Is photography art

There is a question being asked by many in the creative community, is photography art?

We’ve all seen the family photos of the cat and the kids and that trip to Yosemite and that isn’t art. Oh it’s important stuff to the folks who took it, but for the rest of us it’s just a bit better than a root canal.

Truth be told, I’m old enough to remember the family slide show and that’s nothing you want women and small children to know about. No, not all photography is art.

But is any of it really art and if so what part and how can you tell?

We’ve all seen the breath-taking landscapes of Ansel Adams or the intimate street scenes of Henri Cartier Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White’s portrait of Gandhi at his spinning wheel and there is no doubt that these are beautiful, amazing photographs, but are they art? And even if they are are the photos of lesser cameramen worth consideration?

What of Gordon Parks or Irving Penn or Annie Leibovitz? Can a photograph made for purely commercial reason become art? What about fashion photography? Is that art? Francesco Scavullo creates those riveting covers for Cosmopolitan, Peter Gowland’s artful pinups or Bunny Yeager’s half-step from smut pin-ups, are any of these art?

We can all agree that the stormy portrait of Winston Churchill taken by Joseph Karsh is one of the most well known and memorable photographs ever taken, but once again we have to ask is it art?

If all a photograph is is a moment of frozen time, those endless snapshots we all have crates of, then no it isn’t art. But when the image is so potent, so arresting, so memorable it becomes the iconic collective memory then surely that is art.

But there is more to making art with a camera than finding the iconic image. It is seeing a daisy growing in the cracks of a bit of broken pavement or the eagle building its nest in the rotted out housing of an air conditioning unit on an abandoned building in some inner city slum. It is Brandi Chastain ripping off her jersey after “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in the 1999 World Cup. It is knowing when to shoot and what to shoot.

Other artistic disciplines are so lucky, they can change the light or the weather, move a building from one state to another, plant a tree where was none and watch it grow into a giant of the forest and they can do it every time they work. Photographers are limited by the things they see and the tools they use. Composition is done in the viewfinder, standing hip deep in swampy water in a thirty mile an hour wind, while waiting for that pelican, puffin, sandpiper to do the perfect thing. Then and only then can they make their image and if it works, they have art.

Respect is the glue which binds the creative community together. If we do not respect each other’s art and offer the support to all forms of expression, are we any different than the empty suits who complain about obscene art getting all of the federal funding and student’s time being wasted learning to scribble when there’s no way they can ever make a living?

Art is a visible thing. The human animal reacts when it sees art and has since the first man crawled into a dark and frightening cave to paint on the walls. Why did he hide his art in the dark? Because art was so magical it had to be only for those who were brave enough to see.