Photography/Fine Art

Fajitas!

An Elven-esque posting from me... (In the good way)

To get a somewhat general consensus... When does photography become art? Where's the line that says this is art, this is design? Or is there one?

I mean, there are some of the obvious lines, product photography etc.

It's been something I've been thinking about for ages.

Although my college environment is open to everything and anything (Doing a Fine Art degree), I often find that they want a lot more than a photograph - a photography is just that, a photograph, to many of the tutors, whereas, a photograph to me, can be everything. Perhaps I have to work more into a photograph, like Jeff Wall...Or use mass (banal) images like the Bechers or Struth... But that isn't what I'm comfortable with. I had a conversation about this a while back with Irishcrazyhorse, who's in my college too.

I have three weeks off at the moment (Just to rub it in again ) but we've been told to have a written proposal for our final project in college. I'm clueless as to what to write. Where can I put art in with my photography? Or something.

Hmmm...I'm not sure I'm getting my point across very well, but I'd like to get others opinions on photography/art.

Do many of you consider your photography to be art?

What or who would you consider to be art as regards photography?

irishcrazyhorse

I consider most of my work to be just photographs as there isnt really a reason behind them,other than to look good!
Where as the work I did last week(with yourself behind the lense) I would count as art as I was only using photography as a way of getting my meaning across!
if that makes sense, I wouldnt count alot of the stuff on my flickr as art and that was more practice than anything else

prox

It has a lot to do with intent, and it shouldn't be confused with an image having meaning.

Fajitas!

But, apart from what we were doing last week, could you see the art in photography?

Edit:

prox wrote:

It has a lot to do with intent, and it shouldn't be confused with an image having meaning.

As in the intent to make the photograph art, as opposed to anything else, such as commerical purposes etc?

irishcrazyhorse

granted with saying that,I feel photographers have it harder than any other artist...
I have worked for along time with metal and wood as well as alot of print work and I have never been questioned as to if my work is art or not!

Only with photography has that happened

irishcrazyhorse

I do see an art in photography, I mean my level of skill/ eye is way above any normal person but compared to someone like yourself I am way behind.

I feel it is easy to take a good photo,but it is very difficult to take more than one!

Fajitas!

irishcrazyhorse wrote:

granted with saying that,I feel photographers have it harder than any other artist...
I have worked for along time with metal and wood as well as alot of print work and I have never been questioned as to if my work is art or not!

Only with photography has that happened

Most certainly true.

And even moreso with the digital aspect...

irishcrazyhorse wrote:

I feel it is easy to take a good photo,but it is very difficult to take more than one!

But what would make the one photo good, as a stand alone piece of art, or should it be accompanied with something else, whether it be text, or more photographs? Or even the mounting etc?

ThOnda

IMHO Art is any human product, which has been made with the intense to have or to force some thought or spirit. Sometimes it is accidental. This "things" make us think and find associations with our memories and souls.
So, If you have a product photography, it is purely informational. However photograph of the same product trying to bring some thought or mood (i.e. commercials) could be art.

Basically - if it makes me think, it could be "art" for me.

What could I know, I have a technical education! :-P

bullpost

I suppose if the intent is to use the medium as a vehicle for creative self-expression then it can be classified as art.
A large percentage of photographs do not fall into that category and would be simple mementos or keepsakes. The intent in a lot of casual or amateur photography is simply to record whats pleasing to the eye or has personal meaning (shots of family and friends etc.) or to enjoy the technical aspects of the hobby.
As far as my own photography goes I would struggle to say that I have something unique to express though I would like to think that this will be the situation one day.

Fajitas!

bullpost wrote:

As far as my own photography goes I would struggle to say that I have something unique to express though I would like to think that this will be the situation one day.

Do you have any idea of how you would express it though?

I agree with you 100% that most photography is for the sake of mementos and aesthetic values , but I guess I'm quite interested in exploring other reasons too.

I find expression can be quite hard to do with photography, but maybe I'm limiting my own photography too much.

As a side thought... what do people think of Lomography, banal photography, and 'bad' photography as an art movement? I quite like some aspects of it...obviously enough with some of my work...but am sick of a lot of it...

prox

Fajitas! wrote:

As in the intent to make the photograph art, as opposed to anything else, such as commerical purposes etc?

No, as in the intent to achieve an artistic goal through the medium of photography.

prox

ThOnda wrote:

Sometimes it is accidental.

You can't have an accidental intent. Not without fairly heavy medication, at least.

ThOnda

Lomography is not an art. It is just way and possibility to create an art. As a sheet of paper and pencil. They are just means of creating.

Fajitas!

But the means are still the camera and film, the paper and pencil, Lomography being the style? Or at least that's what I would have though?

ThOnda

prox wrote:

You can't have an accidental intent. Not without fairly heavy medication, at least.

You can have an accidental result - piece of art.

Some older cheap digital cameras are going to focus themself somewhere in the picture and you could be suprised, how intesive and beautiful picture it is. And I am not affraid to call i art.

Picture hanging on the wall I want to see again after seeing it for the whole month - that's good photopgraph for me.

Fajitas!

But in the example of the old cheap digital camera, what would make the picture art?

Sorry to be kinda anal about it, but I think there's an interesting debate to be had about it.

prox

ThOnda wrote:

You can have an accidental result - piece of art.

No you can't. Art presupposes an artist.

Fajitas!

What if the artist depends on the unpredictable?

Cross processing for example?

I mean, obviously you have quite an idea of what is going to happen, but sometimes the results can be quite different. I've gotten some cross processed Sensia back, with essentially, a red and white photograph, with selective coloured blue. I had no intent of this happening... but it worked.

prox

Fajitas! wrote:

What if the artist depends on the unpredictable?

That is part of the medium, and would probably have to have some relevance. There still has to be intent.

ThOnda

What about art of nature? Beautiful dawn with flickering spots of the sun beams reflecting in the sea?

As I have said before - art is something that makes me think or brings me some associations.

I can call most of the documentary photographs an art, because they have some message in the picture, some feeling.

And I have to sleep now 'cos I have to wake up in five hours and drive a lot.

Fajitas!

prox wrote:

That is part of the medium, and would probably have to have some relevance. There still has to be intent.

Good answer!

I find a lot of documentary photographers will not call their work art though.

magicbastarder

ThOnda wrote:

What about art of nature? Beautiful dawn with flickering spots of the sun beams reflecting in the sea?

art = artifice. nature =/= artifice.

prox

Fajitas! wrote:

I find a lot of documentary photographers will not call their work art though.

Probably because it generally isn't. Not many journalists will call their writing literature for the same reason.

ThOnda

artifical penis =/= art
artifical penis in Royal Hospital (IMMA) = art

?

There are no borders. It is free, flexible and what is the most important - very personal.

We cannot find common agreement what is "the art". Romans haven't succeeded, Nazis haven't succeeded, Communists haven't succeded so bloguers could not succeed :-)

Open your mind, find your borders and try to stretch them! Enjoy life and fun how much possible it is. And acceptapble for people around you :-)

prox

Attempting to describe any happy little confluence of form and colour as 'art' ultimately debases the term and negates the effort of all artists.

I'm not denying you the pleasure you take from pretty things, but don't kid yourself that what you behold is art.

ThOnda

I am looking forward to read it tomorrow after coming back from Mayo.

However, would you call next photograph "an art"? Because it is purely documentary picture - you can say.

http://www.p-centrum.cz/img/foto/index.jpg

rymus

Fajitas! wrote:

Do many of you consider your photography to be art?

Yes, but only because I was told so by a reliable source

Naw, only kidding. Just get lucky sometimes.

irishcrazyhorse

ThOnda wrote:

I am looking forward to read it tomorrow after coming back from Mayo.

However, would you call next photograph "an art"? Because it is purely documentary picture - you can say.

http://www.p-centrum.cz/img/foto/index.jpg

But isnt art all about capturing a moment,getting a meaning or feeling across for all to see? taking a moment in time and framing it for years to come so other can see and appreaciate that one emotion,that one moment in time!

Art is all about documentation in my opinion,but,documentation with "intent" as it was put by someone else

Fenster

If you go to such length as to IM me, I guess you want my feedback. I'm constantly suprised that people respect my ability, considering that I have such a nihilistic outlook on it.

It's all one and the same to me; if you're behind the camera for any other reason than to simply create a record of a person/place/thing then you're creating art. Some of us just take it to greater lengths than others do. If I take a photo of a cat and then spend a few hours with it in Photoshop, how am I any different than a painter who'll spend days creating a watercolour of it; or a sculptor, or a writer. My medium is different, is all.

What matters isn't a question of whether a photograph is art, but what is our individual approach to it. I was actually talking about this with Mariah earlier tonight: I went to Barna wood, took a few hundred of photos, went home to find I wasn't happy with any of them. I denied it then but she was right in saying that it didn't sit well with my sense of aestetics. It's very much my preference to have a strong central focus, to the point that I outright abuse the vignette and constrast sliders in Lightroom.

Going through the photos, I found that they were technically good (I guess I'm improving in that department). But there wasn't enough of a singular focus for me. So I more or less wrote the batch off. I know my style and sense of aestetics isn't really that popular with people. but I'm me.

Back on topic, we all have own styles. Al is one for burning photos, Darren prefers to vignette, Julie is the macro queen, Sinead loves her film, Calina and Helios prefer to wait for an interesting subject to come along.

Fionn

i was going to answer this.....
but i forgot what the F.'@ you was on about

maybe tomorrow!!!

Calina

The line is very blurry I think.

I spend a good deal of my life standing on Dollymount taking photographs of kitesurfers. Sometime in November, I selected one of them, and used it as the basis for a large mosaic piece.

Most people who have seen the work in progress reckon that the mosaic is a piece of art work (it's almost complete, as it happens). But they don't accord the same status to the photograph that it's based on. So the two works represent the same scene, but one is a piece of art, and the other, apparently, is not...

I also spent a good deal of the weekend wandering around the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon. They have quite a reasonable collection of modern art (including two Francis Bacons, btw). I have severe issues with the idea that some of what I see on those walls is "art" when many, many wonderful photographs are not.

I've come to the conclusion that art is fundamentally an elitist label. Photography suffers because it is not so elitist - it's a more democratic form that makes it easier for many more people to create images which are pleasing to the eye, all the more so with digital. The problem for me is that much of what is labelled as art, be it modern painting or sculpture, is fundamentally meaningless to me. The point is, there is a limited vision of art which is that it is to provoke comment or thought. I happen to think that if it is also not pleasing to your eye, then it's closer to self-indulgence than art. I realise though, that this is not a universally shared opinion.

You could take a simple example - the Robert Doisneau Baiser A L'Hotel de Ville and debate whether it would be a piece of art if it wasn't posed or would it just be documentary. The fact that it was posed creates some of that intent that was mentioned above.

Ultimately, I would fall on the side of photography being art. But in the same way that not all bits of canvas with paint thrown at them them are art works, not all photographs are works of art. Some of them just aren't good enough, some of them have a different purpose. Not all design is art either although some industrial design is probably more artwork than many works of modern sculpture in my opinion. The fact that everyone can use a camera does not mean that technically more crafted exponents are not artists. After all, pretty much all of us have painted a wall at this stage, and that doesn't make us all artists either. Function has a lot to do with it, vision has a lot to do with it, form has a lot to do with it, and none of that excludes photography. To be honest, no one has come up with a good reason why photography is not an art form...but it still has that aura of "just not being one of us" for art.

I think it's a pity.

magicbastarder

painting=creating an image.
photography=capturing an image.

doesn't necessarily mean it's not art, but it does mean that analogies with painting can only go so far.

Calina

I disagree with that latest statement. Quite a lot of the great art - say some portraiture as an example - is capturing an image, not creating it. Only the tools differ.

elven

Hmmm, do I have a reputation for a particular kind of post now???? :eek:

I had an answer when I read the original post. But by the time I got to the bottom I forgot it Fionn, I feel your pain!

But, before opening the 'what is art' can of worms, I think something you have to consider is whether you're going to judge it by the photographer's intent, or the final product.

If you decide to make up your mind based on what the photographer intended, then at the end of the day the final result doesn't actually matter - also bearing in mind that we aren't talking about what is 'good' art, just art (nobody's really qualified to give a definitive answer on that front).

Given that situation, I would think, logically, that the line is crossed is when the photographer does something for a reason, to have an effect on the final outcome. And we've talked about this before, how the things you can do to affect the outcome start with your selection of subject, choice of what to put in thr frame, the camera position, then your selection of medium and process. So, by that logic, if someone chooses to use a particular method/material for the sake of the effect it has on the final outcome, they are creating art. If they just pick up their camera and don't pay any attention to what the outcome will be like - beyond suitably well exposed and for the sake of the just the recording of the subject, there's no art in there.

Product photography, whilst being subject to those choices of equipment/materials/process, probably doesn't come under the art banner because it's about purely getting a true, lifelike representation of the item in the picture, it's just that more effort goes into it. Advertising, where they try to make the product look better than real life - I don't think should be written off because of the purpose of the final product in mass media.

Even photojournalists who are more interested in recording the subject, (because it's the subject that interests them rather than the aesthetics of the final print) go through that effort of making choices to affect the outcome, because the aesthetics of the final print actually has a bearing on the effectiveness of how they put across what they were trying to show, so they probably come under that artistic/creative banner as much as anyone.

From the other angle: if you are trying to evaluate the situation given the final product, it's a whole different story. Someone could hand you two prints - one of an abandoned shopping trolley lying beside a river in a city, another of a beautiful landscape. They tell you that one was made by a 14 year old who isn't interested in photography, and another by an established photographer. Both are technically correct. Does it matter who shot which one, when you have the print in your hand? Does it matter how the print is presented - if you saw one in a gallery and the other lying on someone's coffee table, would that make a difference? Can you judge whether it's 'art' purely from that print?

Annoyingly, I fall on both sides of the fence here. As a photographer, I'm very interested in art as a process, because the doing is waaaay more enjoyable than any print I'm going to hang on my wall. But as a consumer, I don't give a toss whether someone climbed a mountain and camped out for 3 weeks waiting for the particular light and captured it with a large format film, then hand printed it in the darkroom over and over until they got the best result - or if they were driving home one night and stopped at the side of the road to 'snap' a scene with a P&S, and printed it at the supermarket photo lab. The Quick-e-mart print could be considered as art just as easily as the handmade print... the process has no bearing on it.

So, I suppose you have to pick your viewpoint and take it from there.

magicbastarder

there's no way you can draw a direct comparison between painting a portrait and capturing one with a camera.

Calina

Why? Because it's too easy?

magicbastarder

partly because anyone can take a photograph which will look recognisably like the subject, whereas painting one takes talent and experience?
partly because there's always a matter of interpretation with painting?

just because they're different disciplines does not mean photography is an inferior one.

Fenster

Calina wrote:

Why? Because it's too easy?

I have to second that. As much effort goes into lighting, positioning and processing a portrait photo as would a painting. Considering the eye of the photogapher dictacts the wholeness of the photo as much as a painter does his canvas, I fail to see any differences.

Our medium and timescales are different, is all.

magicbastarder

Fenster wrote:

I have to second that. As much effort goes into lighting, positioning and processing a portrait photo as would a painting.

that doesn't mean they're equivalent, though.
sculpture involves time, effort, and a good eye too. that doesn't mean sculpture is equivalent to photography, too.

Fenster

Eh, you're right. They're different mediums.

dalk

There may be more effort involved in sculpting than taking a photograph, but the end results of both efforts could still be considered equally bad art...

prox

There's an order of magnitude more bad photography out there than bad sculpture though. Until someone comes out with a point and sculpt digital chisel, I suppose. Then there'll be a lot of crappy sculpture too.

Calina

Have you spent any time with five year olds and marla?

elven

prox wrote:

There's an order of magnitude more bad photography out there than bad sculpture though. Until someone comes out with a point and sculpt digital chisel, I suppose. Then there'll be a lot of crappy sculpture too.

There was a whole lot of crappy photography before digital P&S's became commonplace. It just wasn't so easy to share it with the world.

Isn't this veering off topic though?

Fajitas!

But anyone can paint a portrait...or draw a portrait. And people do, just like people take a picture.

You don't have to be talented and/or trained to paint.

Oh...and there's a hell of a lot of bad sculpture.

prox

Right. And just because it's executed in a particular medium doesn't make it art.

CraggyIslander

art is very subjective; a mondriaans or karel appel is unimpressive (to me) but a van gogh or picasso is

Product photography to me is just that, photographing a product for display... not art (with a few exceptions).

Advertising usually is product plus a ton of PS'ing (ie combining x photos into one) that it isnt really just photography anymore.... their graphic artists

Seeing a single photo as art is very hard (because of the medium and the subjectiveness of it), but a very short series of 3-5 with the same mood, attention to detail usually does make it art.. to me anyway.

That's 2cents worth from someone without a single artistic bone in his body (music teacher told me I couldn't keep rhythm worth a bean!) Having said that, I've thought about doing a 3piece on derelict bicycles around dublin (just coz I'm a cyclist) and maybe that would be called 'art' by others

ThOnda

magicbastarder wrote:

painting=creating an image.
photography=capturing an image.

doesn't necessarily mean it's not art, but it does mean that analogies with painting can only go so far.

photography = creating an image by using camera.

The product of photograpghy is an image (on the wall, on the display). There is absolutely no difference about the picture.l Who is interested, if it was made by photolab or by painter? There lots of pictures you cannot find the procces of creating it. It does NOT matter!

The art - the product - the picture, that's what we are talking about.

To summarize - yes, picture created by photographical process could be art. As a painting, sculpture, building, noise (music) or written word.

Does somebody agree with me? :-)

RazielDoomgate

i agree completly.. fine art is not so much the product but the idea behind it.. of course a certain amonth of skill is required for it to be classed as fine art but that can be said about anything

magicbastarder

ThOnda wrote:

To summarize - yes, picture created by photographical process could be art. As a painting, sculpture, building, noise (music) or written word.

Does somebody agree with me? :-)

agreed - but my point stands, that you cannot directly equate painting and photography. and i don't agree with the comment that anyone can paint a portrait, at least a portrait recognisable as the intended subject.

magicbastarder

i can take a decent photo. but i couldn't for the life of me paint a picture. i used to be good at drawing, but strictly in the draughtmanship sense; i could copy a photo well, but ask me to draw something off the top of my head and i'd be lost.

and i know a few (very talented) photographers who are in the same boat; a different sort of talent is required to be able to paint or draw, and that issue alone would be enough for me to accept that painting and photography cannot be directly equated.