we think so. Nor do we get to decide for him.

Art is what you think it is, nothing more, nothing less.

I accept this interpretation for individual pieces. Is this specific photograph art? The argument becomes more tenuous when used to support the idea that the entire medium is not even eligible to be art. Particularly given the number of museums, collectors, critics and academics, not to mention photographic artists dedicated to the display, promotion, study and creation of this art form.

You don’t have to like it, but I find it exceedingly irrational not to at least grudgingly accept that the craft of photography can produce art.

Would the same rule apply if the subject was "what is a toilet"?

Language is not a free for all.

Are you referring to the slasher, loo or the bog?

Language is a free for all.

It's a dunny :-)

No I'm a Dunny.

Danny. DOH!

Oh OK, I was wondering where the smell in this thread was coming from 😆

Don't look too far Dunno 😉

Dunny = toilet

Um, no. A toilet is a very specific object. Art (without context) is not and object, but a concept. A not so clearly defined concept at that.

Language can definitely be a free for all.

Edit: Search fountain Duchamp. Art is definitely a free for all.

My camera captures my pictures, I can't draw for toffee apples so I can't express myself through dextrous means. But my camera doesn't know where to point itself, what focal length to use, what aperture to set, what shutter speed to use to produce a desired effect. Nor does my software know precisely how to crop, how to adjust certain settings to get the result I want. The art is not in the mechanical process of producing a photograph, it's in knowing what image to produce. It's that creative process in the head of the photographer that makes something art, not the mechanical means used.

A painter may need a paint brush (or a finger) to apply the paint, but it's what's in their creative mind that makes the artwork. Using a brush doesn't negate it being art and using a camera doesn't either. Not all photography is literal mechanical reproduction of the world, it needs the same visual imagination, the same creative intent.

If I were to hazard an opinion on a real difference between some photography and painting, it would be that photography is more a subtractive art. Photography starts with the whole universe as the subject and the photographer uses their creativity to selectively exclude most of it and emphasise other bits to produce a work of art. Painting is additive - the painter starts with a blank sheet and adds the art to it.

In both cases the artfulness comes from the head of the artist. Perhaps the reputation of photography suffers a bit because sometimes serendipity plays a part. Great photographs do sometimes get created from a lucky break. But not all.

My personal discomfort with the concept of photography as art, is all the baggage associated with the word "art". To me, the word comes with a history of pretension (a lot of which is all about making money). If I call myself an artist, I feel a fraud. I prefer to call myself a photographer or someone who takes photographs. It relieves the feelings of imposter syndrome. I'll leave it to others to decide whether my work is art. I doubt my photographs will ever be considered as craft. I'm really not a good craftsman.