“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  Today, this problem has largely been superseded by the need to separate the artistic from the mundane amidst the vast quantity of images produced by digital cameras everywhere.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.

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The composition of a photographic image is the author’s arrangement of elements within the image.

Photographically, composition is influenced by all aspect at the disposal of the photographer including: their position, framing of the image (both in camera and with subsequent cropping), and determining the zone of focus.

At the start of my 10,000 hour journey to become a better photographer, one area of weakness was (is) composition.  My Thaxted Windmill and Church Spire apparently is “poorly composed.”  In particular:

• Two elements of roughly equal significance
• Similar heights in the frame

The more I worked on this post, the more complicated it became.  So I’m just going to give mention to a number of important areas with a view to returning to them in greater detail in follow-up posts.

This is a topic I hope to review regularly. If you have any comments on this post, please post them below.

To see more posts on other photographic topics, or to follow my learning progress, please like or follow me on the social media channel of your choice to the right.

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Harmony in Colour

It seems that colours that look good together follow clearly defined rules.

Although colour theory and the associated psychology is a massive subject, the basic rules are fairly simple, and the simpler combinations are both easier to apply and seem to produce the best effects.

From a photography perspective, these rules can help:

1. picking complementary colours for split-toning images in Lightroom
2. using the Adobe Color Themes extensions in Photoshop for more subtle/ sophisticated treatments.

This is definitely a post that I expect to revisit in the future. So, if you have any ideas or thoughts, please post comments below.

To see more posts on other photographic topics, or to follow my learning progress, please like or follow me on the social media channel of your choice to the right.

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“Emotional Communication” – My Flawed Definition of Art

Defining art for photographers is fraught with difficulty.  Ask an academic the question: “what is art?” and you will generally get either: a clever monologue, witty remark that dodges the question, or a combination of the two.

My answer is just two words: “Emotional communication.”  Which, I admit, is neither clever nor witty, but it has the advantages of being both short and, for a photographer, I would assert useful.

Whereas the Oxford Dictionary (online) defines Art as:

“NOUN: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

IMHO: this is just more words, same meaning.

The most obvious flaw in the definition is that not all emotional communication is Art.  My recent discussion with a workman who deemed it appropriate to dump a pile of rubble outside my house, contained a good deal of emotional communication, none of it art!

Please comment – the goal of this blog and 10,000 hour project as a whole is to learn and grow.

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