Can photography be art?

It's a dunny :-)

No I'm a Dunny.

Danny. DOH!

Oh OK, I was wondering where the smell in this thread was coming from 😆

Don't look too far Dunno 😉

Dunny = toilet

Um, no. A toilet is a very specific object. Art (without context) is not and object, but a concept. A not so clearly defined concept at that.

Language can definitely be a free for all.

Edit: Search fountain Duchamp. Art is definitely a free for all.

My camera captures my pictures, I can't draw for toffee apples so I can't express myself through dextrous means. But my camera doesn't know where to point itself, what focal length to use, what aperture to set, what shutter speed to use to produce a desired effect. Nor does my software know precisely how to crop, how to adjust certain settings to get the result I want. The art is not in the mechanical process of producing a photograph, it's in knowing what image to produce. It's that creative process in the head of the photographer that makes something art, not the mechanical means used.

A painter may need a paint brush (or a finger) to apply the paint, but it's what's in their creative mind that makes the artwork. Using a brush doesn't negate it being art and using a camera doesn't either. Not all photography is literal mechanical reproduction of the world, it needs the same visual imagination, the same creative intent.

If I were to hazard an opinion on a real difference between some photography and painting, it would be that photography is more a subtractive art. Photography starts with the whole universe as the subject and the photographer uses their creativity to selectively exclude most of it and emphasise other bits to produce a work of art. Painting is additive - the painter starts with a blank sheet and adds the art to it.

In both cases the artfulness comes from the head of the artist. Perhaps the reputation of photography suffers a bit because sometimes serendipity plays a part. Great photographs do sometimes get created from a lucky break. But not all.

My personal discomfort with the concept of photography as art, is all the baggage associated with the word "art". To me, the word comes with a history of pretension (a lot of which is all about making money). If I call myself an artist, I feel a fraud. I prefer to call myself a photographer or someone who takes photographs. It relieves the feelings of imposter syndrome. I'll leave it to others to decide whether my work is art. I doubt my photographs will ever be considered as craft. I'm really not a good craftsman.

Most of the paintings in the world do nothing for me, many lauded photos don't either. But we are looking at someone else's idea of great work here. A curator's or the art world in general. There is nothing that says that you have to like something because someone else tells you to. What you like is yours and yours only. I find plenty of photographs to like, you just have to keep looking. But liking what you like is the key, not because it is a "classic".

Sorry you don't like reading, though. It's just about the most important thing in the world to me. I read non-fiction and fiction in copious quantities. Currently re-reading S282 An Introduction to the Solar System (an Open University course on planetary science I took 20 years ago), Michael Kenna's Trees, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Lords of Uncreation (science fiction).

I read non stop: finish one book, start another seconds later. Have been doing so since I could first read. Don't own a TV, no time for that stuff. Reading is everything. Understanding the real world and being consumed by imaginary worlds. As Red Dwarf put it, Better than life. 😁

I took A-level English literature aged 16-18. It left me with an everlasting feeling that instead of analysing the meaning of a line of Shakespear like 10 million students before me, what we should be doing is learning to create new works. But that's just me. Being a critic and being a creator are often different things.

I feel taking enjoyment from art is more an emotional experience, than cerebral. I've noticed all my life how some people who, say, love literature, love works where the whole piece is some kind of vast many layered intellectual maze they delight in the experience of unraveling. I've never been one for crosswords or decrypting codes. That stuff is not for me. I love stuff that spirits you away on an emotional imaginary journey. It works on the heart, rather than the mind. Everyone takes something different from creativity.

This is just wordplay. But if it makes you happy.

I understand from reading Perfecting sound for ever: The story of recorded music that arguments over the process of recording music have raged since Edison. Edison was in the "make the most literal recording you can" camp, while many others were in the "studio music is an art form in itself, quite separate from live performance" camp. The latter camp won, and the majority of music recorded today is as much the product of the artistry of the producers and engineers as it is the musicians and composers. In effect, producers are the composers.

The 1973 barbarian's try against the All Blacks scored by Gareth Edwards (yes, "that try") must surely be regarded as one of the greatest pieces of spontaneous art in history (even though I'm convinced there was more than a hint of a forward pass in there). I've seen it a hundred times, but it is still breath taking. Literally poetry in motion.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1YV5xMWlK8

Danny, looking at the question pragmatically, there's no question but that history documents the fact of photography being art going back more than 150 years. Is there any real doubt that photography won't be treated as art, discussed as art, exhibited, reviewed, bought, sold, and collected as art 25, 50, 100 years from now?

A person is entitled to their own opinion. But if someone wants to argue that photography isn't art, I think it's only fair to point out that society, as a whole, rejected that argument nearly two centuries ago.

Museum and gallery curators, art critics, art collectors, art historians, members of the general public who enjoy & value art - the people whose education, expertise, opinions, and dollars spent effectively determine what history identifies and preserves as art - have made their choice.

No discussion, here or in any other forum, is going to change that. It's tilting at windmills.

Again, that's still a fallacy.

Isn't it obvious that, of the visual arts, one of them is entirely different from all the others? If you have a sack of marbles, all of them various shades of green and one red one, wouldn't that tell you that the red one is in the wrong bag?

My A-level teacher said, when I complained that the author couldn't possible have intended all these deep and subtle meanings that people had identified:

"The measure of literature is not that author intended such meanings, but that his work is written in such a way that it lends itself to different interpretations by those that follow. The importance of a work owes more to the interpreters than the authors". I never bought that argument. i have far more admiration for writers than I have for post hoc critics and analysts, impressive as their inventions can also be.

Completely incidental, I live next door to an author called Tibor Fischer who was the youngest nominee for the Booker Prize in 1993. His parents (who lived there before him) were Soviet era refugees and former Hungarian basket ball players. His father George went on to become a BBC producer. They just seemed like very ordinary elderly people in the twilight of their lives when I met them. I expect modern day Britain would have deported them as illegals [Warning: political comment, avert eyes]

I'm not very keen on literature, I'd much rather read a good book. lol

Good for you. Writing that ambiguous is bad writing.