Photography and Art

Art, This Way. Santa Fe Avenue, Denver, 2011

Is photography art? Well, how about these questions: Is a set of water colors art? Is a set of paintbrushes art? Is a box of clay modeling tools art? Does an opera stage and its costume room constitute art?

So, the question misses the mark. We shouldn’t be judging the tools or the methodology employed.

Photography certainly can be art, although most of it isn’t. Like any art, the camera is just a tool and what comes out of it depends very much on the vision of the person behind the viewfinder. Of the millions of images and pretty pictures floating about the human universe (and Facebook!), only a small percentage could be considered art.

The problem photography has, as opposed to the other more traditional and established arts such as painting and sculpture, is that we use a machine in our work–a common machine that everyone has and uses. Since everyone has a camera of some kind, everyone knows that making a photograph is as easy as pressing the shutter button or the icon on the cell phone. But making a photograph and making a photograph that is art are two very, very different things–as I have been discovering. (Here, you could get into the “what is art” discussion which I’ll avoid for now.)

In the 19th century, photography was born with an inferiority complex that it is still trying to overcome in the current 21st century. As an example, although the Denver Art Museum began collecting photographs in 1937, they did not establish a separate photography department until 2008! At least New York’s MoMA started collecting photographs in 1930 and established their department in 1940 but, even today, the area allocated to photography is but one room on one of the six floors–still a relatively minor exhibition space. It would be interesting to know when other major U.S. museums finally hired their photography curators, or when they built spaces specifically for photography exhibitions. Thankfully, there are now many separate, dedicated photography museums that have filled the gap.

But, back to those first photographers who had yet to understand the unique artistic capablities of the new medium. In those early days of the mid to late 1800s, the first photographers tried to gain legitimacy as artists simply by copying the diffuse and dreamy paintings of the time in what is known as pictorialism. Later, in the 20th century, with Ansel Adams and the Group f/64, with their emphasis on realism, clarity and definition, there was an attempt to move photography toward its own distinct niche, to have it stand tall on its own unique technical merits. Today, with the digital super-explosion, once you separate out the billions of crappy grab and snapshots, there is still a huge range of work that could be considered photographic art–everything from bizarre, surreal composites, to multi-terabyte 360-degree panoramas to high-level fashion photography to wilderness landscapes.

The very personal question for me is: how do I move from merely snapping the shutter on a beautiful scene to making photographic art that satisfies my creative drive? This, as it turns out is extremely difficult and it is just as difficult today as it ever was–despite the myriad fancy cameras and the Photoshop software–because making art does not rely on the equipment. It relies instead on the vision of the artist. That is why it is so difficult.

So, as I see it, all I can really do is keep making pictures and continue refining my vision, skill and style and hope I continue to evolve.