Debates in photography: Comment

Is photography art?

I think the idea that photography is art is a matter of individual opinion. Many people will say that it is art and many people will say that it is not. These days there are many social mediums where you can take a picture on your mobile phone and add a creative filter and make it look nice and pretty, although they may look nice, I personally wouldn't class that as art because no actual thought or planning goes in to the composition of the photograph.

When you look at the oldest surviving photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce which is dated around 1826, it doesn't look like much now but I think back then it would have been an amazing development, photography was still in the early stages of development back then and no one had figured out how to get the image to last, but when French artist Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce ( who is essentially the father of photography) teamed up and formulated the basis of getting an image to last permanently, as the methods they were currently using wasn't making the image last permanently.

Eventually they were close to discovering a successful method but Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre continued to develop the method and once he had perfected it he named it daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype was a very long process and since the early days many new methods of photography have been developed up to the most recent in digital photography. It’s safe to say it has come a long way since the 1800’s.

I think when you look back at the earlier forms of photography it wasn’t so much art because it was a way for people to have a lasting image of their loved ones, if it wasn't for photography back then we wouldn’t know what our great, great grandparents might have looked like or what the landscapes looked like, earlier forms of photography was more of a record of history and wasn't being used in a creatively thought out way. I think there’s a difference between documentary photography and artistic photography.

Documentary photography is powerful in its own right as it’s a record of human history, wars, politics, culture and so much more, when you look at the work of great photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson and Dorothea Lange, their images are moving and inspirational because they capture real life in a beautiful way but I guess in their own way they are artistic because they had an eye for capturing a moment in history with the natural composition of their images. If you look at the image by Cartier Bresson – Kashmir, The 4 woman praying at dawn in Srinagar, the image does look as though it could have been a painting; it’s an amazing and inspirational photograph. The image by Dorothea Lange of the Migrant Mother is another powerful image, a painter couldn't have caught that kind of pain, suffering and emotion as a photograph could, and you can see it in the eyes, its natural real art.

When an artist uses a real life model to paint, they aren't really capturing a person’s identity, the eyes usually look dead and emotionless, but when a good photographer captures a moment it says so much more than a painting ever could. There are photographers such as Andre Kertesz who I guess in a way redefined what photographic art was with his series of distortion images, the compositions of his images went against what ‘normal’ photography was and opened a door to what you can do with an image and how it is viewed.

Of course there is an official genre of fine art photography. Which is inspired by great artists of time, you can see this in the works of photographers such as David Lachapelle who has said that his work is greatly inspired by the works of artists such as Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio and Andrea Pozzo and the Baroque style in general. This shows greatly in his work as the compositions are thought out and planned in great detail and obviously staged using props, lighting techniques and background sets to create the final image. With the works of Ansel Adams, his landscape images look like a work of art, again they almost look like they could have been painted by an artist. It’s all in the composition and angles at which he’s taken the pictures. They remind me of dreams.

In conclusion, in my own opinion I do think that photography is an art form. It takes a great eye to compose a photograph worthy of being called a piece of art. There is a big difference between photography and mobile snap shots. Again I do believe that it is open to a viewer’s own personal opinion on what they perceive as art and whether or not they see something artistic about a photograph and whether or not an image is saying something to them with regards to feeling and emotion. Over time photography has developed in to art from the methods we chose to compose the image and the final outcome. As beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder. You either relate to it or you don’t.