That's fine and is your opinion to have.
Other people are just as entitled to their opinions which might be different to yours.
Can photography be art?
- 74 votes.
- Started by JimKasson on May 6, 2023.
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A lot of paintings can be "artistic" too.
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Anything can be "Art".
This was sold for $120,000 :
To Quote :
The first and second editions on display at Miami Art Basel both sold for $120,000 (£95,640), and another was put up for sale for $150,000 before Datuna showed up to eat the fruit. “I have travelled in 67 countries around the world in the last three years, and I see how people live,” Datuna said. “Millions are dying without food. Then he puts three bananas on the wall for half a million dollars?”Obviously, for anyone paying so much for a banana, its all in the eye of the beholder.
If, in the art world anything goes, then why not photography.
In fact a photograph could be printed on edible rice paper.
No doubt at sometime in the future a lazy artist will display a gallery full of artisitc barcodes & make a fortune doing so.
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As someone who studied photography, art and advertising design in the film days, I learned what it takes to create artistic images. While I worked as a professional corporate photographer for just over a decade, I worked with many designers and graphic artists to combine ideas into artistically rendered images which were published. Being retired now, I occasionally find the motivation and Intent to use my home studio to set up and create a unique image (or set of images) that pleases me. So, based on my experiences with photography, some of it is intended to be art, while greater portions document events and what people find interesting.
Here's an example of what I consider Photographic Art.
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This seems to be taking us back to the concept that photography is only art if someone has made the subject. Personally, I find constructed, studio based, manufactured photography the least interesting. I think of photography as an art form that occurs when you find a subject by chance, just happen across it, then your artistry turns something mundane into an interesting picture. All that stuff where art directors dream up concepts in advance and plan out elaborate tableaux, not so much.
Just goes to show that "art" is so wedded to the personal view, it's a hopeless task trying to put boundaries on it. Who was that judge who famously remarked something along the lines of "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it"?
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On the money! (Got my Reply buttons mixed up--That was Re, "A shot can be a record, and can also be art.")
There's also:
A shot can be art, and also a record.
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I went to the SF modern art museum and one of the displays was a pile of candy on the floor.
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On this point, we agree. Example: Guernica.
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A good example of artists whose technique is poor. They are still artists if they are trying to produce art.
However, it's possible that the judges in the competitions have a strong preference for photos that resemble their own.
Don
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The point of pop art is to make you look at a man-made product (such as that candy) with fresh eyes. Of course it doesn't always work.
Would you accept a photograph or a painting of the candy ?Don
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Nice.
What about this?
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Great thread. It's an endlessly fascinating topic that has no end.
It's become the done thing in some quarters of art criticism to downgrade beauty in art. A sub-species of this critical strain points the finger at photojournalism or documentary work in which the photographer's composition, framing, and exposure produce images of misery and horror with what most of us would probably consider good photography technique. Salgado and many superlative Magnum shooters might be targets of this viewpoint (not a view I agree with, BTW). Here's a link to a write-up on this theme by a New Yorker art critic a propos of a Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MOMA about 10 or 12 years ago. I don't agree with the critic (actually a very fine longtime art writer who passed away not long ago). But it's an example of a critical stance on photography that has some currency in recent years:
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When I first read the subject of this post, my first answer was 'Yes'. I don't know why but it "sounded" logical in my mind.
After reading several replies here, I started to ask myself, "What is art?"
So, I started a search. The best definition I found was on this page, www.britannica.com/art/visual-arts
This definition treats the word 'art' as visual arts and includes photography in it. It goes into details like aesthetic vs. utilitarian purposes of art, artist vs. artisan, etc. It also goes into recent history of art but not to the extent an art historian would (which I am not).After reading a bit online, my answer is, "Yes, photography CAN BE art."
Yes, it could just be a matter of pointing the camera (most of which are automatic today) at a subject and clicking a button. Sounds like the utilitarian end of it, documenting something. That's what I do most of the time :) but there is more.
If we were to ask a dozen photographers to shoot the same scene or subject and we gave them the freedom to make small changes (different direction, light, etc.) I am very sure that we will like the result from one or two of them more than the rest. Whatever those two did to make their output more appealing is the artist part in my opinion.
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Jeff Wall (a personal favorite of mine) divides art photographers into two camps - hunters and farmers - and then he proceeds to muddy his own dichotomy by the way he produces images. That's what makes art so interesting - as soon as you think you've got a working definition of it, someone comes along and blows it up (maybe literally). I enjoy both types of photography (as defined by Wall), but man-oh-man I'm rarely stopped in my tracks and forced to study a "hunted" image like I am when I see one of Gregory Crewdson's "farmed" images.
And it's Potter Stewart (Supreme Court justice from the 60's) who famously replied "I know it, when I see it" when asked to define his standard for "obscenity," which was the legal determinant for limiting one's First Amendment rights to produce and distribute "pornography" among other forms of expression that might be subjected to the obscenity test.
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I am a big Crewdson fan. But there are "hunted" images that make me spend time making up stories to fit them. I even did a couple of series with that intent:
www.kasson.com/gallery/staccato/
www.kasson.com/gallery/nighthawks/
You need ambiguity to make this work well, I think.
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As Gerhard Richter said (in various iterations), "Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures."
P.S. I enjoyed viewing your galleries. For a guy hung up on all that useless technical stuff that just gets in the way of taking good photographs, you've done ok. 😉
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😊
And a lot of that stuff was done before I figured out how cameras really work.
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Yes...by all means...art. But, I feel where photography is going wrong is not in differentiating between the level of photoshop that goes on within any one image. For instance, a highly photoshopped image compared to one that just uses the tools one finds in the field and with that camera. There is a huge difference and it needs to be known where 'that particular image ' stands.
Also....street portrait or candid street? Huge difference. I see many photos (street portrait) where obviously a model is used and all of the right elements (light, background, etc) are carefully planned. AS opposed to candid street where you come along something by hap-chance or have to wait and wait and wait for something to occur and everything be in the right place etc...... The two images do not equal in the same skill set. Both require skills but totally different.
So why not label them for what they are instead of having all photographs be 'art'....and grouped into the same category?
