I was looking through my Twitter feed a few days ago when I came across a tweet by nature and wildlife photographer Richard Bernabe. In his tweet, he posted a quote from the late Ansel Adams in which Ansel said “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” If you Google famous or inspirational photography quotes, this statement will invariably be listed.
But Mr. Bernabe noted that there was more to the quote than is typically reported. Immediately after making the above statement, Ansel went on to say “Unless you have a really long shutter release cable. Then it doesn’t matter where you stand, as long as the camera is in the right place.”
The lesson I found in this complete quote is just how much work and planning is required to create an artistic photograph rather than taking a quick snapshot. To a certain degree, I had a proverbial “a-ha” moment when I realized that I often don’t work hard enough to achieve the vision I have in mind for a particular subject.
But, what really caught my attention was a reply to Mr. Bernabe’s tweet. The responder stated he did not consider photography as art, and he compared a photographer to a DJ who simply plays someone else’s music. His statement seemed to consist of two arguments for why photography is not an art. Argument number one: it takes virtually no skill to take a picture. Argument number two: photography does not actually create anything; rather, photography simply records something that already exists.
After a few choice words ran through my mind, I began to wonder if this person could be right. Before anyone gets too worked up, I have no question in my own mind that photography absolutely is a form of art. But, for the sake of some fun, let’s dissect his arguments.
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, there are several definitions of the word “art,” but they boil down to this: knowledge and skill acquired by experience, study, or observation that is consciously used in combination with creative imagination to produce aesthetic objects.
Wow! That’s a mouthful, so let’s break it down.
With the plethora of camera phones or DSLRs with automatic settings, photography seems so easy. You just point the lens and click the shutter. How much easier could it be?
But, anyone who takes photography seriously quickly realizes there is so much more to it than point and shoot. You not only need to know what shutter speeds, f/stops, and ISOs are, but also how they interact with one other. You need to understand lenses and focal lengths and how they affect perspective and can be used to expand or contract the apparent space between objects in the frame. And, a basic knowledge of composition and the elements of design is necessary.
While much of this knowledge can be gleaned from reading books and watching Youtube videos, it is virtually worthless without the requisite skill needed to put it to use. And, skill is not something that can be learned by reading books and watching videos. Photographic skills, like playing a musical instrument, require practice and experience, and a lot of it. Going out into the field, making mistakes, learning from them, and repeating the process over and over again. That process to acquire the necessary skills takes a lot of time and perseverance. It is not achieved in just a few hours on a weekend.
The final piece of the puzzle is to purposefully combine your knowledge and skill with your creative imagination to create an artistic image. No matter how much photographic knowledge or skill you have, random pictures of stuff will look exactly like random pictures of stuff. But, to create something that has artistic merit, you have to have a mental picture of what you want to create and then use your knowledge and skill to create it.
So, there is no question in my mind that photography meets the definition of being an art. It requires knowledge, skill, and the vision to create those amazing photographs we see everyday. But, what about his second argument that photography is simply a “recording” medium rather than a “creative” medium like painting or sculpting?
The first part of that argument is absolutely correct. Photography is a recording medium. Opening the shutter allows us to record, on either film or memory card, the light being reflected from our subject. That is just the basic physics of photography. But, does that negate the creative aspect of photography and, thus, relegate it to something less than art?
Absolutely not. Frankly, that argument, to me, has no merit whatsoever. It implies that the only way for something to be art is for it to create something from nothing. Therefore, the only true art form in existence is sculpture where a sculptor creates something (the sculpture) from nothing (a block of stone). If that were so, someone standing on a beach and painting the surf with the sun setting in the background would not be engaged in an artistic endeavor. He would not be creating art. He would simply be using his tools (brushes, paint, canvas, easel) to record a scene that already exists. That reasoning seems very short-sighted and one dimensional.
So, is photography a form of art? Absolutely, and there should never be any question about that. Good photography, like any art form, requires a lot of knowledge, years of experience, and an imaginative mind to create a vision to share with the viewer.
But, don’t get me wrong. Not every photograph is a work of art, and I wouldn’t even begin to try to convince you otherwise. I may look at a photograph and think it belongs in a museum while you look at the same image and think it should have been relegated to the recycle bin. That holds true for any piece of art, whether it be a painting, sculpture, or something else.
That’s ok, though. As the saying goes, beauty, or in this case, art is in the eye of the beholder, and we can agree to disagree about artistic merit. But, there should not be any question about whether photography is an art form.
The short answer is yes, it is.