“Is Photography Art?” The History of this Question
It strikes me that photographers of all eras have suffered a sense of insecurity as to whether what they are doing qualifies as art.
The challenge of the early photographer was to elevate their art above that of a merely scientific process. Today, this problem has largely been superseded by the need to separate the artistic from the mundane amidst the vast quantity of images produced by digital cameras everywhere.
The purpose of this post is a first attempt at assigning a historical context to the various photographic movements I have encountered and the styles or techniques associated with them. These include:
- Pictorialism, i.e., “arty photography”
- Modernism – experimental “wacky” stuff, influenced by cubism and surrealism
- Californian Modernism – technically perfect straight natural photography
- Reportage – shocking straight humanist photography
- Late modernism – extreme abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism
- Post-Modernism – constructed “snapshot” aesthetic; sometimes difficult for the untrained eye (I include myself here) to differentiate from images made by a child with a smartphone.
Although it is possible to indicate times when various approaches first appeared, or were most fashionable, many of these trends progressed in parallel, and are still around today.
Please help.
This is a long way from a comprehensive review of the major movements and is certainly a post I hope to revise over time. If you have any comments or suggestions please add them below or the social media channel of your choice to the right.
Thank you.
