When I claim that photography is art, then I am taking something away from the traditional arts. The value or sum of their ”art-ness” is diminished to the extent that my type of imagery claims to have “art-ness.”
Do you see how ridiculous that statment is? Yet it seems to be the way many non-photographic artists feel. As if there is some absolute quantity of “art-ness” available in the world, and we have to fight over who gets it.
In a lovely irony, the airbrush artist, Dru Blair, who has an excellent, illustrated step-by-step description of how he makes a photorealistic portrait, then claims that while his picture is art, the photograph from which it originated is not:
“As a style, Photorealism has a few detractors, who often dismiss it as pointless, or non-art. They fail to realize that many photorealistic paintings are not mere copies of photographs, but interpretations of reality based on the artist’s vision….
… Art is the selective re-creation or conversion of reality by the human mind into concrete imagery according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Real or imagined concepts are filtered and altered through the human mind to the artist’s hand to create an image or sound that did not exist before. The reason photography does not qualify as art is that the process removes the filter of the human mind as an interpretative element. Although photography requires technical skill, in the final analysis it is only a mechanical recording of reality.”
Don’t you just love the anti-photography logic of these people?
Obviously, he doesn’t know much about photography and the ongoing straight vs manipulated wars, but even before that, as has been said ad nauseum, photography was never a mechanical recreation of reality.
(Nevertheless, I highly recommend his illustrated page. It’s very interesting.)
-Julie
