Interestingly urinals and toilets have been exhibited in museums as objects of found art in major shows.
May 3, 2023
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Danny, you're free to hold any opinion you choose. I am as well.
If I expressed the opinion that Michael Jordan is the worst basketball player of all-time, I'd be roundly skewered as a fool by most every fan of the game and especially by those who saw Jordan play.
How do you suppose the sports world would react if someone seriously proposed that Michael Jordan wasn't even a basketball player? Would such a claim even merit serious consideration?
My point is that the question, "Can photograhy be art?" isn't as preposterous as the statement that Jordan is the worst basketball player of all time. It's as preposterous as a statement denying Jordan was a basketball player.
We have a 150+ year history of photography being considered as art. It's a history that includes photographs being lauded as great works of art. Artists, curators, critics, collectors, and historians agree. By what other standard should we consider the question?
I'm not denying that individuals have the right to form and hold their own opinions. I'm simply acknowledging the reality that history treats certain opinions with much higher regard than others. In the context of this discussion, the question has been answered.
Not only can photography be art, it is art and some photographs are great works of art. That's what history has and will record.
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There's a famous EW photograph of a toilet bowl that freaked out some people.
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Black and white, wide angle lenses, telephoto lenses, barrel distortion and fisheye, starburst, blur from shallow DOF, movement, or corner softness, flash, polarizing filter, infrared filter, noise, macro magnification. These are all distortions of reality for the photographer to decide upon even before they even pick up the camera. And of course there are many more decisions during post-processing and printing stages. To say that photographers merely "capture something already there" and reduce the entire medium to the press of a shutter button just shows ignorance of photography. The ongoing debate here is not about the definition of art, it's about the definition of photography.
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As this roller coaster rounds another turn, allow me to quote a genuine master of the art of the absurd as that appears to be where the ride is taking us...
"But after all, we must remember that art is art. Still, on the other hand, water is water isn't it? And east is east and west is west. And if you take cranberries and and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now uh... now you tell me what you know." — Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers – 1930
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At 3am this morning, when I couldn't sleep, I thought "I think Lee Jay may be right".
Why?
Well, think about music. That can be art (like betthoven), but the CD itself isn't art. It's what it plays. In the same way, a photograph itself isn't art, it's what it shows. So, the art is physical object (scene, person, flower etc.) and the photo is just recording that - including any changes (fisheye, composition) that the photographer wants to add in.
So, what you holding your hand (if you've printed it) is a piece of paper. What is on it is a representation of the art that the photographer wants to show.
Of course, in the fullness of daylight, it makes less sense 😁- but I can see where Lee Jay is coming from.
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AlanSh wrote: At 3am this morning, when I couldn't sleep, I thought "I think Lee Jay may be right".
Good god man… you were having a nightmare !It is not uncommon for engineers to overthink things.
A trait which can lead to procrastination / inaction and indecision.It may be contagious, and to date, there is no known cure.
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I explained that clearly already. You just don't want to accept the argument (which you are perfectly entitled to do).
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This argument would apply to any other form of art. According to this line of thinking, the painting is not the art, it's just a representation, a piece of paper. The original scene is the art.
Which is nonsense. The original scene is the original scene, not the art. Congratulations, you've just argued away the exist of all art!
What makes a piece of art, art, is that it is a representation. The representation is the art because the artist has filtered the original scene through her unique vision and applied her own view/interpretation in representing in a way no one else has (at least ideally).
People are really over-thinking this now: there is a subject, the artist represents that subject through their own creativity. The result is art (might not be good art, but that's subjective). Photography is just the same. The photographer interprets the scene is front of them and produces a representation. Some people might argue that if the representation it too literal a representation and you can't tell it from the scene itself, it's a photocopy, not art. But in the majority of serious photography, the photographer filters, interprets the scene is some way and gets that interpretation down as a representation. That's art, whether good or bad art.
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no we dont. just ask a painter if photography is an art. they would laugh at you. like most trained musicians . they think all the modern midi recorded music is crap and fake. its not art. photographers think negative space is art LOL and weird is not art, its weird. i have a friend who thinks his photography is art. one competition the judge asked whos demented image is this he was judging 😂and it was. it was demented it wasnt art it was taken by a sick individual.
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Yes, totally agree.
Some example -
fstoppers.com/spotlight/fine-art-landscape-photography-part-1-magically-appearing-photograph-202074
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Your eyeballs are fisheye lenses with angles of view of over 180 degrees and horrible "corner softness" outside an angle of about a degree.
The above would imply that HCB's images aren't art because they are taken with a 50 and pretty much straight printed (B&W though). Do I have to use some sort of "distortions of reality" for photography to be art?
I like this photo. It's nearly an out of camera jpeg. Is it art because I find it aesthetically pleasing or not art because it's not distorted in some way?
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Congratulations — another piece of art. If it were mine I’d crop it just enough to eliminate the shadow(?) noise at the top of the frame. (I might even crop more — but that’s down to taste.)
Nicely done.
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It's a reflection of the shoreline.
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What makes it a piece of art? Because you like it?
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Symmetry. Story. Expression. Mood.
And yes, I’m a sucker for a good floatplane shot.
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It's fun to try to time a shot to capture a rudder drag on landing. Gotta be quick!
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But Duchamp's urinal was not a toilet it was a fountain. ;-)
Context, concept.
Because a toilet or urinal can be found in a gallery and called art, does that make every toilet art? If so, can one expand that to say that every object is art?
Art is (can be?) a concept that can include context. While one cannot exclude anything specifically from being art, including photographs, one also cannot automatically include everything either.
