Can photography be art?

Most of the paintings in the world do nothing for me, many lauded photos don't either. But we are looking at someone else's idea of great work here. A curator's or the art world in general. There is nothing that says that you have to like something because someone else tells you to. What you like is yours and yours only. I find plenty of photographs to like, you just have to keep looking. But liking what you like is the key, not because it is a "classic".

Sorry you don't like reading, though. It's just about the most important thing in the world to me. I read non-fiction and fiction in copious quantities. Currently re-reading S282 An Introduction to the Solar System (an Open University course on planetary science I took 20 years ago), Michael Kenna's Trees, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Lords of Uncreation (science fiction).

I read non stop: finish one book, start another seconds later. Have been doing so since I could first read. Don't own a TV, no time for that stuff. Reading is everything. Understanding the real world and being consumed by imaginary worlds. As Red Dwarf put it, Better than life. 😁

I took A-level English literature aged 16-18. It left me with an everlasting feeling that instead of analysing the meaning of a line of Shakespear like 10 million students before me, what we should be doing is learning to create new works. But that's just me. Being a critic and being a creator are often different things.

I feel taking enjoyment from art is more an emotional experience, than cerebral. I've noticed all my life how some people who, say, love literature, love works where the whole piece is some kind of vast many layered intellectual maze they delight in the experience of unraveling. I've never been one for crosswords or decrypting codes. That stuff is not for me. I love stuff that spirits you away on an emotional imaginary journey. It works on the heart, rather than the mind. Everyone takes something different from creativity.

This is just wordplay. But if it makes you happy.

I understand from reading Perfecting sound for ever: The story of recorded music that arguments over the process of recording music have raged since Edison. Edison was in the "make the most literal recording you can" camp, while many others were in the "studio music is an art form in itself, quite separate from live performance" camp. The latter camp won, and the majority of music recorded today is as much the product of the artistry of the producers and engineers as it is the musicians and composers. In effect, producers are the composers.

The 1973 barbarian's try against the All Blacks scored by Gareth Edwards (yes, "that try") must surely be regarded as one of the greatest pieces of spontaneous art in history (even though I'm convinced there was more than a hint of a forward pass in there). I've seen it a hundred times, but it is still breath taking. Literally poetry in motion.

Danny, looking at the question pragmatically, there's no question but that history documents the fact of photography being art going back more than 150 years. Is there any real doubt that photography won't be treated as art, discussed as art, exhibited, reviewed, bought, sold, and collected as art 25, 50, 100 years from now?

A person is entitled to their own opinion. But if someone wants to argue that photography isn't art, I think it's only fair to point out that society, as a whole, rejected that argument nearly two centuries ago.

Museum and gallery curators, art critics, art collectors, art historians, members of the general public who enjoy & value art - the people whose education, expertise, opinions, and dollars spent effectively determine what history identifies and preserves as art - have made their choice.

No discussion, here or in any other forum, is going to change that. It's tilting at windmills.

Again, that's still a fallacy.

Isn't it obvious that, of the visual arts, one of them is entirely different from all the others? If you have a sack of marbles, all of them various shades of green and one red one, wouldn't that tell you that the red one is in the wrong bag?

My A-level teacher said, when I complained that the author couldn't possible have intended all these deep and subtle meanings that people had identified:

"The measure of literature is not that author intended such meanings, but that his work is written in such a way that it lends itself to different interpretations by those that follow. The importance of a work owes more to the interpreters than the authors". I never bought that argument. i have far more admiration for writers than I have for post hoc critics and analysts, impressive as their inventions can also be.

Completely incidental, I live next door to an author called Tibor Fischer who was the youngest nominee for the Booker Prize in 1993. His parents (who lived there before him) were Soviet era refugees and former Hungarian basket ball players. His father George went on to become a BBC producer. They just seemed like very ordinary elderly people in the twilight of their lives when I met them. I expect modern day Britain would have deported them as illegals [Warning: political comment, avert eyes]

I'm not very keen on literature, I'd much rather read a good book. lol

Good for you. Writing that ambiguous is bad writing.

Come into a restaurant just to say all the food sucks and see how long before they ask you to leave. If you're gonna be in a photography form and say this isn't an art, why are you even here other than to troll? This isn't a chocolate and vanilla debate of taste. Dismiss every single posters images as not art, that's fine. That's a subjective matter of taste. I have no qualms with that. But to say the craft isn't an art spits on so much hard work by so many to make this art form possible and evolved to where it is today where even an idiot without knowledge of cameras can take amazing images...GTFO with that sorta noise.

So Bill, is this art to you? because it's not to me.

Danny.

@OpenCube

I don’t agree with LeeJay’s comments, but I’m sure as heck not going to argue with him, plenty of other folk here to fill that role.
Too long in the tooth and too jaded to deal with “button pushers.” lol

Ah, but it's not ambiguity, you see, they say it's depth from the writer waiting to be mined by others for for subconscious insights 😁

Documentary!

This thread turned from a simple question of whether photography can be art (spoiler: yes, it can) to which photographs can be considered art (a contentious topic). I am not sure that everyone realizes that those are two unrelated topics.