Just about all of us are walking around with a camera on our smart phones. There are millions of pictures being snapped everyday, probably more than ever before in history. They can be posted instantly to be seen around the world in seconds. Photography has always been a hobby of mine. In some ways, I find it more interesting than video. That sounds strange from a journalist who spent his career in television news always searching for the best video to tell a story.
Photographs make time stand still. Whether your taking pictures of your family, or pet, or an accident scene, or the beauty of nature, or a news event that split second is preserved, and will never happen again. Some pictures you will remember forever. The bad ones can now be instantly deleted. The ability to take a picture at any moment can make us more engaged in the world around us. We are able to share our experience as we saw it. But can good photography be considered art?
I would argue a great photograph is an expression of the photographer’s view of his subject. Just as an artist translates his emotions into the subject he is painting. Two critics for the British newspaper The Guardian published pieces on the two sides of the argument last year. They referred to it as the “photography is not art” debate. Sean O’Hagan was on the side of photography as art. Art critic Jonathan Jones disagreed. O’Hagan wrote, “Photography is as vibrant as it has ever been-more so in response to the digital world, which Jonathan mistakenly thinks has made everyone a great photographer. It hasn’t. It has made it easy for people to take-and disseminate-photographs, that’s all. A great photographer can make a great photograph whatever the camera. A bad one will still make a bad photograph on a two grand digital camera that does everything for you. It’s about a way of seeing, not technology.”
Jonathan Jones was critical of the fact that someone paid $6.5 million for a black and white photograph of a water fall in Antelope Canyon, Arizona. He said he could have taken the same picture and it would look “really awesome in monochrome.” Jones went on to write, “Photography is not an art. It is technology. We have no excuse to ignore this obvious fact in the age of digital cameras, when the most beguiling high-definition images and effects are available to millions. My iPad can take panoramic views that are gorgeous to look at. Does that make me an artist? No, it just makes my tablet one hell of a device.”
A picture you take of your cat in a Santa hat, or the drawing I make for one of my granddaughters are not art. They are images. There are different kinds of photographers and artists. There are photo journalists who take pictures in all kinds of circumstances, and can capture the essence of a story in one frame. There are also photographers who can make the human face, or a lion in the jungle rise to the level of fine art using light and angles to create an emotional reaction in us, just as a great artist can also use light, color and shading to draw out that same kind of reaction. The great photographer Ansel Adams said, “Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.”
Art is made with the heart and mind, and a good eye. Everyone sees and feels something different. For me, the photographer who creates an image of a moment in time that makes me see something I haven’t seen before is an artist.
Leave a Reply