"Is photography art?" It's the wrong question. Photography is a medium. "Is the photographer an artist?" is a better question. An artist is an artist, regardless of the medium.
Paint and brushes are just tools. Camera is just a tool. You can use these tools to make art. Or you can paint a wall white, or take a snapshot of your old table that you want to sell on internet. Tools don't make art. You need your craftsmanship to be able to reach your goal, but it's the intention that counts.
@@cheito5876 Did you smash it in a smiley face? Indicative of the shattered and fragmented world we live in. Maybe trying to show how its difficult to travese these problems as the windscreen is hard to see through.
Pretty much what I was gonna write. Photography is not Art but you can use photography to create Art, and I would certainly not call the headshots I do for actors Art. Same with film, dance, music, painting, etc.
like any other art , photography is surely an art form. its not just capturing something, its about creating something too. painters do learn about how to use their brush, oil and combination of paints in order to paint a beautiful painting similarly we need to learn how to use light, aperture, shuter speed and various stuff of camera to create something beautiful. its an art form not many actually understand though many people can appreciate good pictures but not many can tell how the photographer took it. i see no debate in this, its someone's ignorance to not call photography an art. i think its a great Art form.
Sorry, imv its not someones 'ignorance' if they view photography as not being art...that is your perception, of which you are entitled, to have your opinionl! Just like everyone else!! There is debate on probably every subject on the planet ! Imv photography IS an art
@@bekindalwaysx1g by definition : Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual idea, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. now we as human learned everything through experience and our memory of it. even an painter creates something only from its memory. i hope you understand where i am taking you from it. lack of knowledge creates debates. awareness, realisations dissloves debates. ;) theres no debate actually. photography is an art, period !!!
@@amitgautam6766 although you're missing this subtle detail, that Art with a capital initial is in fact the simplification of the term Fine art that we tend to ignore more and more due to exactly this typically modern (in the anthropologist spirit) conceptual confusion, which is that Fine art is art developed primarily for aesthetics or beauty, distinguishing it from applied art, which also has to serve some practical function. Now, you can make the modern choice to call everything art and exclude the aesthetic specificity, based on established norms, which is essential to the historical and traditional meaning of the word. But that's a philosophical choice. In other words, photography is obviously an art, but when Tony and Chelsea are asking the question "is photography art ?", they actually mean "is this a fine art ?" and that's a different question.
I like what Chelsea said about intention. For me, art is something created to evoke an emotion. Same thing for writing fiction. The intention as an author, is to invoke feelings in the reader. Fantasy writers want to invoke wonder and awe, thriller writers want to invoke tension and apprehension, romance writers try to titilate. As a photographer, I'm trying to make pictures to share the feeling I experience when seeing something. I think that's art to me - sharing feelings - essentially.
Asgard Studios yes and that’s also why there is so much time in professional photography to composition, editing out unwanted subjects, keeping random people in the pics sometimes if they add something to the scene, etc. Bc photography that isn’t simple point and clicking is meant to evoke emotions and tell a story same as any painting or book or music piece or dance
Erik Wahl has a great definition of what art is: The purpose of art is not to produce a product. The purpose of art is to produce thinking. The secret is not the mechanics or technical skill that create art - but the process of introspection and different levels of contemplation that generate it. Once you learn to embrace this process, your creative potential is limitless. Artwork should be an active verb (a lens by which to view the world) not a passive noun (a painting that sits dormant in a museum). Creativity lies NOT in the done but in the doing. Art is active and incomplete. Always shifting, always becoming. Art is a sneak peak into the future of potential, of what could be. Not a past result of what has been already done. Art is a process not a product. Art is a human act. Art is Risky. Generous. Courageous. Provocative. You can be perfect, or you can make art. You can keep track of what you will get in return for your effort, or you can make art. You can enjoy the status quo, or you can make art. This is the purpose for why art should not be cut from education. and why creativity and innovation are critical to navigate the future of business www.linkedin.com/pulse/purpose-art-erik-wahl/
I really enjoyed your discussion -- I was a journalism major in college with an art minor/emphasis photography (missed a double major by 3 credits). Part of my education included three years of art history, which explored photography toward the end of my final semester. It is fascinating to look at how art changes with time -- as Tony mentioned, there is a recurring pattern in the evolution of art, and photography is one such pattern. Those who refused to acknowledge photography as art seemed to have forgotten technology's impact on so many other areas of art. Scukpture is one example -- from carving wood, to rock, to marble, then to casting bronzes. Today, sculpture is even more varied due to technology, to include pieces made from glass and even very creative pieces made from junk machinery, for example, that has been welded together into something different. Thanks again for the discussion. Photography is an art form. I love it and play with it in this way a fair amount. Tony and Chelsea, you both are awesome!
Jared Polin said in one video that there is a difference between a photograph and a snapshot. A photograph being set and composed, planned and care taken. A snapshot being a captured moment, a frozen memory. Paraphrasing, of course. Photography includes both, but in a photograph, you create, in a snapshot, you catch.
For me, there is no debate. *Photography is art and an art form.* Why? The composition (lighting, angles, lens, mood, human interpretation of the scene, etc) of a photograph is arguably the most important and creative part of that photograph. By definition 'a skilled creator' (photographer/videographer) is artful and his/her work is an art form. Referring to the argument made in 2014 about art not being 'art' because it is now a digital world would be like saying 'digital music' is not art. This is patently absurd. Well, some music may not be considered art, but I digress. In conclusion, all photography can no more be considered art than all music can be considered art. Generally speaking, photography is surely art as is music. Beauty (expressed by means of an art form in this case) will always be held and appreciated in the eye of the beholder. Detractors should try this argument on Peter McKinnon. I'd love to be there for that lively debate. This videocast was excellent coverage of the facts, myths, points, and counterpoints of the issue.
Disagree. Photography CAN be art, but we've all seen plenty of shitty cell phone photos of someone's breakfast or cat that have zero thought put into them, and so little care was taken that there is camera shake or bad focus.
nicodimus2222 I’m pretty sure they are not referring to amateur photography from cell phones. Photography can be art. When you learn a dslr and do things like blur motion, bokeh, panning, And again as the person you responded to said.... angles, lighting effects, composition etc is art. A lot of painting was nothing more than doing what cameras do now back in the day ie portraits. I like photographic portraits far better than painting and drawing Bc of the different things you can do like bokeh and things I mentioned above. Also post processing is also a form of creating art by changing what the original photo was in different ways to create a different image. Art is about expression and photography is a way of expressing oneself. You can look at a portrait of someone and see something I don’t see in it. Same as painting portraits. People can have their own emotions evoked by a picture same as by a painting. Modern art with just a steak of paint or a blank canvas is less art to me than a photograph.
I always love these podcasts and this one was one of my favorites. I have worked in various media painting, drawing, sculpting and glass artist. I am rather an accomplished glass artist but physical limitations have been impairing my ability to work glass more and more. I was always interested in photography and when I realized someday I would get to a point I could no longer work glass I took up photography. I am a professional photographer now. I believe some of the work I produce is art. As Chelsea said, there is usually an intention behind art. I capture my own unique perspective, my way of interpreting the world around me, I freeze that moment and it is that aspect I want to share with others. Glass work was the same. I would take molten glass, give it shape, form, movement, texture and impart my imagination into that glass, then outside the flame, it becomes a solid, frozen moment in time. Liquid oxygen, propane and a 2000 degree flame are the same as my camera, lenses and filters etc. They are tools for intentional interpretation and expressing my own view of things. Sorry for the lengthy comment, this was a great topic though.
I received my signed copy of Stunning Digital Photography today. I can't believe how fast delivery was to the UK! Thank you guys, very much looking forward to learning from it :)
Steven Brust had a book where the character debates this point, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that photography might the most difficult art form out there because it requires the artist (photographer) to capture something we've seen a hundred times, and show it back to us in a way that stops us in our tracks. Painters, sculptors, etc., they can make up their reality. Photographers can only work with what's actually out there in the real world, and it still needs to amaze us.
"beauty is in the eye of the beholder" the argument can never be settled. Plus it kind of doesn't matter. If it was settled that photography was not art, who cares? We gonna stop taking pictures? Stop trying to evoke emotion? It's a non issue
That's one of the most bull shit cliche's there ever was. Beauty is beauty you can't confuse it its the most obvious thing in our world even animals know it. People, on the other hand, are so psychologically screwed up that they haven't a clue.
@@walkertongdee I agree 100%. My point being, the worst artist in the world can call their work art. And a good portion of people will defend that regardless of how crap it is. Or how non artsy. And you can't do anything to convince them otherwise. It's annoying, but also a pointless argument and a waste of time.
To Chelseas question about a photographer who just shoots everything, then goes back through it. The famous "raising the flag at Iwo Jima" that has literally shaped the Marine Corp (in fact, the official USMC museum, is shaped like the pose in the picture!) was actually a total accident. The photographer took a bunch of pictures, trying to capture EVERYTHING then went back to filter through them. Its the only way to minimize how many moments you miss in a hectic environment like war.
I like the philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteins description. He uses a system called Family Resemblances. “It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things” think of what a Game is? There are many different forms of games. Card games, sports, gambling, Olympic Games etc. There is not one common feature or description that connects the concept together but rather think of a web that has overlapping features. This web of overlapping features is what we know to be games. You can use this system of family resemblances to give an all encompassing description of art.
In my opinion photography is an art form. The intentional act of creation, that goes beyond utilitarian form or function, is a defining aspect of art. The camera is a tool we use to intentionally create, just like a paint brush or a pen.
Yes, absolutely correct. None of us "see" the world in the same way, it's not our eyes but our minds that "see" the world around us. Each of us learns how to see the world from the moment we open our eyes after birth. Our experiences during our formative years affect the way our minds interpret how we "see", our social environment has a massive effect on this. If you manipulate images to your liking, then it is personal expression, which is art. So many people think we all see the same thing, we don't.
The great majority of people can't appreciate art because they have psychological issues concerning being able to feel, most people are numbed by a banal existence without meaning.
Art is something that creates an emotional response in a person, be it a good or bad response. Photography, sculpture, painting, sketching, or performing, if it creates that emotional response in the viewer, is art. It’s an individual experience. Art to one person may not be art to another.
Here is my favorite definition of art: "Art consists of paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects which are created for people to look at and admire or think deeply about." - Collins dictionary It is an inclusive definition, as far as the means of creating art goes. Even AI generated pictures can be art, according to it. On the other hand, if you emphasize the "think deeply about" part, most paintings in museums won't make the grade, no matter how skillfully they are made. As for me, that definition gives me latitude to combine different media, and to work in genres I like. Most of my pictures aren't art, but maybe there are a few who are. It doesn't really matter to me, as long as I am having fun creating them.
For those of you interested in the history of photography, there is a fascinating chapter titled "State of the Art" in the photography book Victorian Giants. The chapter goes into the history of the question "is photography art" which began shortly after photography was invented. The book is also a great look at the work of the Victorian Giants of photography - Cameron, Rejlander, Carroll and Hawarden.
At the collegiate level, there are bachelor of science degrees...and bachelor of arts degrees. In the arts field, there are graphic arts, literary arts, performing arts, historical arts, and creative arts among other degrees of study. The point is that the field of study for the arts relates to the expression of the individual. It is the ability to “tell a story”. Regardless of the medium, art enriches our lives by adding the flourish to the functional.
Photography is usually considered art by most photographers.. its an ego boost at best calling a photographer an artist. pointing a camera and pushing a button and calling that art , dilutes the definition and the craft of being a true artist.
As in defining "art," almost anything can be art, but what the focus should be is on what makes it more a masterpiece. On a paper anybody have the right to say that a stick figure is art but it's not a masterpiece that requires years of practice and skill.
Anyone who says photography can’t be art because of technology, needs to throw away their brushes, canvases, modern paints and all other tools used to create paintings and sculptures. It’s all new technology. Go back to using whatever cavemen used to paint.
I have been an artist for 18 years, and now have switched to photography and yes it is an art form, subject matter, composition, lighting and expression are still essential to art and photography. The craftsmanship has changed and its ability to render reality has changed but so has our civilisation and technical advances. Are we not here as artist to represent what we see as ideal and beautiful. Is it not the final result / image the main goal to represent that symbolism of reality. To evoke emotion and understanding of our reality in a visual format.. this is the true form of the artist ... Ben Lynam.
I started out, even as a kid, as an artist who also liked taking photographs. Once I got my first dslr, my first decent camera that would record things how I wanted them recorded, with different focal length lenses etc., I was free! I could enjoy the great outdoors, animals and other subjects and capture moments in time of locations that I loved. Then along came digital processing and wow, the freedom floodgates were really open. Some of my photography is straight record shots, other images are more artistic interpretations of what I pre visualised. Yes, photographers are artist. I think the camera is the most wonderful artistic tool ever invented. The human brain creates the art and uses whatever tools it can to do that. Thanks for your wonderful and informative videos. Cheers.
Scenario: A person sets up a modern digital camera, set to fully automatic mode, on a tripod pointed generally towards a subject but not composed. Someone comes along who does not compose a specific shot but simply presses the shutter for 10 seconds and the camera spools off pictures at 10 frames per second. Another person then sorts through those 100 pictures and selects one. Questions: Who is the artist? The person pressing the shutter release button or the person selecting one frame from 100 or perhaps the person who randomly set up the camera? (correct me if I'm wrong but I think copywrite of those images sits with the button presser) Are all 100 pictures art? Are none of. the pictures art? (after all, there was no emotional input into the pictures). Does a picture only become art when it is selected? or does it only become art when someone else comes along and views the selected photograph and has an emotional response to it?
Did Steiglitz have the first gallery showing of photography? Possibly. However there were many photography shows including one at the Kensington Museum in 1858. On 12 February 1858, Henry Cole, the founding director of the South Kensington Museum, recorded in his diary: 'Museum: Queen &c came to private view of the Photographic Socy, being the first exhibition in the Refreshment upper room'. The exhibition was not only the first to take place in that part of the museum. It was in fact the first exhibition of photographs to be held in any museum. Consisting of 1009 photographs, it was organized by the Photographic Society of London and included approximately 250 contributions from its French counterpart, the Société française de photographie.
It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it. Camera, pencil, brush, paint, etc. The old story: A writer and a photographer are at a dinner party. The writer walks up to the photographer and says “I’ve seen your work you must have a great camera.” The photographer responds, “I’ve read your books you must have a great typewriter. “.
For my part, for an object to qualify as art, it must meet at least three of the following criteria: • It must be aesthetically pleasing. • It must rely on a degree of skill to be produced. • It must evoke strong emotions in the viewer. • It is done with intent. On that basis, great photography is art - and a hell of a lot of the "art" in galleries isn't.
Is photography an art? Why not turn the table and ask whether painting is an art? Just take a look at many pictures from the renaissance. So many pictures were only meant to depict some rich person as realistically as possible so that other people would have an idea as to how he looks, or looked. Basically, they were like photos with a super slow shutter speed shot at like 0,0001 ISO. But all kidding aside. My statement above is obviously meant ironically. The fact that paintings were often used the way I described above does not discredit painting as a possible means to create art. However, the same is also true for photography. Yes, you can use it to create a picture for either a passport, or a driving licence, but you can still go way beyond this just like many painters did and still do.
The art is not the object; the art is the experience of the object. Visual artists, like poets, painters, sculptors, videographers, etc., simply re-present the world in ways that others' experience of it is broadened and deepened. I think it is absolutely possible to be an "unconscious artist", if your means of expression has an impact on others, *regardless* of whether or not that was your intent while you were creating.
I believe that *photography is a tool that can be used to make art* . Just like painting. The difference between the two to me is that painting is pretty much always a more laborious activity, which makes that much fewer paintings fall into a category equivalent to snapshots in photography (excluding elementary school pupils' attempts perhaps). Modern cameras and cell phones made taking photographs trivial and essentially effortless.Consequently, almost everybody is doing photography these days, which makes a huge difference in the distribution of artistic skill across the population of people who engage in any of these activities - be it photography, painting, sculpture etc. - to the disadvantage of photography in this regard. If anyone is in doubt as to whether photography is an art form, I'd say: Go to a good quality photographic museum/gallery exposing multiple authors and genres, and do the same with another artform that you regard as an artform. Then compare the best to the best and reflect on how much artistic qualities do each have. I guess it would take a blind one to claim that photography is not an artform after undertaking such an exercise. Something I don't dare judge so clearly is *what to call an art* - the *process* leading to an output, or the *output* itself (e.g., an image/painting/sculpture)? Or perhaps both (artistic process and artistic result)? Any thoughts?
If you intend the picture to be art it's art...if you intend to take a snap it's documenting. It could be as simple as that, but I think it's more justifiable if you put thought into location, theme, framing, settings, post processing etc. Like many things it's such a subjective erm? subject. I intend this statement to be art lol (Chris Lock, 2018)
Discussion about art is endless, because art is dynamic and always evolving. But, I think this discussion will be more legit if there are included an art master or bachelor degree speaker (or maybe a professor, if necessary) in this conversation. So there will contain more information and wider perspective about art itself.
Photography is an art. Art is something meant to cause emotion, to make you pause and ask yourself what is the story being told. That person who asked a q about a panorama forgers that panorama is full of detail much like a painting and telling a story of its own. In it can be some interesting composition elements too. So yes it is no more art than if someone painted the same panorama. Photography is a medium same as paint, mosaic Tiles, mosaic beadwork. It requires creative composition, creative use of different elements of photography be it panning, long exposure, blur or freeze motion, differences in color composition, bokeh , purposely putting things out of focus to center the focus on something else. But even a simple portrait of someone such as a pic of me when I was clearly mad at my bro’s wedding taken by his photographer tells a story in the mood in my face and in my eyes much like a painting does. So yes it’s an art and not everyone learns it well anymore than everyone learns painting well. Besides have u seen what modern “artists” call art these days? Throwing a splotch of paint on a canvas is what people call paintings these days and hang up in museums. To me a five year old can do that
Enjoyed this topic over a cup of coffee this morning, thank you. I agree it's mostly about intent and effort. Just because I can splash paint on a canvas doesn't mean I'm a painter. Similarly, putting a $40,000 camera in a someone's hands doesn't make them a fine art photographer. There is no doubt though that you can convey emotion, tell a story, or move someone through photography, and that's what I love about it.
I observe the world around me, I SEE IT. Many painters saw the world around them. They painted that image that captured their eye and I photograph that image that captures my eye. I think that an artist "sees" better than many people do. We recognize that certain something that other people never see or never notice. Maybe they are in too much of a hurry, or focus their mind on things other than - that "moment" when everything happens to be JUST PERFECT. And some images are so fleeting, so momentary that no painter (or very few) could remember and then capture them as well as an artist with a camera (and the skills to use it). I think that someone viewing photography, as an art, should ask themselves, could/would this image exist if it wasn't photographed. A photograph allows the viewer to look through your "eye" and see something that the viewer may never have the chance to see. It's the closest we can come to being in two places at once. Human beings have been sharing visual images for a LONG TIME! Knowing what to record and how to record it is what makes an artist an artist. The better we do it the more amazed the viewer will be.
Photography is absolutely is art. I think it comes down to the nature of art. If art is or can be defined as "an expression of human experience", then that implies that art is also communication. That is important because that means that there is a receiving side of the expression. I think this leads to a purpose of art, inspiring feeling. If a person likes or doesn't like a piece of art, that piece has done its job because there was a feeling. This also means that the value isn't, necessarily, based on "likes", which is important. Sorry about the long post. . . :)
Depth!! I believe art is defined by anything having a beauty or meaning beyond it’s literal parts. 1+1=3. Whether it’s photography, painting, graffiti, architecture, poetry, dance, nature, or a pattern on your drywall, as soon as it has a value to anyone beyond it’s literal value, it becomes art to them.
Depends on the genre. Photojournalism, for example = not art in any way shape or form. OTOH, landscape, portrait, architecture, abstract, street (if you compose a certain way) to name only a few are absolutely art.
Is not Robert Capa an artist? Is not Weegee? Or Walter Ioos? There are reasons why certain "documentary" photographers' work is instantly recognizable and distinguished from their colleagues.
@@JohnDrummondPhoto Documentaries can be artistic, but I'm talking hard photojournalism, like the stuff you see in the news where artistic touches is taboo.
@@kalekain3521 well, that's an bit of a qualification from your original statement. Plus, Weegee and Capa shot for the press and were hardcore photojournalists, yet their work (and others) still stands out, to the point that they have books and exhibitions dedicated to them. It's not just post-processing that makes a photograph art, IMO.
@@JohnDrummondPhoto I don't consider photojournalism as being anything other than photos for news publications, so my original post still stands. And no post processing is not the only thing that makes a photo art. Framing, composition, lighting etc also count. However, if you are only taking a picture to capture reality then there's no artistic intent behind it, thus your work isn't art. Documentaries can be art as they are deliberate undertakings with biases involved and are subject to considerable post production.
@@kalekain3521 I think in some cases, those decisions come from an innate artistic esthetic rather than a conscious planning process. That has to be the case in photographing war, for example, or sports. You have to decide when to take the shot, how to frame it, even how to pre-set your camera so that when the moment happens, you're ready for it. To me, at a certain level, that goes beyond just technique. We can agree to disagree on these points. I get where you're coming from. 🤝
I just wanted to thank you for recommending Udemy because I found this app a month or two back from one of your videos that had a 90% off sale. and I found out that there is this wonderful world of courses that I could purchase for extremely cheap and I have learned so much from Udemy. I bought 5 courses so far including indoor and outdoor portraits, how to use adobe Lightroom CC, and a portrait photography masterclass and I spent less than$60 all these courses. Every time there's a sale I go and see if there's anything new. and let's not forget I've already purchased your book on how to take stunning photography and your buying camera gear book. I've been so glad I found your CZcams channel. This has made my photos look so much better and when I do have a problem with maybe lighting or so now I know what I need to use or what to do to make the photos look better. So thanks
Painter Diego Rivera and photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo were friends. Rivera used to make fun of Bravo with the notion photographers just fired a shutter and their work was done. Bravo challenged Rivera and invited him to learn how to take pictures rather paint them. After three days Rivera gave up. His complaint was photography was too hard. Making the shot was much harder to him than putting any object on a canvas simply by painting it where and how he wanted.
Quote from Salvador Dali... " I was at an art opening and someone asked me why am I staring at the door.. I simply said the beautiful staining on that door shows more artistic ability than any painter represented here today.. I feel if someone can appreciate your work and call it art than its art... From a simple one stroke of paint to a painting that took countless hrs.. You can ask a thousand people what is art and get a different answer.. There's also a fine line of a creative skilled trade.. Simply put, if you created it can be called art... You can take a rock and paint a dot on it and someone will think its art... If you feel your art is in ? of artistic integrity than maybe you should reconsider your choice of medium.. Even Davinci made fun of Michael Angelo saying sculpting is not art.. I'm sure even a photographer like Ben Vong Wong gets ? on his photography art...
I think it is important to realize that art and photography are about communication. To be a good, or at least economically viable, artist or photographer you need something worth saying, an audience, and a method of saying those things to that audience. These are quite separate issues, and I suspect a major generator of grief. Think of an image of a bird. A biologist wants the least amount of modification. A birder wants to see all the field marks. Artists might want a nice composition of light, color and texture. The general public wants the clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders all the way to the right, so the image pops. If you fail to reach your audience then your thoughts and feelings were all in vain.
As an artist I agree that sometimes art invokes an emotion, but is not emotion. It can be emotional, but art is a representation of what you see regardless of the medium. Is your own rendition of reality. Also, a statement is not art. It is a statement. Making a statement thru art is the difference. Same as writing a blog is not literature. This whole photography is/is not art is like arguing if film/movies are art. Meh.. just my opinion.
If you plan a shot/series, procure (a) model(s), work on posing and props, create the setting, control the lighting and then take the image into Photoshop and put your own effects and vision into it, then that is clearly art.
Coloring in a color book could be considered art to some and it’s all in the eye of the beholder. The tools to create art are changing daily. To be honest I love digital technology, I miss the darkroom process I grew up with but not the hassles of maintaining it. Can’t wait to see what the next generation of tools will come.
This is that in order to take an amazing picture, you just have to scout a good location and start snapping. To create an amazing painting, (first off, if you aren’t talented, don’t even attempt it, it’s impossible), so assuming you have talent, it’s now going to take you years of practice to get mildly alright and maybe after a decade of practice can you finally compete with the elite painters of the world. So sure photography is an art but it’s basically like the super easy version of being an artist.
@@johndong7524 Film is motion picture-aka motion photography-cinematography. They have an entire award show dedicated to the art of cinema watched all over the world. There’s a technical aspect in photography that anybody can learn, but not everyone can get famous doing it.
This was a surprisingly good discussion. I expected something more one-sided on photography’s side. It’s hard to define a right brained activity with the left brain, which thinking about it and then discussing it entails. I’m not sure about the Insta series of Breakfast shots constituting art, however, lol. Art is not so personal, like your breakfast choices, after it’s out there. It becomes art when everyone who sees it is moved by it. What constitutes art for me is what I come back to time and again. A good book, a certain song, a great painting or an image. With photography, it’s usually my own stuff I come back to. I lament the fact that these days so many landscape photographers, many with large CZcams followings, do the “same image” over and over again, whether it’s in their backyard or at the ends of the Earth. Tripod the camera, add a stack of ND filters, maybe a PL unless it’s a pano, and … the same image just with different geographic coordinates. Some of their images are arresting. But only for a moment and then I have no need to view them again. Ansel massaged his negatives to get the best from them and we recognised his artistic eye when we viewed them. There can be much more to art in photography than an ultra slow shutter speed and blurred water.
This goes back further than the camera. Drawing a landscape just as it was seen was considered "photography and therefore not art" long before the camera was invented. Photography CAN be art, which in my opinion comes with some sort of abstract or direct self expression created by purposeful use of tools. I wouldn't necessarily call photos that are taken for the sole purpose of documentation art. A lot of selfies aren't art for that reason. But you can take artful selfies by taking things like composition and lighting into consideration. Suddenly your picture does more than document, it conveys some form of mood.
As you pointed out the line between technology and art is not only a moving line but it also varies in thickness with a wide grey area. What is art to one person is technique to another. I have been taking photos for 50 years, almost all are candid snapshots. Some are quite good, most are not. Lately I've decided to move my hobby to center on portrait work and get serious about it. It's the ART part that scares me. I have very limited creativity capabilities. I can see a good photo taken by my talented nephew, but for him it is just a natural talent while for me it would be more like tripping and stumbling on something good. For me just getting the speedlights at the right angle and intensity is an artistic requirement. For others it is a simple technical task. Is photography art? Yes for me it is.
The ipad quote is this, he used the ipad to take the picture, the person decided what to point the ipad at. Therefore he produced the content. It maybe not technically perfect, but if someone appreciates it, then it has value.
I feel that photography can be art and in other ways it is just documenting. When you create a composition and frame up the shot to convey a message or a feeling that is art. If you are shooting without intent then I feel that is just "taking photos"
IMHO: Photography is not an art form. A composition is an art form. The fact we capture the composition either by a medium of a painting or a camera only shows two different technologies, but not what made the final product what it is. The selection, either by finding, or by directing the perfect composition is, and nothing else determines if the final result is liked, or not. In today's society where people who have no clue what composition is and what needs to be done to CREATE a composition snap images and edit the heck out of them to make it something it never was, the value of photography is lowered. The inability of people to appreciate images captured by a camera the way they were, compared to the over editing, over saturation and glorifying something that affects the eyes of the masses is simply fake reality. Good photographers will ALWAYS be good because of their composition, not because of their editing capabilities or their gear! Love you two. Greetings from the Arizona desert, where sunsets are so pretty as they are, that locals who have no clue what a composition is, are able to crap their own images by playing with RED, ORANGE and YELLOW... like nature needs favors... Sheesh
Ah, the endless and tireless beast of categorization. There is some primal instinct inside us all that came from the time we realized we 'belonged' to a family unit, tribe, town, religion, that required us to begin the journey of catagorizing and prioritizing anything and everything that comes into our path. Is any endeavor art or not? One could call the instinct to sort and label, an auto-curation of life experiences. What we need to be mindful of is not just the categorization and the accuracy of it, but also the inevitable comparison. Maybe Yoda can help. "Categorization leads to comparison, comparison leads to judgement, judgement leads to... winning/losing? Rejection/acceptance? By whose standards? And you're correct - the debate goes on. ;) Thanks for a great prod to think deeper on this!
Art school definition. (It's not subjective and has nothing to do with beauty, composition, aesthetics, creating or capturing). None of which can be defined. Art is the sensible, (you can sense it) manifestation of an idea or concept. Art is prospective, (the idea comes first). Not retrospective or reactive. Photography in itself isn't "Art". Photography is a Medium. (A medium through which an idea or concept is communicated) Painting isn't necessarily "Art" Painting is a medium. (As above). Paint and photography can be used for all kinds of things. Not just "Art". Both painting and photography can and if required, be used to make art. They are media... Not "Art". If you use photography to make "Art" . You have produced a piece of photographic "Art". A robot cannot produce art because a robot cannot have an idea to begin with. If robotic photography is then selected by an artist as a medium by which to express himself then the robotic photograph becomes art. (human intervention). As it is no longer a purely robotic photograph. So photography is art if it was the intention of the photographer was to produce art. If it wasn't, then it isn't. Like say forensic or medical photography, neither of which is intended to be art. Put simply. You look at an art photograph with your mind. You look at a forensic photograph with your eyes. Go out and photograph your ideas. Make art.
I think its what you choose to photograph and the way in which that shot is composed that makes it artistic. If a greenhouse frame on four jacks is art then a well composed photographic image must qualify.
In the same way a master carpenter may care deeply about making, say, a beautiful table, and may be proud of her work but not consider it to be art, a photographer could make a beautiful photograph she does not consider to be art. But nobody should tell her not to make art using her woodworking skills. The only person who gets to decide what to call it is the one who did the work. Here's another question, is it generally people who don't make art themselves who decide photography is not / can't be / shouldn't be called art? If you aren't sure whether you're making art, you're not.
I love you for bringing up this subject, my belief is that an artist can create art even though no one who looks at it consider it to be art. And the opposite, something that didn't have the intention to be art can be considered art of the beholder. With that said, not every photographer is an artist, and no artist only creates art.
You should check out Edvard Munch's (yes, the scream guy) photography work. As far as I know he never showed photography in galleries, but he was quite the innovator and experimented a lot with different photo techniques very early on.
Look at Mike disfarmer.. He took photos to make a living doing something he enjoyed.. Many many years later his work became art because someone made his work art.. Now his photos sell like crazy.. What we do now with photography may someday be in a art gallery or it might just be forgotten, either way we like most artist create because it's our own personal passion where it goes is up to the people of the future. Go shoot and have fun..
Thank you Chelsea and Tony for your, as always, deep thoughts about photography and art. In my opinion art could not be defined like an object, e.g. a camera. Art and music and intelligence are expressions of human being that can only be operationally defined, like „Intelligence is, what the IQ-Test measures“ or „Music is the Output of Musicians“. As Arthur C. Danto argues in his highly remarkable book about art theories „The Transfiguration of the Common Place“, objects like paintings or photos can only be candidates of art and not art itself. For example, if you took three pictures of a red surface and you put them in a frame of, let‘s say 50x50cm, all three of them will look similar to a recipient. Probably, no one will perceive these three pictures as candidates for art. But if you give them titles, like „The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea“, „My First Menstrual Bleeding“ and „Picture Without Title“ the perception of these, as before simply red squares, will completely change and a lot of recipients will be likely to agree, that these pictures are candidates for art now. So, obviously, art is not an attribute of the pictures, but a mediation process between object and subject, between the peace of work and the recipient.
The question I always ask is, "If you think you can do then do it." Amateur painters look at Mark Rothko and say, no problem. So alright, do it. The great artists, including photographers, have more, do more.
In one of your previous videos it was established that I'm a documentarian with thechie tendencies. I practice a craft, which may or may not be defined as art. Why is art seemingly superior to craft? In the elevation of art above craft are we being just as ridiculous as those who eschew any new technology as "not art." I bought my first DSLR (Canon 10D) from a salesman at San Jose Camera who declared to me that he only shot black & white film, which he considered the only legitimately artistic form of photography. That was right around the time that a collection of color photographs of the Los Angeles area by Ansel Adams were discovered; who knew?
To me, the real question is, is there a difference between photography and digital art? I consider a photo that has been altered digitally, is digital art. A photo that is displayed the way it comes out of the camera, warts and all, is a photo.
Very thoughtful and interesting discussion! From my perspective, the backstory should not matter to the viewer. A photograph (or any other piece of art) should evoke emotions, tell a story or express an intention on its own, regardless of how much effort the artist put into creating it, how he or she did it, what their personal intention was or how important that piece is to them. For example, whether I walked two blocks from my apartment and snapped a quick photo without premeditation or trekked for ten days to a faraway place and set up an elaborate shoot with a well defined concept, the final result is all that matters to those who perceive it as art, not what went into making it.
So often I start watching these videos with a bucket load of opinions I plan to write in the comments. And then you address every single one of them in the video and leave me with nothing to add. I'm not sure if I missed it or if you didn't say, but the name of the artist that uses Google Maps is Jacqui Kenny aka the Agoraphobic Photographer. Might be cool to add a link to her work in the show description.
Even paint and paint brushes were a technology at some time in the past. These things didn't spring forth from the ground and into the artists hands. I think this debate will rage on forever, just like the debate of 'are videos games art'.
This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's rant about artists versus craftsman and finding the right time and place to play each role. Bourdain was ranting about line cooks "artistically" changing the chef's painstakingly developed dishes, when instead their job is to precisely replicate them over and over again. Does portraiture classify as art or document? For example the Queen just viewed a new portrait painting of herself last week. It's impressive and beautiful, but to my untrained eye, the painter did little more than document the Queen's image and slap a bookshelf behind her. By Bourdain's logic, is her painter an artist or just a craftsman employing his skill to document a person's image?
I always have a hard time with the 'expressing yourself' answer. If I see a beautiful landscape, and I use my gear and knowledge of composition to take a shot that many see as beautiful, how exactly is that me 'expressing myself'? I just can't quite draw the connection between 'making' something I like using a photographic capture and 'expressing myself'...
It's the observer who determines what is art, not the creator. Michelangelo's David could have been nothing more that a three dimensional representation of the male human form, but it's people seeing Michelangelo's David who identify the work as art
Steaphany I half agree. I think the artist intention is important in regards to what will be defined as art. To re frame your position we are active observers and interpreters and good art will never leave you passively observing but rather you are a part of the art itself as you are the observer finding meaning or truth in the object you are fixated on.
I disagree with this general principle and this specific example on several levels. Michelangelo's David, for example, is about to launch his sling stone at Goliath. But his stance, known as contraposto, is one that accentuates the lines of the body towards a specific asthenic ideal with no relation to the kinesiology involved in throwing a rock. Furthermore, if you view David from a distance it appears to have an abnormally big head and protruding brow. But the statue was designed for a courtyard where you'd view it from close up and below, where perspective makes the head and brow look "normal" to the viewer. Those are Michelangelo's very specific design decisions, the kind that not only make David art, but make it great art, not just an academic study piece. It was no accident. Photography is no different when the shooter makes specific decisions regarding subject, lighting, angle, shutter speed, aperture, editing, even the choice of print paper, to evoke certain impressions and emotions from the viewer. To me, that makes the photograph art. How successful it is as art is another, very subjective matter that really is up to the viewer. Even photos intended as documentary or editorial can stand out as art because of the photographer's decision to shoot things we'd never otherwise see, in locations we'd never go, in a way that others wouldn't do. That's why of all the crime scene photographers who ever lived, we all know who Weegee was. So while all photography isn't art, I believe that it's mainly the photographer's intention for the viewer to respond to the image that can make it art.
to me there is a huge difference between a snapshot and art in photography. Im all for any new technology, love the work some do with phones or with drones, but that does not make old school photographers and those who like to use film etc obsolete. I have seen real art from many different kinds of camera devices. Know your style and if you dont want to change for the sake of change it does not make you less of an artist, encourage people to use whatever technology they want as the photographer is making the art and it helps to have an artistic eye for it
I have a friend who did 8 x10 photos of his environment..he called his work documentary art. I thought about him and I also thought about all the people in North America taking “snapshots” thousands of images every day. I thought they were doing documentary art as well..only they did not call it art. I think it was art. Just because someone’s work is exhibited does not mean it is art.
Defining art always hits a wall of subjectivity, and what semantic remnants remain are further contorted by pretense and marketing. This does not mean that art doesn’t exists, and typically the forces and filtering of time will help bring some modicum of objectivity to the debate (or at least a footing). But in its broadest sense, art doesn’t require anything more than a human voice or a pencil and napkin to manifest. Technology or simplicity, likewise, don’t discredit its legitimacy; although I would argue that the most creative people are not all seeking the latest mediums of expression. A pinhole camera will still do, and of course, there are remarkably creative people still using antiquated mediums that long predate photography (which itself is nearing 200 years). I need to only show one photograph that I could tenaciously define and defend as art to prove to at least myself (if no one else) that photography can be art. Not all photography, obviously, but some, or even just a little. And of course, more than one such sample is circulating. Now, is it even important that photography, or anything for that matter, can be defined as art? The answer will likely depend on the individual. Lots of photographers take as much pride as denying any artistic intent as those proclaiming to be artists. Again, the pretentious stigma of it all. This said, for me (as subjectivity is still recognized here), most good photography, irrespective of intent, incorporates artistic components, such as compelling use of composition, color, contrast, lines, shapes, tonality, movement; it’s the reason that a Robert Capa, Don McCullin, or a Larry Burrows could be straightforward war documentarians who, nevertheless, produced--on a consistent basis--photographs that visually transcended even the inherent drama of the subject.
I think as we discussed art. It's the medium that people use often is the first thing that they criticism. But it should be "how you judge the art?". How do one judge art? Well for me Master after master, from Leonardo, to Rembrandt, to Bierstadt, produced works that inspired, uplifted, and deepened us. And they did this by demanding of themselves the highest standards of excellence, improving upon the work of each previous generation of masters, and continuing to aspire to the highest quality attainable. People who just a camera just to take a selfie or snapping a shot of what they are eating or whatever with out care of how they capturing the shot and what the shot means not only to them but what the shot could mean to others. Art isn't about the medium but the quality and what they have learned form the pervious masters to tell a story or an emotion or to make a statement.
Excellent discussion! I continue to believe that photography is an art. The example of creating art from Google images shows that art can be accomplished in many ways. I also believe that post processing is part of the art. The application of lighting, color, blur, etc to an image is part of the artistic process even though it is applied by software. It is the same as a painter using specialized brushes to achieve specific textures in painting.
Pictorialism started when Impressionism was still king in the art world, so I can see how someone would see it as a knockoff attempt which lacks the physical texture (& color) which is so important to that painting movement.
And Impressionism was all about "the feeling" of the scene not what it actually looked like. Not great timing to come out with something to capture what you see exactly.
Yes, photography can be art. One of my brothers is an artist (M.a [distinction]) and he has used photography in his body of work, as well as painting, sculpting, music, and installations. But not all photography is art. P.S. Love you guys, come to London. I'll give you a tour, and maybe even buy you a cuppa.
I'm thankful that I saw some beautiful photographs taken with a phone early on. I might have turned this into a gear hobby otherwise. I still use my DSLR because that's what I'm familiar with but power to anyone who can make art however they choose to do it. Great video.
Why does it matter who (or what) by or for what reason a photo was taken? Does anything about the picture change if you find out a robot took it? Or a human? Or that it was taken in full auto mode and triggered by a timer?
To answer this, just look back at the videos that Kai did at DigitalRev where he gave pro photographers, really cheap cameras. They came in with $6k plus in gear and he said nope, you are going to use this, and he gave them a Lego Camera, a Barbie camera or basically any $20 camera and they actually took astonishing photos with them. If those are not a true artists, then I don't know what is :-) If you are an artist and understand your medium you can accomplish great things. search CZcams for "Pro photographer cheap camera" you'll be amazed.
I am a Jamaican filmmaker and photographer, anyone can take a picture with a camera or a phone even a baby. Does that makes the baby or whosoever an artiste? NO!!!! What i believe is that once you get real creative and put in alot of work to demonstrate to this world how you really feel about what you see by taking a Photograph with the use of lights, angles, colour, props etc then that what i would call ART.
At the end of the day, asking “what is art?” is like asking “ what is time?” We all know...until we are asked for a definition. Then things get messy. If you have a stringent definition of what “art” is....
I find this debate humerous as I imagine the first artists carving on stone scoffed at the new technology of animal hairs on a stick dipped in pigmented oils!
I would classify art as a form of communication. You are either saying something or being spoken to. A picture can be worth a thousand words. Love your videos.
"Is photography art?" It's the wrong question. Photography is a medium. "Is the photographer an artist?" is a better question. An artist is an artist, regardless of the medium.
Wow. That has the ring of truth.
I like that guy
Spot on - Well said.
Totally spot on.
Exactly
Paint and brushes are just tools. Camera is just a tool. You can use these tools to make art. Or you can paint a wall white, or take a snapshot of your old table that you want to sell on internet.
Tools don't make art. You need your craftsmanship to be able to reach your goal, but it's the intention that counts.
@@cheito5876 Did you smash it in a smiley face? Indicative of the shattered and fragmented world we live in. Maybe trying to show how its difficult to travese these problems as the windscreen is hard to see through.
Pretty much what I was gonna write. Photography is not Art but you can use photography to create Art, and I would certainly not call the headshots I do for actors Art. Same with film, dance, music, painting, etc.
like any other art , photography is surely an art form. its not just capturing something, its about creating something too. painters do learn about how to use their brush, oil and combination of paints in order to paint a beautiful painting similarly we need to learn how to use light, aperture, shuter speed and various stuff of camera to create something beautiful. its an art form not many actually understand though many people can appreciate good pictures but not many can tell how the photographer took it. i see no debate in this, its someone's ignorance to not call photography an art. i think its a great Art form.
Sorry, imv its not someones 'ignorance' if they view photography as not being art...that is your perception, of which you are entitled, to have your opinionl! Just like everyone else!!
There is debate on probably every subject on the planet !
Imv photography IS an art
@@bekindalwaysx1g by definition : Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual idea, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. now we as human learned everything through experience and our memory of it. even an painter creates something only from its memory. i hope you understand where i am taking you from it. lack of knowledge creates debates. awareness, realisations dissloves debates. ;) theres no debate actually. photography is an art, period !!!
@@amitgautam6766 although you're missing this subtle detail, that Art with a capital initial is in fact the simplification of the term Fine art that we tend to ignore more and more due to exactly this typically modern (in the anthropologist spirit) conceptual confusion, which is that Fine art is art developed primarily for aesthetics or beauty, distinguishing it from applied art, which also has to serve some practical function. Now, you can make the modern choice to call everything art and exclude the aesthetic specificity, based on established norms, which is essential to the historical and traditional meaning of the word. But that's a philosophical choice.
In other words, photography is obviously an art, but when Tony and Chelsea are asking the question "is photography art ?", they actually mean "is this a fine art ?" and that's a different question.
I am a painter and a photographer. I can say this... yes photography is an art. But painting is a monster. Photography is much much much easier.
I like what Chelsea said about intention. For me, art is something created to evoke an emotion. Same thing for writing fiction. The intention as an author, is to invoke feelings in the reader. Fantasy writers want to invoke wonder and awe, thriller writers want to invoke tension and apprehension, romance writers try to titilate. As a photographer, I'm trying to make pictures to share the feeling I experience when seeing something. I think that's art to me - sharing feelings - essentially.
Asgard Studios yes and that’s also why there is so much time in professional photography to composition, editing out unwanted subjects, keeping random people in the pics sometimes if they add something to the scene, etc. Bc photography that isn’t simple point and clicking is meant to evoke emotions and tell a story same as any painting or book or music piece or dance
Ekta Shah Agreed!
Erik Wahl has a great definition of what art is:
The purpose of art is not to produce a product. The purpose of art is to produce thinking. The secret is not the mechanics or technical skill that create art - but the process of introspection and different levels of contemplation that generate it. Once you learn to embrace this process, your creative potential is limitless.
Artwork should be an active verb (a lens by which to view the world) not a passive noun (a painting that sits dormant in a museum). Creativity lies NOT in the done but in the doing. Art is active and incomplete. Always shifting, always becoming. Art is a sneak peak into the future of potential, of what could be. Not a past result of what has been already done. Art is a process not a product.
Art is a human act. Art is Risky. Generous. Courageous. Provocative. You can be perfect, or you can make art. You can keep track of what you will get in return for your effort, or you can make art. You can enjoy the status quo, or you can make art.
This is the purpose for why art should not be cut from education. and why creativity and innovation are critical to navigate the future of business
www.linkedin.com/pulse/purpose-art-erik-wahl/
I really enjoyed your discussion -- I was a journalism major in college with an art minor/emphasis photography (missed a double major by 3 credits). Part of my education included three years of art history, which explored photography toward the end of my final semester.
It is fascinating to look at how art changes with time -- as Tony mentioned, there is a recurring pattern in the evolution of art, and photography is one such pattern. Those who refused to acknowledge photography as art seemed to have forgotten technology's impact on so many other areas of art.
Scukpture is one example -- from carving wood, to rock, to marble, then to casting bronzes. Today, sculpture is even more varied due to technology, to include pieces made from glass and even very creative pieces made from junk machinery, for example, that has been welded together into something different.
Thanks again for the discussion. Photography is an art form. I love it and play with it in this way a fair amount. Tony and Chelsea, you both are awesome!
Jared Polin said in one video that there is a difference between a photograph and a snapshot. A photograph being set and composed, planned and care taken. A snapshot being a captured moment, a frozen memory. Paraphrasing, of course. Photography includes both, but in a photograph, you create, in a snapshot, you catch.
For me, there is no debate. *Photography is art and an art form.* Why? The composition (lighting, angles, lens, mood, human interpretation of the scene, etc) of a photograph is arguably the most important and creative part of that photograph. By definition 'a skilled creator' (photographer/videographer) is artful and his/her work is an art form. Referring to the argument made in 2014 about art not being 'art' because it is now a digital world would be like saying 'digital music' is not art. This is patently absurd. Well, some music may not be considered art, but I digress. In conclusion, all photography can no more be considered art than all music can be considered art. Generally speaking, photography is surely art as is music. Beauty (expressed by means of an art form in this case) will always be held and appreciated in the eye of the beholder. Detractors should try this argument on Peter McKinnon. I'd love to be there for that lively debate. This videocast was excellent coverage of the facts, myths, points, and counterpoints of the issue.
agree
Disagree. Photography CAN be art, but we've all seen plenty of shitty cell phone photos of someone's breakfast or cat that have zero thought put into them, and so little care was taken that there is camera shake or bad focus.
nicodimus2222 I’m pretty sure they are not referring to amateur photography from cell phones. Photography can be art. When you learn a dslr and do things like blur motion, bokeh, panning, And again as the person you responded to said.... angles, lighting effects, composition etc is art. A lot of painting was nothing more than doing what cameras do now back in the day ie portraits. I like photographic portraits far better than painting and drawing Bc of the different things you can do like bokeh and things I mentioned above. Also post processing is also a form of creating art by changing what the original photo was in different ways to create a different image. Art is about expression and photography is a way of expressing oneself. You can look at a portrait of someone and see something I don’t see in it. Same as painting portraits. People can have their own emotions evoked by a picture same as by a painting. Modern art with just a steak of paint or a blank canvas is less art to me than a photograph.
I always love these podcasts and this one was one of my favorites. I have worked in various media painting, drawing, sculpting and glass artist. I am rather an accomplished glass artist but physical limitations have been impairing my ability to work glass more and more. I was always interested in photography and when I realized someday I would get to a point I could no longer work glass I took up photography. I am a professional photographer now. I believe some of the work I produce is art. As Chelsea said, there is usually an intention behind art. I capture my own unique perspective, my way of interpreting the world around me, I freeze that moment and it is that aspect I want to share with others. Glass work was the same. I would take molten glass, give it shape, form, movement, texture and impart my imagination into that glass, then outside the flame, it becomes a solid, frozen moment in time. Liquid oxygen, propane and a 2000 degree flame are the same as my camera, lenses and filters etc. They are tools for intentional interpretation and expressing my own view of things. Sorry for the lengthy comment, this was a great topic though.
I received my signed copy of Stunning Digital Photography today. I can't believe how fast delivery was to the UK! Thank you guys, very much looking forward to learning from it :)
Steven Brust had a book where the character debates this point, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that photography might the most difficult art form out there because it requires the artist (photographer) to capture something we've seen a hundred times, and show it back to us in a way that stops us in our tracks. Painters, sculptors, etc., they can make up their reality. Photographers can only work with what's actually out there in the real world, and it still needs to amaze us.
"beauty is in the eye of the beholder" the argument can never be settled. Plus it kind of doesn't matter. If it was settled that photography was not art, who cares? We gonna stop taking pictures? Stop trying to evoke emotion? It's a non issue
That's one of the most bull shit cliche's there ever was. Beauty is beauty you can't confuse it its the most obvious thing in our world even animals know it. People, on the other hand, are so psychologically screwed up that they haven't a clue.
@@walkertongdee I agree 100%. My point being, the worst artist in the world can call their work art. And a good portion of people will defend that regardless of how crap it is. Or how non artsy. And you can't do anything to convince them otherwise. It's annoying, but also a pointless argument and a waste of time.
To Chelseas question about a photographer who just shoots everything, then goes back through it. The famous "raising the flag at Iwo Jima" that has literally shaped the Marine Corp (in fact, the official USMC museum, is shaped like the pose in the picture!) was actually a total accident. The photographer took a bunch of pictures, trying to capture EVERYTHING then went back to filter through them. Its the only way to minimize how many moments you miss in a hectic environment like war.
I like the philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteins description. He uses a system called Family Resemblances. “It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things” think of what a Game is?
There are many different forms of games. Card games, sports, gambling, Olympic Games etc. There is not one common feature or description that connects the concept together but rather think of a web that has overlapping features. This web of overlapping features is what we know to be games.
You can use this system of family resemblances to give an all encompassing description of art.
In my opinion photography is an art form. The intentional act of creation, that goes beyond utilitarian form or function, is a defining aspect of art. The camera is a tool we use to intentionally create, just like a paint brush or a pen.
In my mind, two people can look at the same thing and one can think it is art and the other think it is not art, and, both of them can be correct. !:)
Yes, absolutely correct. None of us "see" the world in the same way, it's not our eyes but our minds that "see" the world around us.
Each of us learns how to see the world from the moment we open our eyes after birth. Our experiences during our formative years affect the way our minds interpret how we "see", our social environment has a massive effect on this.
If you manipulate images to your liking, then it is personal expression, which is art. So many people think we all see the same thing, we don't.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
This! 👌
Yeah,art is very objective. We shouldn't just defame everything we don't like or can't understand.
The great majority of people can't appreciate art because they have psychological issues concerning being able to feel, most people are numbed by a banal existence without meaning.
Art is something that creates an emotional response in a person, be it a good or bad response. Photography, sculpture, painting, sketching, or performing, if it creates that emotional response in the viewer, is art. It’s an individual experience. Art to one person may not be art to another.
Here is my favorite definition of art:
"Art consists of paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects which are created for people to look at and admire or think deeply about."
- Collins dictionary
It is an inclusive definition, as far as the means of creating art goes. Even AI generated pictures can be art, according to it. On the other hand, if you emphasize the "think deeply about" part, most paintings in museums won't make the grade, no matter how skillfully they are made.
As for me, that definition gives me latitude to combine different media, and to work in genres I like. Most of my pictures aren't art, but maybe there are a few who are. It doesn't really matter to me, as long as I am having fun creating them.
For those of you interested in the history of photography, there is a fascinating chapter titled "State of the Art" in the photography book Victorian Giants. The chapter goes into the history of the question "is photography art" which began shortly after photography was invented. The book is also a great look at the work of the Victorian Giants of photography - Cameron, Rejlander, Carroll and Hawarden.
At the collegiate level, there are bachelor of science degrees...and bachelor of arts degrees. In the arts field, there are graphic arts, literary arts, performing arts, historical arts, and creative arts among other degrees of study. The point is that the field of study for the arts relates to the expression of the individual. It is the ability to “tell a story”. Regardless of the medium, art enriches our lives by adding the flourish to the functional.
Photography is usually considered art by most photographers.. its an ego boost at best calling a photographer an artist. pointing a camera and pushing a button and calling that art , dilutes the definition and the craft of being a true artist.
As in defining "art," almost anything can be art, but what the focus should be is on what makes it more a masterpiece. On a paper anybody have the right to say that a stick figure is art but it's not a masterpiece that requires years of practice and skill.
Anyone who says photography can’t be art because of technology, needs to throw away their brushes, canvases, modern paints and all other tools used to create paintings and sculptures. It’s all new technology. Go back to using whatever cavemen used to paint.
SDMacMan 😂
Some photography is art and some artists are photographers.
I have been an artist for 18 years, and now have switched to photography and yes it is an art form, subject matter, composition, lighting and expression are still essential to art and photography. The craftsmanship has changed and its ability to render reality has changed but so has our civilisation and technical advances. Are we not here as artist to represent what we see as ideal and beautiful. Is it not the final result / image the main goal to represent that symbolism of reality. To evoke emotion and understanding of our reality in a visual format.. this is the true form of the artist ... Ben Lynam.
I started out, even as a kid, as an artist who also liked taking photographs. Once I got my first dslr, my first decent camera that would record things how I wanted them recorded, with different focal length lenses etc., I was free! I could enjoy the great outdoors, animals and other subjects and capture moments in time of locations that I loved. Then along came digital processing and wow, the freedom floodgates were really open. Some of my photography is straight record shots, other images are more artistic interpretations of what I pre visualised. Yes, photographers are artist. I think the camera is the most wonderful artistic tool ever invented. The human brain creates the art and uses whatever tools it can to do that. Thanks for your wonderful and informative videos. Cheers.
Scenario: A person sets up a modern digital camera, set to fully automatic mode, on a tripod pointed generally towards a subject but not composed. Someone comes along who does not compose a specific shot but simply presses the shutter for 10 seconds and the camera spools off pictures at 10 frames per second. Another person then sorts through those 100 pictures and selects one. Questions: Who is the artist? The person pressing the shutter release button or the person selecting one frame from 100 or perhaps the person who randomly set up the camera? (correct me if I'm wrong but I think copywrite of those images sits with the button presser) Are all 100 pictures art? Are none of. the pictures art? (after all, there was no emotional input into the pictures). Does a picture only become art when it is selected? or does it only become art when someone else comes along and views the selected photograph and has an emotional response to it?
Did Steiglitz have the first gallery showing of photography? Possibly. However there were many photography shows including one at the Kensington Museum in 1858. On 12 February 1858, Henry Cole, the founding director of the South Kensington Museum, recorded in his diary:
'Museum: Queen &c came to private view of the Photographic Socy, being the first exhibition in the Refreshment upper room'.
The exhibition was not only the first to take place in that part of the museum. It was in fact the first exhibition of photographs to be held in any museum. Consisting of 1009 photographs, it was organized by the Photographic Society of London and included approximately 250 contributions from its French counterpart, the Société française de photographie.
It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it. Camera, pencil, brush, paint, etc.
The old story: A writer and a photographer are at a dinner party. The writer walks up to the photographer and says “I’ve seen your work you must have a great camera.” The photographer responds, “I’ve read your books you must have a great typewriter. “.
For my part, for an object to qualify as art, it must meet at least three of the following criteria:
• It must be aesthetically pleasing.
• It must rely on a degree of skill to be produced.
• It must evoke strong emotions in the viewer.
• It is done with intent.
On that basis, great photography is art - and a hell of a lot of the "art" in galleries isn't.
Is photography an art? Why not turn the table and ask whether painting is an art? Just take a look at many pictures from the renaissance. So many pictures were only meant to depict some rich person as realistically as possible so that other people would have an idea as to how he looks, or looked. Basically, they were like photos with a super slow shutter speed shot at like 0,0001 ISO.
But all kidding aside. My statement above is obviously meant ironically. The fact that paintings were often used the way I described above does not discredit painting as a possible means to create art. However, the same is also true for photography. Yes, you can use it to create a picture for either a passport, or a driving licence, but you can still go way beyond this just like many painters did and still do.
The art is not the object; the art is the experience of the object. Visual artists, like poets, painters, sculptors, videographers, etc., simply re-present the world in ways that others' experience of it is broadened and deepened. I think it is absolutely possible to be an "unconscious artist", if your means of expression has an impact on others, *regardless* of whether or not that was your intent while you were creating.
I believe that *photography is a tool that can be used to make art* . Just like painting. The difference between the two to me is that painting is pretty much always a more laborious activity, which makes that much fewer paintings fall into a category equivalent to snapshots in photography (excluding elementary school pupils' attempts perhaps). Modern cameras and cell phones made taking photographs trivial and essentially effortless.Consequently, almost everybody is doing photography these days, which makes a huge difference in the distribution of artistic skill across the population of people who engage in any of these activities - be it photography, painting, sculpture etc. - to the disadvantage of photography in this regard. If anyone is in doubt as to whether photography is an art form, I'd say: Go to a good quality photographic museum/gallery exposing multiple authors and genres, and do the same with another artform that you regard as an artform. Then compare the best to the best and reflect on how much artistic qualities do each have. I guess it would take a blind one to claim that photography is not an artform after undertaking such an exercise.
Something I don't dare judge so clearly is *what to call an art* - the *process* leading to an output, or the *output* itself (e.g., an image/painting/sculpture)? Or perhaps both (artistic process and artistic result)? Any thoughts?
If you intend the picture to be art it's art...if you intend to take a snap it's documenting. It could be as simple as that, but I think it's more justifiable if you put thought into location, theme, framing, settings, post processing etc. Like many things it's such a subjective erm? subject. I intend this statement to be art lol (Chris Lock, 2018)
Discussion about art is endless, because art is dynamic and always evolving. But, I think this discussion will be more legit if there are included an art master or bachelor degree speaker (or maybe a professor, if necessary) in this conversation. So there will contain more information and wider perspective about art itself.
Anyone who is overly concerned about whether photography is art has both an inferiority complex and a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is.
and so what is art? a painting, photograph, a ballet, an art house movie, or my grandchild's finger painting?
Photography is an art. Art is something meant to cause emotion, to make you pause and ask yourself what is the story being told. That person who asked a q about a panorama forgers that panorama is full of detail much like a painting and telling a story of its own. In it can be some interesting composition elements too. So yes it is no more art than if someone painted the same panorama. Photography is a medium same as paint, mosaic Tiles, mosaic beadwork. It requires creative composition, creative use of different elements of photography be it panning, long exposure, blur or freeze motion, differences in color composition, bokeh , purposely putting things out of focus to center the focus on something else. But even a simple portrait of someone such as a pic of me when I was clearly mad at my bro’s wedding taken by his photographer tells a story in the mood in my face and in my eyes much like a painting does. So yes it’s an art and not everyone learns it well anymore than everyone learns painting well. Besides have u seen what modern “artists” call art these days? Throwing a splotch of paint on a canvas is what people call paintings these days and hang up in museums. To me a five year old can do that
Enjoyed this topic over a cup of coffee this morning, thank you.
I agree it's mostly about intent and effort. Just because I can splash paint on a canvas doesn't mean I'm a painter. Similarly, putting a $40,000 camera in a someone's hands doesn't make them a fine art photographer. There is no doubt though that you can convey emotion, tell a story, or move someone through photography, and that's what I love about it.
I observe the world around me, I SEE IT. Many painters saw the world around them. They painted that image that captured their eye and I photograph that image that captures my eye. I think that an artist "sees" better than many people do. We recognize that certain something that other people never see or never notice. Maybe they are in too much of a hurry, or focus their mind on things other than - that "moment" when everything happens to be JUST PERFECT. And some images are so fleeting, so momentary that no painter (or very few) could remember and then capture them as well as an artist with a camera (and the skills to use it). I think that someone viewing photography, as an art, should ask themselves, could/would this image exist if it wasn't photographed. A photograph allows the viewer to look through your "eye" and see something that the viewer may never have the chance to see. It's the closest we can come to being in two places at once. Human beings have been sharing visual images for a LONG TIME! Knowing what to record and how to record it is what makes an artist an artist. The better we do it the more amazed the viewer will be.
Photography is absolutely is art. I think it comes down to the nature of art. If art is or can be defined as "an expression of human experience", then that implies that art is also communication. That is important because that means that there is a receiving side of the expression. I think this leads to a purpose of art, inspiring feeling. If a person likes or doesn't like a piece of art, that piece has done its job because there was a feeling. This also means that the value isn't, necessarily, based on "likes", which is important. Sorry about the long post. . . :)
Depth!! I believe art is defined by anything having a beauty or meaning beyond it’s literal parts. 1+1=3. Whether it’s photography, painting, graffiti, architecture, poetry, dance, nature, or a pattern on your drywall, as soon as it has a value to anyone beyond it’s literal value, it becomes art to them.
Depends on the genre. Photojournalism, for example = not art in any way shape or form. OTOH, landscape, portrait, architecture, abstract, street (if you compose a certain way) to name only a few are absolutely art.
Is not Robert Capa an artist? Is not Weegee? Or Walter Ioos? There are reasons why certain "documentary" photographers' work is instantly recognizable and distinguished from their colleagues.
@@JohnDrummondPhoto Documentaries can be artistic, but I'm talking hard photojournalism, like the stuff you see in the news where artistic touches is taboo.
@@kalekain3521 well, that's an bit of a qualification from your original statement. Plus, Weegee and Capa shot for the press and were hardcore photojournalists, yet their work (and others) still stands out, to the point that they have books and exhibitions dedicated to them. It's not just post-processing that makes a photograph art, IMO.
@@JohnDrummondPhoto I don't consider photojournalism as being anything other than photos for news publications, so my original post still stands. And no post processing is not the only thing that makes a photo art. Framing, composition, lighting etc also count. However, if you are only taking a picture to capture reality then there's no artistic intent behind it, thus your work isn't art. Documentaries can be art as they are deliberate undertakings with biases involved and are subject to considerable post production.
@@kalekain3521 I think in some cases, those decisions come from an innate artistic esthetic rather than a conscious planning process. That has to be the case in photographing war, for example, or sports. You have to decide when to take the shot, how to frame it, even how to pre-set your camera so that when the moment happens, you're ready for it. To me, at a certain level, that goes beyond just technique.
We can agree to disagree on these points. I get where you're coming from. 🤝
I just wanted to thank you for recommending Udemy because I found this app a month or two back from one of your videos that had a 90% off sale. and I found out that there is this wonderful world of courses that I could purchase for extremely cheap and I have learned so much from Udemy. I bought 5 courses so far including indoor and outdoor portraits, how to use adobe Lightroom CC, and a portrait photography masterclass and I spent less than$60 all these courses. Every time there's a sale I go and see if there's anything new. and let's not forget I've already purchased your book on how to take stunning photography and your buying camera gear book. I've been so glad I found your CZcams channel. This has made my photos look so much better and when I do have a problem with maybe lighting or so now I know what I need to use or what to do to make the photos look better. So thanks
Painter Diego Rivera and photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo were friends. Rivera used to make fun of Bravo with the notion photographers just fired a shutter and their work was done. Bravo challenged Rivera and invited him to learn how to take pictures rather paint them. After three days Rivera gave up. His complaint was photography was too hard. Making the shot was much harder to him than putting any object on a canvas simply by painting it where and how he wanted.
Quote from Salvador Dali... " I was at an art opening and someone asked me why am I staring at the door.. I simply said the beautiful staining on that door shows more artistic ability than any painter represented here today.. I feel if someone can appreciate your work and call it art than its art... From a simple one stroke of paint to a painting that took countless hrs.. You can ask a thousand people what is art and get a different answer.. There's also a fine line of a creative skilled trade.. Simply put, if you created it can be called art... You can take a rock and paint a dot on it and someone will think its art... If you feel your art is in ? of artistic integrity than maybe you should reconsider your choice of medium.. Even Davinci made fun of Michael Angelo saying sculpting is not art.. I'm sure even a photographer like Ben Vong Wong gets ? on his photography art...
I think it is important to realize that art and photography are about communication. To be a good, or at least economically viable, artist or photographer you need something worth saying, an audience, and a method of saying those things to that audience. These are quite separate issues, and I suspect a major generator of grief. Think of an image of a bird. A biologist wants the least amount of modification. A birder wants to see all the field marks. Artists might want a nice composition of light, color and texture. The general public wants the clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders all the way to the right, so the image pops. If you fail to reach your audience then your thoughts and feelings were all in vain.
As an artist I agree that sometimes art invokes an emotion, but is not emotion. It can be emotional, but art is a representation of what you see regardless of the medium. Is your own rendition of reality. Also, a statement is not art. It is a statement. Making a statement thru art is the difference. Same as writing a blog is not literature.
This whole photography is/is not art is like arguing if film/movies are art. Meh.. just my opinion.
If you plan a shot/series, procure (a) model(s), work on posing and props, create the setting, control the lighting and then take the image into Photoshop and put your own effects and vision into it, then that is clearly art.
Coloring in a color book could be considered art to some and it’s all in the eye of the beholder. The tools to create art are changing daily. To be honest I love digital technology, I miss the darkroom process I grew up with but not the hassles of maintaining it. Can’t wait to see what the next generation of tools will come.
A painter uses a paintbrush we use a camera. Art is the concept of creation. Even making music is considered art.
This is that in order to take an amazing picture, you just have to scout a good location and start snapping. To create an amazing painting, (first off, if you aren’t talented, don’t even attempt it, it’s impossible), so assuming you have talent, it’s now going to take you years of practice to get mildly alright and maybe after a decade of practice can you finally compete with the elite painters of the world. So sure photography is an art but it’s basically like the super easy version of being an artist.
Photography is not an art. Anyone can learn it.
@@johndong7524 Film is motion picture-aka motion photography-cinematography. They have an entire award show dedicated to the art of cinema watched all over the world. There’s a technical aspect in photography that anybody can learn, but not everyone can get famous doing it.
In many cases I would say photography is journalism...Art needs imagination...groovy discussion !
This was a surprisingly good discussion. I expected something more one-sided on photography’s side. It’s hard to define a right brained activity with the left brain, which thinking about it and then discussing it entails. I’m not sure about the Insta series of Breakfast shots constituting art, however, lol. Art is not so personal, like your breakfast choices, after it’s out there. It becomes art when everyone who sees it is moved by it. What constitutes art for me is what I come back to time and again. A good book, a certain song, a great painting or an image. With photography, it’s usually my own stuff I come back to. I lament the fact that these days so many landscape photographers, many with large CZcams followings, do the “same image” over and over again, whether it’s in their backyard or at the ends of the Earth. Tripod the camera, add a stack of ND filters, maybe a PL unless it’s a pano, and … the same image just with different geographic coordinates. Some of their images are arresting. But only for a moment and then I have no need to view them again. Ansel massaged his negatives to get the best from them and we recognised his artistic eye when we viewed them. There can be much more to art in photography than an ultra slow shutter speed and blurred water.
Glad to see you were sponsored by Udemy today. Phil Ebiner and Will Callahan we’re featured. They are great teachers from Video School Online.
This goes back further than the camera. Drawing a landscape just as it was seen was considered "photography and therefore not art" long before the camera was invented. Photography CAN be art, which in my opinion comes with some sort of abstract or direct self expression created by purposeful use of tools. I wouldn't necessarily call photos that are taken for the sole purpose of documentation art. A lot of selfies aren't art for that reason. But you can take artful selfies by taking things like composition and lighting into consideration. Suddenly your picture does more than document, it conveys some form of mood.
As you pointed out the line between technology and art is not only a moving line but it also varies in thickness with a wide grey area. What is art to one person is technique to another. I have been taking photos for 50 years, almost all are candid snapshots. Some are quite good, most are not. Lately I've decided to move my hobby to center on portrait work and get serious about it. It's the ART part that scares me.
I have very limited creativity capabilities. I can see a good photo taken by my talented nephew, but for him it is just a natural talent while for me it would be more like tripping and stumbling on something good. For me just getting the speedlights at the right angle and intensity is an artistic requirement. For others it is a simple technical task.
Is photography art? Yes for me it is.
The ipad quote is this, he used the ipad to take the picture, the person decided what to point the ipad at. Therefore he produced the content. It maybe not technically perfect, but if someone appreciates it, then it has value.
Virtually anything people make can be considered art, it’s just that a piece of art’s significance can range from zero to infinity.
I feel that photography can be art and in other ways it is just documenting. When you create a composition and frame up the shot to convey a message or a feeling that is art. If you are shooting without intent then I feel that is just "taking photos"
IMHO: Photography is not an art form. A composition is an art form. The fact we capture the composition either by a medium of a painting or a camera only shows two different technologies, but not what made the final product what it is. The selection, either by finding, or by directing the perfect composition is, and nothing else determines if the final result is liked, or not.
In today's society where people who have no clue what composition is and what needs to be done to CREATE a composition snap images and edit the heck out of them to make it something it never was, the value of photography is lowered. The inability of people to appreciate images captured by a camera the way they were, compared to the over editing, over saturation and glorifying something that affects the eyes of the masses is simply fake reality.
Good photographers will ALWAYS be good because of their composition, not because of their editing capabilities or their gear!
Love you two.
Greetings from the Arizona desert, where sunsets are so pretty as they are, that locals who have no clue what a composition is, are able to crap their own images by playing with RED, ORANGE and YELLOW... like nature needs favors... Sheesh
Thinking of photography as an art makes me want to understand art. That rabbit hole goes so deep it gives me a headache trying to understand it!
Ah, the endless and tireless beast of categorization. There is some primal instinct inside us all that came from the time we realized we 'belonged' to a family unit, tribe, town, religion, that required us to begin the journey of catagorizing and prioritizing anything and everything that comes into our path. Is any endeavor art or not? One could call the instinct to sort and label, an auto-curation of life experiences. What we need to be mindful of is not just the categorization and the accuracy of it, but also the inevitable comparison. Maybe Yoda can help. "Categorization leads to comparison, comparison leads to judgement, judgement leads to... winning/losing? Rejection/acceptance? By whose standards? And you're correct - the debate goes on. ;) Thanks for a great prod to think deeper on this!
Art school definition. (It's not subjective and has nothing to do with beauty, composition, aesthetics, creating or capturing). None of which can be defined.
Art is the sensible, (you can sense it) manifestation of an idea or concept.
Art is prospective, (the idea comes first).
Not retrospective or reactive.
Photography in itself isn't "Art".
Photography is a Medium. (A medium through which an idea or concept is communicated)
Painting isn't necessarily "Art"
Painting is a medium. (As above).
Paint and photography can be used for all kinds of things.
Not just "Art".
Both painting and photography can and if required, be used to make art.
They are media...
Not "Art".
If you use photography to make "Art" .
You have produced a piece of photographic "Art".
A robot cannot produce art because a robot cannot have an idea to begin with.
If robotic photography is then selected by an artist as a medium by which to express himself then the robotic photograph becomes art. (human intervention). As it is no longer a purely robotic photograph.
So photography is art if it was the intention of the photographer was to produce art.
If it wasn't, then it isn't.
Like say forensic or medical photography, neither of which is intended to be art.
Put simply.
You look at an art photograph with your mind.
You look at a forensic photograph with your eyes.
Go out and photograph your ideas.
Make art.
My school art teacher has exactly the same opinion...it made it pretty hard to do photography for school art!
I think its what you choose to photograph and the way in which that shot is composed that makes it artistic. If a greenhouse frame on four jacks is art then a well composed photographic image must qualify.
Yes it is an art telling a story and mesmerizing people is an art
😎
In the same way a master carpenter may care deeply about making, say, a beautiful table, and may be proud of her work but not consider it to be art, a photographer could make a beautiful photograph she does not consider to be art. But nobody should tell her not to make art using her woodworking skills. The only person who gets to decide what to call it is the one who did the work. Here's another question, is it generally people who don't make art themselves who decide photography is not / can't be / shouldn't be called art? If you aren't sure whether you're making art, you're not.
Art is the creation of something that can communicate emotion. Images do that.
I love you for bringing up this subject, my belief is that an artist can create art even though no one who looks at it consider it to be art. And the opposite, something that didn't have the intention to be art can be considered art of the beholder.
With that said, not every photographer is an artist, and no artist only creates art.
You should check out Edvard Munch's (yes, the scream guy) photography work. As far as I know he never showed photography in galleries, but he was quite the innovator and experimented a lot with different photo techniques very early on.
Look at Mike disfarmer.. He took photos to make a living doing something he enjoyed.. Many many years later his work became art because someone made his work art.. Now his photos sell like crazy.. What we do now with photography may someday be in a art gallery or it might just be forgotten, either way we like most artist create because it's our own personal passion where it goes is up to the people of the future. Go shoot and have fun..
I think a better comparison would be between a musician's instruments and a photographer and their camera?
Thank you Chelsea and Tony for your, as always, deep thoughts about photography and art. In my opinion art could not be defined like an object, e.g. a camera. Art and music and intelligence are expressions of human being that can only be operationally defined, like „Intelligence is, what the IQ-Test measures“ or „Music is the Output of Musicians“. As Arthur C. Danto argues in his highly remarkable book about art theories „The Transfiguration of the Common Place“, objects like paintings or photos can only be candidates of art and not art itself. For example, if you took three pictures of a red surface and you put them in a frame of, let‘s say 50x50cm, all three of them will look similar to a recipient. Probably, no one will perceive these three pictures as candidates for art. But if you give them titles, like „The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea“, „My First Menstrual Bleeding“ and „Picture Without Title“ the perception of these, as before simply red squares, will completely change and a lot of recipients will be likely to agree, that these pictures are candidates for art now. So, obviously, art is not an attribute of the pictures, but a mediation process between object and subject, between the peace of work and the recipient.
The question I always ask is, "If you think you can do then do it." Amateur painters look at Mark Rothko and say, no problem. So alright, do it. The great artists, including photographers, have more, do more.
In one of your previous videos it was established that I'm a documentarian with thechie tendencies. I practice a craft, which may or may not be defined as art. Why is art seemingly superior to craft? In the elevation of art above craft are we being just as ridiculous as those who eschew any new technology as "not art." I bought my first DSLR (Canon 10D) from a salesman at San Jose Camera who declared to me that he only shot black & white film, which he considered the only legitimately artistic form of photography. That was right around the time that a collection of color photographs of the Los Angeles area by Ansel Adams were discovered; who knew?
To me, the real question is, is there a difference between photography and digital art? I consider a photo that has been altered digitally, is digital art. A photo that is displayed the way it comes out of the camera, warts and all, is a photo.
Art is just not painting. Art is life, art is everything that we see. So yes Photography is art.
Very thoughtful and interesting discussion! From my perspective, the backstory should not matter to the viewer. A photograph (or any other piece of art) should evoke emotions, tell a story or express an intention on its own, regardless of how much effort the artist put into creating it, how he or she did it, what their personal intention was or how important that piece is to them. For example, whether I walked two blocks from my apartment and snapped a quick photo without premeditation or trekked for ten days to a faraway place and set up an elaborate shoot with a well defined concept, the final result is all that matters to those who perceive it as art, not what went into making it.
So often I start watching these videos with a bucket load of opinions I plan to write in the comments. And then you address every single one of them in the video and leave me with nothing to add.
I'm not sure if I missed it or if you didn't say, but the name of the artist that uses Google Maps is Jacqui Kenny aka the Agoraphobic Photographer. Might be cool to add a link to her work in the show description.
Even paint and paint brushes were a technology at some time in the past. These things didn't spring forth from the ground and into the artists hands. I think this debate will rage on forever, just like the debate of 'are videos games art'.
This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's rant about artists versus craftsman and finding the right time and place to play each role. Bourdain was ranting about line cooks "artistically" changing the chef's painstakingly developed dishes, when instead their job is to precisely replicate them over and over again. Does portraiture classify as art or document? For example the Queen just viewed a new portrait painting of herself last week. It's impressive and beautiful, but to my untrained eye, the painter did little more than document the Queen's image and slap a bookshelf behind her. By Bourdain's logic, is her painter an artist or just a craftsman employing his skill to document a person's image?
I always have a hard time with the 'expressing yourself' answer. If I see a beautiful landscape, and I use my gear and knowledge of composition to take a shot that many see as beautiful, how exactly is that me 'expressing myself'? I just can't quite draw the connection between 'making' something I like using a photographic capture and 'expressing myself'...
It's the observer who determines what is art, not the creator.
Michelangelo's David could have been nothing more that a three dimensional representation of the male human form, but it's people seeing Michelangelo's David who identify the work as art
Steaphany I half agree. I think the artist intention is important in regards to what will be defined as art.
To re frame your position we are active observers and interpreters and good art will never leave you passively observing but rather you are a part of the art itself as you are the observer finding meaning or truth in the object you are fixated on.
I disagree with this general principle and this specific example on several levels.
Michelangelo's David, for example, is about to launch his sling stone at Goliath. But his stance, known as contraposto, is one that accentuates the lines of the body towards a specific asthenic ideal with no relation to the kinesiology involved in throwing a rock. Furthermore, if you view David from a distance it appears to have an abnormally big head and protruding brow. But the statue was designed for a courtyard where you'd view it from close up and below, where perspective makes the head and brow look "normal" to the viewer. Those are Michelangelo's very specific design decisions, the kind that not only make David art, but make it great art, not just an academic study piece. It was no accident.
Photography is no different when the shooter makes specific decisions regarding subject, lighting, angle, shutter speed, aperture, editing, even the choice of print paper, to evoke certain impressions and emotions from the viewer. To me, that makes the photograph art. How successful it is as art is another, very subjective matter that really is up to the viewer. Even photos intended as documentary or editorial can stand out as art because of the photographer's decision to shoot things we'd never otherwise see, in locations we'd never go, in a way that others wouldn't do. That's why of all the crime scene photographers who ever lived, we all know who Weegee was.
So while all photography isn't art, I believe that it's mainly the photographer's intention for the viewer to respond to the image that can make it art.
to me there is a huge difference between a snapshot and art in photography. Im all for any new technology, love the work some do with phones or with drones, but that does not make old school photographers and those who like to use film etc obsolete. I have seen real art from many different kinds of camera devices. Know your style and if you dont want to change for the sake of change it does not make you less of an artist, encourage people to use whatever technology they want as the photographer is making the art and it helps to have an artistic eye for it
My opinion.Art is ANY medium you can use to express what mood,emotion,story ect you want to express.
I have a friend who did 8 x10 photos of his environment..he called his work documentary art. I thought about him and I also thought about all the people in North America taking “snapshots” thousands of images every day. I thought they were doing documentary art as well..only they did not call it art. I think it was art. Just because someone’s work is exhibited does not mean it is art.
Defining art always hits a wall of subjectivity, and what semantic remnants remain are further contorted by pretense and marketing. This does not mean that art doesn’t exists, and typically the forces and filtering of time will help bring some modicum of objectivity to the debate (or at least a footing).
But in its broadest sense, art doesn’t require anything more than a human voice or a pencil and napkin to manifest. Technology or simplicity, likewise, don’t discredit its legitimacy; although I would argue that the most creative people are not all seeking the latest mediums of expression. A pinhole camera will still do, and of course, there are remarkably creative people still using antiquated mediums that long predate photography (which itself is nearing 200 years).
I need to only show one photograph that I could tenaciously define and defend as art to prove to at least myself (if no one else) that photography can be art. Not all photography, obviously, but some, or even just a little. And of course, more than one such sample is circulating. Now, is it even important that photography, or anything for that matter, can be defined as art? The answer will likely depend on the individual.
Lots of photographers take as much pride as denying any artistic intent as those proclaiming to be artists. Again, the pretentious stigma of it all. This said, for me (as subjectivity is still recognized here), most good photography, irrespective of intent, incorporates artistic components, such as compelling use of composition, color, contrast, lines, shapes, tonality, movement; it’s the reason that a Robert Capa, Don McCullin, or a Larry Burrows could be straightforward war documentarians who, nevertheless, produced--on a consistent basis--photographs that visually transcended even the inherent drama of the subject.
I think as we discussed art. It's the medium that people use often is the first thing that they criticism. But it should be "how you judge the art?". How do one judge art? Well for me Master after master, from Leonardo, to Rembrandt, to Bierstadt, produced works that inspired, uplifted, and deepened us. And they did this by demanding of themselves the highest standards of excellence, improving upon the work of each previous generation of masters, and continuing to aspire to the highest quality attainable. People who just a camera just to take a selfie or snapping a shot of what they are eating or whatever with out care of how they capturing the shot and what the shot means not only to them but what the shot could mean to others. Art isn't about the medium but the quality and what they have learned form the pervious masters to tell a story or an emotion or to make a statement.
Excellent discussion! I continue to believe that photography is an art. The example of creating art from Google images shows that art can be accomplished in many ways. I also believe that post processing is part of the art. The application of lighting, color, blur, etc to an image is part of the artistic process even though it is applied by software. It is the same as a painter using specialized brushes to achieve specific textures in painting.
Pictorialism started when Impressionism was still king in the art world, so I can see how someone would see it as a knockoff attempt which lacks the physical texture (& color) which is so important to that painting movement.
And Impressionism was all about "the feeling" of the scene not what it actually looked like. Not great timing to come out with something to capture what you see exactly.
Yes, photography can be art. One of my brothers is an artist (M.a [distinction]) and he has used photography in his body of work, as well as painting, sculpting, music, and installations. But not all photography is art.
P.S. Love you guys, come to London. I'll give you a tour, and maybe even buy you a cuppa.
I'm thankful that I saw some beautiful photographs taken with a phone early on. I might have turned this into a gear hobby otherwise. I still use my DSLR because that's what I'm familiar with but power to anyone who can make art however they choose to do it. Great video.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
Why does it matter who (or what) by or for what reason a photo was taken? Does anything about the picture change if you find out a robot took it? Or a human? Or that it was taken in full auto mode and triggered by a timer?
To answer this, just look back at the videos that Kai did at DigitalRev where he gave pro photographers, really cheap cameras. They came in with $6k plus in gear and he said nope, you are going to use this, and he gave them a Lego Camera, a Barbie camera or basically any $20 camera and they actually took astonishing photos with them. If those are not a true artists, then I don't know what is :-) If you are an artist and understand your medium you can accomplish great things. search CZcams for "Pro photographer cheap camera" you'll be amazed.
I am a Jamaican filmmaker and photographer, anyone can take a picture with a camera or a phone even a baby. Does that makes the baby or whosoever an artiste? NO!!!! What i believe is that once you get real creative and put in alot of work to demonstrate to this world how you really feel about what you see by taking a Photograph with the use of lights, angles, colour, props etc then that what i would call ART.
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I spend equal time in Lightroom and Photoshop working on images that I did taking them.
At the end of the day, asking “what is art?” is like asking “ what is time?” We all know...until we are asked for a definition. Then things get messy. If you have a stringent definition of what “art” is....
...and...by the way...when the definition of something is that complex...
I find this debate humerous as I imagine the first artists carving on stone scoffed at the new technology of animal hairs on a stick dipped in pigmented oils!
I would classify art as a form of communication. You are either saying something or being spoken to. A picture can be worth a thousand words. Love your videos.
Doesn't take talent though