Is Photography art?

The controversy about whether photography is art is 1 that has been raging in the art world for a long time & we're probably not going to solve it here. But it can be an important decision if you are considering a career in photography with the goal of producing quality artwork. If this is where you are, the idea that someone would say "It's not art, you just took a picture" is pretty disturbing.

Of course, art is a subjective matter. Many people would look at a Jackson Pollack "splatter" painting & determine definitively that modern art isn't art, because it "does not look like anything." And if you spend any time in the modern art world, you'll definitely see something at some point along the way taking up space in a perfectly respectable art museum, that to you, can never be considered art.

Is this just a matter of opinion? To some extent, yes. But there's an art world & an industry behind it that depend on there being some standards that art is judged by. One such standard is the intention of the artist. If you make a photo or artwork from a photo that's intended to be seen as art, then the viewer is obliged to try to produce artistic value in it. Whether the viewer sees the merit or not may depend on the viewer's ability, how well you get your artistic message, or many other factors.

But just wanting something to be art does not make it so, does it? I sometimes go by "I don't know what is art but I know what I like" evaluation system of the pieces I see. Art, after all, tends to involve us in another place that's beyond the image - an emotional place, a place for reflection & understanding. For a work to be art, there should be a message, a feeling, a reason the artist made the work because he or she wanted to say something, even if how I interpret the statement is different than what the artist meant.

So that might also be a review of a photo's artistic merit or not. Now the primary objection of is photography art sometimes is that a photograph is often a realistic depiction of a moment was taken with a machine & some would say that "anybody can take a picture." This means that the same mechanical skill it takes to paint a picture or sculpt a statue isn't required for photographic art. So it is worth looking at the question from several different angles before we choose which side to weigh in on.

It is true that the mechanical skills that the photographer at Wal-Mart may have to take baby pics may be the same as a great photographic artist. But the objection doesn't hold up, because the same human language used to create great poetry is also used to scream out obscenities at a sporting game.

Good evidence comes from the credit some great art experts have provided photographic exhibitions in the fine museums in the world. The very fact that photography is considered art by those who know may be proof enough. So the conclusion must be that because the arguments against the artistic value of photographs is weak & people who know consider photography as an art, so we're confident in seeing what we do artistically, too. And that opens the side of your soul to express yourself through the media you love the most - photography.