PHOTOGRAPHY

The controversy over whether photography is art is one that has raged in the art world for a long time, and we are unlikely to resolve it here.  But it can be an important decision to make if you are considering a career in photography with the aim of producing quality works of art.  If that is where you are, the idea of someone saying "that's not art, you just took a picture" is pretty disconcerting.  So it's worth looking at the question from a number of different angles before we decide which side to take.

Art is a subjective thing, of course.  A lot of people would look at a Jackson Pollack "splatter" and decide that modern art is not art because it "doesn't look like anything".  And if you spend any time in the modern art world, at some point you are bound to see something taking up space in a perfectly respectable art museum that you would never consider art.

So is it just a matter of opinion?  To some extent, yes.  But there is an art world and an industry behind it that depends on there being some standards by which art is judged.  One of those standards is the artist's intention.  If you produce a photograph, or a work of art derived from a photograph, that is intended to be seen as art, then the viewer is obliged to try to see the artistic merit in it.  Whether the viewer sees that merit or not may depend on the viewer's ability, how well you communicate your artistic message, or many other factors.

But just wanting something to be art doesn't make it art, does it?  As a layman in the art world, I sometimes use the "I don't know art, but I know what I like" system to evaluate pieces I see.  After all, art has a tendency to touch us in a different place, beyond the image.  It is an emotional place, a place of reflection and understanding.  Perhaps we would say it touches our "soul".  For a work to be art, there should be a message, a feeling, a reason why the artist made the work because he or she wanted to say something, even if how I interpret the statement is different from what the artist meant.

So that could also be an evaluation of a photograph as to whether or not it has artistic merit.  Now the main objection to whether photography is art is sometimes that a photograph is often a realistic representation of a moment captured by a machine, and some would say that "anyone can take a photograph".  The implication is that the same mechanical skill that is required to paint a picture or sculpt a statue is not required for photographic art.

It's true that the mechanical skill required by the guy in Wal-Mart to take baby pictures may be the same as that required by a great photographic artist.  But the objection doesn't hold up because the same human language is used to create great poetry as it is to shout obscenities at a baseball game.  So it's not the skill that makes it art.

Good evidence of this is the recognition that some great art experts have given to photographic exhibitions in the world's finest museums.  The very fact that photography is considered art by those who know may be evidence enough.  So the conclusion must be that because the arguments against the artistic value of photographs are weak, and because people in the know consider photography to be art, we are safe in considering what we do to be art.  And that opens up that side of your soul to express yourself through the medium you love most - photography.