Introduction
In the early days of photography art critics refused to consider it as a medium for the creation of fine art. Back then all photography was considered vernacular photography; it’s only conceivable role in fine art would be to document the classical arts. Today the art world fully acknowledges fine art photography, but is increasingly unable to differentiate it. This issue goes well beyond photography’s perpetual problem of distinguishing fine art from vernacular photography. Added now is the issue of distinguishing fine art photography from other art works that fuse photographic elements with other media. Fine art “photography” apparently no longer need be traditional two-dimensional photographs. Short duration videos, photo-digital art mashups, and photo-based sculpture installations are just as likely as traditional framed prints at shows cast as exhibits of contemporary fine art photography. Seemingly, all things photographic are now in the running for fine art photography status.
Fine art photography is increasingly disconnected from photons; fewer pixels in today’s highly manipulated digital photographs owe their existence to a ray of light. For many, fine art photography no longer even need be artisanal; images captured by drones, satellites, or other robots are the subject of art critique. If there is even a question whether a photograph captured by NASA’s Hubble Telescope can be considered fine art,[1] then no doubt Charles Baudelaire has turned over in his grave. However, if the hand of the artist is not a prerequisite for fine art status, then Baudelaire was not so much wrong about photography, he was just wrong about fine art connoisseurs.[2] In our post-postmodern art world, when fine art photography never has had a higher standing, it never has it been so unclear what fine art photography is. The distinction between fine art photography and other types of photography and other art media has been lost in plain sight.
This paper argues for a return to a more traditional definition of photography, and—utilizing this definition—proposes a criterion to distinguish fine art photography from all other modes and uses of photography. To better understand the motivation for these proposals, it is useful to know how fine art photography arrived at its current state. A brief review of the history of fine art photography is instructive.
A short history of fine art photography
In its infancy, photography struggled to get its due as a medium of art. Baudelaire and other art critics of the time, concerned that patrons would be lured away from the traditional arts, argued with some passion that photographs are created ‘mechanically’, and thus should not be considered art. Photography’s status in the art world would not appreciably change for over a century. When change came, starting several decades into the 20th century during the peak of the High Modernist era in art, photography’s status would evolve rapidly. Initially only the works of a relatively few, widely-recognized, high-craft photographers were accorded the status of art.[3] Soon, however, any photograph—whether created with artistic intent or for vernacular purpose, whether photographed by artist, commercial professional, or by amateur snap shooter, whether captured with high craft or by good luck—could be declared art so long as it conformed to the Modernist aesthetic standards of he who sat upon photography’s judgement seat, the Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.[4]
Yet Modernist photography had no sooner arrived at the ball when insurgents stormed the palace. Soon labelled postmodernists, the insurgents were armed with pitchforks whose tines were semiotics and psychoanalysis. They carried ism-fueled torches, notably Marxism, post-structuralism, and feminism. The postmodernists laid waste to modernist theory and standards for art, replacing them with their often competing theories and philosophies. Many of the new, angry voices even wished to throw the baby out with the bath water, questioning the specialness and originality traditionally ascribed to the artist and art. For the most part, however, the prevailing attitude of postmodernists was that art was only meaningful if exposed some hidden fault line in western society. For fine art photography, arguably the quintessentially visual of the visual arts, the dethroning of modernism meant that formal beauty and aesthetics lost their dominance as fundamental components of critique.[5]
The postmodernist era, however, was short lived. In the end, the postmodernists, evidently with little self-awareness of the irony, opted for the comfortable life within the palace. The art world’s own deep state (the major critics, curators, gallerists, and collectors) had cleverly ensnared postmodernist artists with aura—the addictive sense of specialness that comes with gallery space, media attention, and the king’s ransom that collectors were paying for their art—that they ostensibly abhorred, but ultimately could not resist.[6] Postmodernism was not replaced by a new movement; it just lost its grip and became yet another stratum in art history’s irregularly layered cake of eras, isms, manifestos, and movements. With no dominant movement, all art, and photographic art in particular, has since mostly echoed past isms, or mashed them up. Then, in the first few years of the new millennium, the digital tsunami washed over photography, and within a decade the number of digital photographs taken yearly exceeded one trillion.[7] Residual postmodernist thinking, coupled with the explosive growth of digital photography, however, continues to have significant consequences for contemporary fine art photography.
Contemporary fine art photography
The ascendancy of digital photography, especially smartphone photography, makes almost everyone a ‘photographer’, capable of taking reasonably well exposed, well focused photographs. Thanks to the ever increasing processing muscle of smartphones, powerful but easy-to-use editing apps enable the kind of sophisticated manipulation of digital images that was once the redoubt of dedicated artists. World-wide, the uncountable numbers of smart-phone photographers have added to the growing millions of serious self-educated commercial and amateur photographers as well as the legions of art photographers minted each year at art schools. The upshot is a staggering production of digital imagery that has mined-out the veins of freshness in the traditional photographic genres.[8] Motivated to distinguish themselves from the masses, and restore a bit of aura and a sense of the artisanal to the medium, some fine art photographers have returned to analog photography. Others have moved sideways into other art mediums, merging their photography with digital art, video, and even sculpture, resulting in a blurring of lines between these mediums.[9] Consequently, even the definition of photography (never tightly focused anyway) has become a greater circle of confusion.[10]
The inundation of cliché, “I’ve seen this before” digital imagery also has caused many contemporary art critics and curators to seemingly respond to photographic art from a perspective of sensory overload and visual numbness. Only novelty in concept, image scale, or processing technique is likely to elicit a positive reaction.[11] Since many of today’s art literati began earning their art chops during the postmodernist era, they are already predisposed to find the concept motivating (or attributed to) the photograph far more interesting and important—more worthy of critique—than the actual image and its aesthetics.[12] I say ‘attributed to’ because art historians, critics, and curators have never been shy about ascribing their own views of the concept motivating a work.[13]
The cumulative effects of these developments have led to diminished aura and role for the fine art photographer. Not surprisingly then, some critics even wonder if the photographs taken by NASA’s robots in space should be called art on the basis of their striking beauty and the novelty of their surreal imagery. But if an artist’s hand and an artist’s intent are no longer prerequisites for distinguishing fine art, the distinction between fine art photography and commercial, documentary, scientific, vernacular, robotic, or any other category of photography effectively disappears. If it is not clear what fine art photography is, then it cannot be clear who is a fine art photographer. This is the problem facing fine art photography and fine art photographers today.
The case for distinguishing fine art photography
Ever since prehistoric man mixed ashes, pigments, and animal fat to paint on cave walls it has been axiomatic that any medium that can be used for artful expression will be. Of course not all uses of paint, stone, or any medium are for the creation of art. So it is with photography. Clearly there are some who use photography for making art, but just as clearly—given its many practical uses— photography is used for many other purposes. It would seem that failing to distinguish a fine art photographer from a vernacular photographer, or a fine art photograph from a vernacular photograph, would make no more sense than failing to distinguish a house painter from Mark Rothko, or a concrete security barrier from one of Benoist Van Borren’s monolithic sculptures. The distinction between vernacular and fine art photography must be clarified. As previously noted however, in today’s art world, ‘photography’ is now so loosely defined that it confusingly overlaps with other media, in particular with digital art, video, and sculpture. There must be some boundary, however elastic, because if photography can’t be clearly defined, then there is no point in trying to distinguish fine art photography.
Proposed definition of photography
Photography is an artificial process to capture a still, two-dimensional image initially formed by light or other radiant energy.
This definition confines photography within a flexible, but not limitlessly so, boundary. The artificial qualifier is used in its general meaning of humanly contrived, and thus excludes images that, without human involvement, might be formed by light (such as a shadow) from being considered photographs. Moving images are precluded (even animated GIFs), as the freezing of a portion of time is affirmed as a fundamental characteristic of the medium. Also precluded are three dimensional objects. A 3D art object that employs photographs is not a photograph; it is a sculpture variant. While a photographic print is technically a 3D object (print paper, like everything in the real world, has thickness after all), practically speaking it is a 2D object. Or, if preferred, a photographic print can be considered as a 2D photograph imbedded chemically in or embossed mechanically onto print paper. The same arguments can be made for a digital photograph that is projected onto a surface.
The role of light also is affirmed as fundamental to a medium named after light’s power to draw. However, there is no requirement that a camera or lenses be involved in the creation of a photograph. Even though computer software is required to fully realize the pixels (hereafter referred to as photonic pixels) recorded by a digital camera after its sensor has been exposed to light, the resulting two-dimensional matrix of pixels is a photograph. It is light after all that is the basis of such pixels. On the other hand, a digital image that consists exclusively of pixels (hereafter referred to as software pixels) created by a computer responding to an artist’s imagination is clearly not a photograph. Such an image is digital art, no matter how visually indistinguishable from a photograph it may be. However, the definition does not preclude an image that is a mix of photonic and software pixels from being considered a photograph. What degree of computer manipulation essentially mutates a photonic pixel into a software pixel? What ratio of photonic to software pixels distinguishes a photograph from digital art? These are “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” questions. There is no point going there. The definition establishes no rules in that matter. It lets viewers, critics and curators make the call as they see it.
With photography thus delimited, a criterion can be established to distinguish fine art photography from all other categories of photography.
Proposed criterion for fine art photography
Photography is fine art photography if, and only if, it is accomplished by an artist with demonstrative intention to create art
In the classic photographic art process, the demonstration of artistic intent begins before the shutter closes, with the artist selecting or arranging the scene, and selecting and setting up appropriate equipment to capture an image on the basis of a pre-conceived concept for the final art piece. Does then the criterion reject as fine art a casual photograph (the ‘lucky’ snapshot) later offered as art? Not necessarily. An art process that begins after the image is captured is as legitimate as one that begins before image capture. In either case, the final photographic art piece generally is not produced at the moment of image capture anyway. The captured image is generally groomed into an art piece through a process that involves curation, artisanal development (or digital post-processing), and exhibition quality printing or other forms of formal presentation. High-craft post-capture grooming and presentation processes demonstrate artistic intent and action as surely as do pre-capture intent and action. If an amateur or vernacular photographer demonstrates such post-capture artistic intent and action, even for just one photograph, the photographer is, at least in that instance, an artist. On the other hand, printing a casual snapshot at the local pharmacy, placing it in a frame purchased at a thrift store, and plopping the frame atop a dresser alongside other family snaps arguably does not demonstrate artistic intent, the aesthetics of the snapshot notwithstanding.
One way or the other the criterion does demand, first and foremost, the involvement and the intention of an artist in the creation of photographic art. By this criterion, Hubble telescope photographs cannot be considered fine art, stunning as the imagery may be. What of the creation of an artist who, with obvious artistic intention, creates an object that is some amalgam of photography and video or sculpture? Such a creation is undoubtedly fine art; it is just not, by the definition and criterion proposed here, fine art photography.
When all is said and done, however, the criterion provides no rules for determining who is an artist, or for establishing intent. As has always been the case, judgement by knowledgeable individuals still would be required to make the call. Aspects, like the photographer’s reputation and history of claims to artistry, the existence of an artist’s statement, art title, and the aforementioned art preparation and presentation, will of course come into play these determinations. Such determinations can neither be infallible nor likely unanimously agreed upon. Consider the consensus in today’s art world that Eugène Atget was an artist, and that his photographs of a fading Paris era are rightfully considered art. There are critics, however, who argue that Atget never considered himself an artist or his work art, and therefore they believe his photographs documentary rather than fine art. That’s OK; Consensus by an art community is sufficient, and consensus does not require unanimity on position, just an agreement to move on. That’s the way it has always been.
Finally, the proposed criterion does not align fine art photography with any particular art movement or ‘ism’. Nor does it equate a fine art photograph with good art. As with any art form, just because an art piece is created by artist with artistic intent, it doesn’t mean that the art is necessarily good or interesting art. But even inferior art is still art.
Conclusion
By returning to first principles, a differentiating, yet sufficiently flexible definition of photography is proposed. The definition does not completely eliminate the need for a judgement call as to how to categorize 2D imagery that combines photography with software pixels or other 2D media. To define photography in a manner that would eliminate any need for judgement in this regard is probably not possible, but in any case, would not be practical. Even the strongest proponents of ‘straight’ art photography feel the need to modify their original photon-based images to some degree to achieve their final artworks. Some wiggle room is a practical requirement of photography’s definition if it is to be a medium of art. This wiggle room does not mean that the proposed definition is inappropriate for scientific or documentary photography purposes. What it does mean is that the scientific and documentary communities will likely be very much more restrictive in their judgement about how much a photograph may be altered and still be called a scientific or documentary photograph. Even in these communities, however, a restriction against any modification is not practical. As in the art world, it would be impossible to delineate the degree of allowable modifications that would work in all cases.
Though fine art photography is highly regarded in today’s art world, its essence has been lost due to muddling of the medium’s definition and diminishment of the artist’s role. The classical visual arts of the pre-photography era have not been similarly affected because the definitions of their respective mediums have evolved little over the years, and because the tautological relationship between art and artists in those mediums has been little challenged. Consequently, the proposed criterion for distinguishing fine art photography is based on a more clearly defined medium, and pivots on the art/artists relationship. In this regard, the proposed criterion puts fine art photography on an equal footing with the classic visual arts. Distinguishing fine art photography in this manner in no way is meant to discourage the appreciation (or the exhibiting) of other types of photography. Regardless of how or why it was captured, any photograph rightly may be appreciated if it is beautiful or interesting or impactful. Still, until the art world overcomes the tendency to label a photograph ‘art’ just because it is in some way remarkable, what truly distinguishes fine art photography—the fine art photographer—will remain lost in plain sight.
[1] Nora Landesjan, “Are These NASA Images Art or Science?,” Artsy.net, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-are-these-nasa-images-art-science (accessed Dec. 10, 2017)
[2] French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), dismissing photography as an industrial tool, famously asked “What man worthy of the name of artist, and what true connoisseur, has ever confused art with industry?”
[3] Early in the 20th century champions of art photography struggled mightily to get photographs into museums and galleries. Few museums had a photography department, and few collectors were interested in photographs, artful or not. But the champions of photography-as-art, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, among others, battled on for half a century. Recognition came slowly and unevenly, but by the sixth decade of the twentieth century, the battle was (more or less) won. The art world, bending to the will of Modernists, would grant the status of fine art to photographs that manifested Modernists aesthetics. Initially that grant extended only to works of the few, widely acclaimed, master artisans.
[4] Critic Christopher Phillips called the Museum of Modern Art’s Director of Photography the photography world’s judgment seat. In her book Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography, Janet Malcolm claims that ever since former MoMA Photography Director John Szarkowski’s seminal anthology The Photographer’s Eye proved (whether it was his intent to do so or not) that vernacular photography could be just as artful (or not artful) as fine art photography, the old order has crumbled.
[5] This trend is mostly confined to the rarified world of the art literati and academia. See “A Disturbing Trend in Photography,” Opinion, https://petapixel.com/2016/05/31/opinion-disturbing-trend-photography (accessed Apr. 23, 2018). Modernist-like views of art still holds sway at the lower echelons of the art world.
[6] Stephen Bull, “Postmodernism: The Artist as Photographer and ‘The Death of the Author’,” in Photography (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2010), 137.
[7] Stephen Heyman, “Photos, Photos Everywhere,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/arts/international/photos-photos-everywhere.html (accessed Jan. 2, 2018)
[8] Tom Rankin, Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University, asks in a recent essay “With everything being photographed and tagged, and posted, what should a serious student photograph? Is there anything that hasn’t already been photographed?”
[9] For example see: “This is how I turned photos into better experiences – Research, design and development of a new digital format.,” UX Collective, https://uxdesign.cc/this-is-how-i-turned-photos-into-better-experiences-944c1ada9c5b (accessed May 3, 2018).
[10] Andreas Gursky, whose Rhein II is the most expensive photograph ever sold at public auction (for a reported $4.3M in 2011 at Christie’s), said “Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.” AZQuotes.com, Wind and Fly LTD, 2018. http://www.azquotes.com/author/50122-Andreas_Gursky, accessed April 24, 2018.
[11] For example see: Leah Ollman, “Rematerializing Photography,” Art in America, June/July 2017, 102
[12] One art critic, in his review of a photography exhibit, wrote: “[the] photos are undoubtedly beautiful, but beauty in itself isn’t all that unique or important or even desirable in contemporary art. It is easy to replicate and more often a distraction from ideas. So much art is so ugly, and that’s a good thing.” See: Ray Mark Rinaldi, “Did Arne Svenson go too far? MCA Denver show explores his photos.” The Denver Post (Denver, CO), March 6, 2016, p. E1
[13] For example, the Untitled Film Stills series of acclaimed photographer Cindy Sherman famously has been interpreted by critics as a feminist’s critique on how popular media (especially film and television) stereotypically portrays the female. Yet Sherman said that the series had as much to do with a chance to play dress up as anything else. For more, see: “A Brief History of Cindy Sherman and Feminism,” Art, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-is-cindy-sherman-a-feminist (accessed Apr. 23, 2018). For an example of particularly egregious arrogation of an artist’s intention, read Sally Mann’s recounting of the reaction to her famous and unforgettable photobook Immediate Family, Sally Mann, “Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus Est,” in Holding Still. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 131.