Photography as an art
Photography has evolved immensely since it was first conceptualized. What started as a way to quickly get someone’s or something’s image on a flat surface has become a whole new category of what I think is modern art. While photography began as a way to document events, important people, and to disseminate information, I believe it has become an art in the recent years. Modern technology has done great things for photography and has helped it become more than just a pretty picture on a piece of paper.
For this assignment, I interviewed my brother who is a self-taught photographer. He started out as traditional artist, working with ink, paint, and most recently coffee art. He also dabbled a little bit in sculpture. When I asked him what felt more “artsy” to him, painting or photography, he said they are both forms of art in different ways. He gave me a really interesting answer: if a painter can manipulate colors, brush strokes, and shapes and the product is called art, then so can a photographer’s work of manipulating exposure, light, contrast, and perspective be called art. He said photography is like using the environment, the surroundings, and your equipment to find the “painting” in the scene in front of you and to capture it onto a “frame”.
I agree with his idea to some extent. I believe that photos can be incredibly thought provoking and aesthetically pleasing when done for those particular purposes. I believe photography that can be considered art is intentional, and in the hands of a skillful photographer who understands the different elements that make a picture exceptional, photography can be very powerful. Of course, not all photographs are art: a frontal picture of the Statue of Liberty, banal as it is because it is so unoriginal would not be art; a photo of a leaf on the ground will not be art because there is nothing special about it. But a picture of Lady Liberty taken from an angle that gives the statue a personality and a story amidst a background that is original can be considered art. That same leaf, if caught on film while falling from a tree with the background hazy and unfocused can be art because of the skill it took to capture it and the composition.
I do believe that good photography, if done thoughtfully and with intent, can be called art. Otherwise, photography would just be another way of documenting events or people, much like older paintings without aesthetic intent in mind.
