The Old Question, Revisited

Introduction: Recently I mentioned, a couple of times, the formulation "successful art convinces" or words to that effect. I was sure I'd written about the idea before, but I couldn't say where or when. So I've been doing a little digging through the archives. I couldn't find anything on the new TOP or the old TOP, or in the old Sunday Morning Photographer, or anywhere else online, and it wasn't easy coming up with anything from my magazine days either.

I did find this. It was published in Camera & Darkroom magazine in 1993. At the time I had recently met John Szarkowski; I believe the eminent critic A.D. Coleman had recently joined the contributing staff of the magazine; and I was up for the reviewer's position at The Washington Post (didn't get it, but it didn't matter because it paid so poorly and I actually needed money). So you might notice the tone is a bit more serious than my writing here on TOP. However, it's good for perspective to keep in mind that as a critic, I was very far on the loose, casual, and colloquial side of the spectrum, which caused (and still does cause) some initiates to despise me. I did have ambitions to be a critic at one time, but I wanted to write for "real people" and not just the closed circle of sophisticates and habitués. I may be an outsider among photo enthusiast writers because I'm a bit too art-historical, academic, and concerned with aesthetics, but I'm an outsider from the other side as well, because I'm too populist and too willing to engage with the verboten dirty bits like gear and technique. The way I used to describe it is that Benihana, the Japanese steakhouse, is called "Benihana of Tokyo" in New York and "Benihana of New York" in Tokyo*. It's Japanese-American food, and which one it seems more like to you will depend on where you are and which direction you're looking.

So here's that ancient essay, which touches on that idea we were talking about, for those few who might be interested. I've made a few minor edits.

*If that's not true, don't tell me, I don't want to know.

The question "Is photography art?" was an important one in the history of the medium from about 1880 to about 1920. Most discussions of the subject later than that were defused by the fact that many of the pictures originally put forward to support photo- graphy's claims to being high art—a style known as pictorialism—were derivative and imitative, and proved to be an evolutionary dead end. The intellectual arguments of the partisans might seem dated to us now, but the principal problem was that the pictures themselves simply didn't hold up their end of the bargain. The eventual conversion to modernism of the art side's most eloquent and impassioned advocate, Alfred Stieglitz, effectively ended the discussion. From an art historical perspective, Emerson can be said to have established the centrality of the argument, and Stieglitz's publication of Paul Strand's "Blind Woman" in Camera Work in 1919 is a convenient enough signpost signaling that the argument had become obsolete.

Most contemporary commentators are content to dismiss the issue either by questioning its relevance or by concluding that it can't be resolved. Yeah, photography sort of is art, they seem to be saying, but it sort of isn't, and besides it really doesn't matter.

Such prevaricating aside, I'd like to propose and try to defend what may be a novel assertion about the matter, because it happens to be what I believe: that photography is not an art, but that some photographers are nevertheless artists.

To understand what I'm saying, you first have to make the crucial distinction between photographs and photographers. Empirically, it is obvious that photographs are made by all sorts of people (sometimes even by machines) for every conceivable sort of purpose. Billions and billions of pictures have been made. Let's call this the "corpus of all known photographs." Looking over representative samples of such pictures,** it is manifestly possible to discriminate among them: that is, to distill a few good ones from all the bad ones. As is the case with a single photographer looking over a pile of contact sheets, any such "editor" will occasionally come across a particularly fortuitous felicity, which might be called—to borrow a term from pop music—a "hit."  One person's hits may not be the same ones another person would identify as such, but, just as in music, some rough sort of concensus is implied. Furthermore, it is possible to sample deeply and widely across the corpus of all known photographs and use the fruits of one's investigation to come up with good ideas and supportable theories about the nature of the medium. It is even possible to sort out pictures which resemble very closely, in every respect, pictures made as conscious art by conscious artists.***

I have in my own collection a number of examples: a photograph made of a shy child by a policeman who was giving a lecture on safety at a grade school; an ID shot which was discarded because the subject's eyes were closed; family snapshots, of course; a publicity picture made for a newspaper advertisement in 1928; pictures made by my former high school photography students, years ago, some of which I selected from their contacts myself; colored postcards; an Air Force propaganda photograph from WWII; and an old Polaroid which has become partially metalized and has partially faded because it wasn't coated adequately when it was made. Although not directed by any single sensibility—in some cases not by any sensibility at all—all of these photographs are "hits," you might say. That is, they all work as pictures.

In order to make that claim for such pictures, however, you have to be willing to re-interpret them, at least partly. You have to assume that the photographer didn't really know the whole story about what he or she was doing, or about what the camera did, and that the pictures have a meaning or an aura that exists separately from what the photographer intended. A 1930s stage manager who used a press camera to make a record of how a set was constructed may inadvertently have made a very fine picture, but it is not a requirement that he have known, either before or after the attempt, that a fine picture would be, or was, the result. It is not even a requirement that he care whether his picture was a good one or not. We might assume that he found the picture satisfactory only insofar as he could use it to help him remember and re-create a certain set later on—a use of the photograph which is utterly irrelevant to most later viewers. (Except maybe modern stage managers.)

Photographs seem intrinsically susceptible to this sort of relativism. Give me a stack of any sort of random pictures—insurance records, old snapshots, school portraits, whatever—and, assuming I have enough of them, I'll find you an exceptionally good photograph or two. Curators and commentators love to do this even to the work of conscious artists who meant to author their work, finding in the work something they suppose the photographer didn't exactly mean, but which is there anyway. In this subtle way, the "history" of photography is continually and subtly re-cast. Modernism finding its antecedent in Atget (an out-of-work actor photographing scenes to sell as artists' references) is a perfect example.

The flip side of this relativism is that work which has been shaped with firm control to conform to the photographer's ideas about art sometimes has to be dismissed in retrospect because those ideas were so wrong. (Or maybe just because they were just so lame, as is the case with the later pictorialists, or with most advertising photographs.)

I have a distant ancestral relative, for example, who was a photographer, and a box full of his old glass plate negatives have come down to me. For a while after I got them I returned to the work repeatedly, trying to unearth a treasure. But what ultimately struck me about the work is how relentlessly uninteresting it is—there is plate after plate of nothing but picturesque foliage, marginally enlivened by the occasional river or footpath. I almost feel that anything would have been better, including if he had just played the photographic equivalent of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and turned his camera randomly on whatever happened to be around him with his eyes tight shut, and photographed what it happened to come to rest upon. It's unfortunate, but no amount of sympathy or credit will rescue his work from dullness. The one good picture is a record shot of his darkroom workbench, a picture which is completely uncharacteristic of all the rest.

It seems clear to me that if you do take the corpus of all known photographs as your guide, and attempt to discover the nature of the medium from whatever subset of those photographs that you can get your hands on (I mean all those that you can get to see), then what you are likely to conclude is that photography doesn't want to be art. It's too unruly, for one thing. It wants to be plastic, provisional, approximate, inscrutable, susceptible to a range of differing and sometimes conflicting interpretation. In fact, it resists being art—it just wants to be. And sometimes when you force it into being art, as was the case with my relative, it will defeat you. Whole bodies of work by erstwhile artisans look meaningless and empty in retrospect, a silent mockery of their sundry heartfelt apologias and earnest intentions, because they somehow weren't been able to locate ideas which were amenable both to themselves and to their alleged medium at the same time. Empirically, the fact that photography sometimes works in ways similar to the ways art works seems incidental, even accidental, and largely irrelevant.

The idea of expression
This would seem to bode ill for individuals who for some reason became enamored of the idea that the medium can be used for expressive purposes.

If photography is a craft, like ceramics, and if it is used for all manner of mundane purposes (like ceramics is used for plates, planters, toilet bowls, and power line insulators), and all the uses it's applied to don't seem, in total, to amount to a sufficient argument that most photographs are equivalent to conscious art, then what have you got?

But hold on a minute. One test for art—what you would call a diagnostic criterion, if you were defining an illness—is that it convinces you. You can tell from looking at it that it amounts to something more than a mere record, that it has expressive content, that it possesses the aura of an object. (Walker Evans called it "quality.") And, sure enough, in the history of photography, there are not one, not ten, but many, many individuals whose work has that crucial quality: it convinces us. It seems different and apart, eloquent, complete. You would never mistake a Bill Brandt for an Edward Weston or a Diane Arbus for a Dorothea Lange. So it would seem that photography is not just a craft after all, not just a technique of image manufacture, but something more. What's important here is this fact, that some people have in fact used the medium of photography for artistic expression and been very successful at it. I'll leave you to select your own examples, so that we don't get embroiled in defining that word "successful."  (If you choose Daido Moriyama, you might disagree if I used Carleton Watkins as an example, and if you choose Watkins, you might disagree if I said Moriyama. But even if we can't agree on which artists were successful, at least we can agree that artistic success is possible.)

So this is the other way of looking at photography in an empirical fashion, to try to discover what it's all about: by first determining which artists have used the medium to best effect, and then studying them and generalizing from their work. This approach seems natural, too, because it's more similar to the ways in which historians and scholars of the traditional media have gone about their work.

Integrity
I like photographs. I mentioned earlier some examples of some of the "found" pictures I value. But I tend to like photographers more: not only because I am sympathetic to their struggle, and sensitive to their problems, but—and this is crucial—because I am convinced by their work when they succeed. So, as a viewer, I am willing to spend time and care and effort to try to unlock the secret of what's inside them, the mystery of what they're struggling to "put into" their pictures. What interests me is not so much the fact that some small subset of all random photographs happen, by chance, to be good ones; I am more interested in what all of one person's photographs can tell me about that person's thoughts and ideas and feelings and values, and how completely that can be communicated in pictures.

One thing this interest requires and assumes, though, is integrity on the part of the photographer. If the photographer won't be honest, or if he or she imitates a generic style, or allows other people to tell him or her what to photograph, or merely pursues superficial technical effects, then it gets harder to tell what they're really all about. These days, the biggest impediment to integrity in photography is the divergence between what individuals would do if left to their own devices, and what they often must do with their photography in order to earn a living****. I think this accounts for my general dislike of professional photography, and of generic photography, and explains my constant stumping in favor of what I call "authentic" photography: I always want to see the artist behind the art, and, moreover, I want the art to have a chance: a chance to succeed, to communicate, to convince.

I'm not trying to be elitist about this. I'm merely expressing the faith that, even if photography is not automatically an art, then at least some photographers can be artists, assuming they're both talented (or smart) and honest with themselves. In general, one must admit, most photographers fail at being artists. This is true even when they're trained and such and when that's specifically what they're trying to be. The ones who succeed the best, I think, are the ones who don't try to rig the game, who do their own thing, who don't try to second-guess the arbiters of style and taste, who don't judge themselves only by the acceptance of others, who are willing to experiment, to loosen up, to stay honest with themselves, and, above all, to listen and respond to what their gut tells them about their work.

The people I'm describing are, as far as I'm concerned, the only real photographers. Not the ones Dorothea Lange called the "the Success Boys," who make photography pay, but, rather, those who somehow manage shove the craft of photography kicking and screaming into the realm of consistent personal expression. They're the ones who really make this medium vital for the rest of us, and it's those people whose work we try to bring you in the pages of Camera & Darkroom. They're the ones who make photography worthwhile. Here's to 'em!

And if that's what you're trying to be, why, then, here's to you, too. Good luck, and don't ever quit.

Mike
©1993, 2015 Michael C. Johnston

**As Roland Barthes pointed out in Camera Lucida, no one has ever seen even a very substantial fraction of all the photographs that exist; Niepce may have been the first and last person who ever saw "all photographs," although in his case it wasn't saying much. What this means is that everyone always has some different subset of all photographs in mind whenever he or she says "all photographs."

***Numerous books have been built on this principle of "found photography," including this Fraenkel Gallery title we were discussing recently.

****I would probably have to amend that now, since there are now far more photographers and far fewer of them try to do it for a living. If you caught a whiff of antipathy here, I also think that when I wrote this I was not too far from a difficult six-month stint as a 60-hour-a-week assistant to a studio pro who was a bit of a psycho toward me, and I still resented the experience.

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Brad B: "I bought a book for a photography class I took in school. I think the book was called Criticizing Photographs [by Terry Barrett of Ohio State University, Fifth Edition 2011 —Ed.] One idea from the book stood out to me back then and it came to mind while reading this. For a long time the question was, is photography art? Photography has changed so much since that question was first asked. Perhaps the better question now is: Yes, it's art, but is it a photograph?"

Rip Smith: "I think this article is as relevant today as it was 1n 1993. With the explosion of digital images from smart phones and other digital cameras, the corpus of all known photographs" today is truly ovewhelming. Yet separating out images that could qualify as art may not be as difficult as it might seem because the best images stand apart from relative sameness of so many of the images. 'You would never mistake a Bill Brandt for an Edward Weston or a Diane Arbus for a Dorothea Lange' is a strong point. That work that has the 'quality' stands out not only from the crowd but stands separate from others with that quality.

"I've said that whether a photograph is art depends on the intent of the photographer. That's not to say it is 'good' art, but art nonetheless. Yet it strikes me that in some cases, the quality of the photograph transcends this definition. Images by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, for example, mostly intended to document, stand out to me as art.

"As it is sometimes quipped, if you ask 10 photographers 'is photography art?' you'll get 11 opinions. Perhaps the benefit of the discussion is that it makes us think."

Steve Jacob: "For hundreds of years, painting/drawing had mainly practical uses. It was the preserve of artisans who worked primarily for the church, the nobility or the state for the purposes of flattery, propaganda and decoration. It was only the extreme skill of some, or the historical significance of their work, that elevated them above the mundane.

"Thankfully, most of these practical uses were usurped by photography. I would argue that the reason is not because it was easier, but because it was infinitely more successful, adaptable and accessible.

"It's probably for this reason that I much prefer painting that is impressionistic or abstract. It does something that photography cannot do. It provides a unique form of self-expression that is as personal as a poem. It influences opinions and aesthetics, but it is a personal interpretation of reality. Intent is implicit in its meaning.

"Photography can play a uniquely complimentary role to interpretive art by being entirely objective. It can rely exclusively on 'found objects' as the source of its material. It can present a cameo of reality, a small jigsaw piece for us to fit into our own puzzle.

"If painting and poetry are about inspiration and ideas, photography is about discoveries and facts. A very Dusseldorfian view is that a photographer's role is to discover and present, not to idealise and interpret. Painters and poets can always do that far more convincingly.

"In the science world, we call this experimental and theoretical. One discovers and measures with painstaking objectivity, the other interprets, formulates and asks new questions, but one cannot exist or progress without the other. Progress relies on inspiration, but evidence is the foundation on which it is built.

"Facts have as much likelihood of being useless and mundane as ideas. To be 'successful' they also have to surprise, inform and even challenge us. We are all at a different stage of completing our world puzzle, and we all have a different desire as to how that puzzle should turn out.

"This explains our wildly varied reactions to different images and our hot tempered preferences. Either we struggle to fit the piece or know where to put it, or we don't like what it is doing to the overall picture.

"Whether objective representation succeeds as art as opposed to documentary reportage largely depends on whether it exists outside a socio-political agenda, or manages to entirely transcend it. Vermeer transcended mere representation in portraiture and Capa transcended mere photojournalism. The vast majority did not/do not.

"However, to claim that photography cannot be art is to claim that art is all about opinions and not about discovery. This is about as stupid as claiming that science is only about theory and not about evidence. Inspiration and discovery are the Yin and Yang of human progress. One is empty and pointless without the other."

Comments

[Herman Krieger]

According to Tolstoy there is a religious element to art. Thus my photo series, "Churches ad hoc" could be thought of as art.

[michael matlach]

A good read! So many really good images being made today but the issue for me is who is the rightful owner of the image. By that I mean is the vision or idea that of the photographer or just the trending style. Being original is hard but ultimately the only way to be true to one's self.

[Dave Jenkins]

I remember that article very well, and, in fact, am reasonably certain I still have it. It has ever since been a key to my understanding of art and photography. Your statement (paraphrasing) that photography is not necessarily art, but that some photographers are artists has stayed with me through the years. I never worry about whether I'm an artist (and I would think it presumptuous to call myself one), but I seek to work seriously, in an artistic manner and with artistic intent. Some people will think my photographs are art (some of them, anyway), and others won't. I'm cool with that.

Part of the problem in understanding photography and its relationship to art is confusion of terminology; using the words medium and art as though they were interchangeable, when in fact they are not. Painting is a medium, as are sculpture, engraving, photography, and pottery. When practiced at a high level of competence within the context of its own inherent qualities, each medium is a craft, which may become art when imbued with an indefinable presence imparted by the being of the artist himself.

[Andrew Molitor]

This is truly a wonderful bit of writing. The overall thrust really clarifies a bunch of things that I have been wrestling with for - literally - years. Thank you so much!

One side remark. Pictorialism as "thing" is, as nearly as I can tell, an artifact of Beaumont Newhall's desire to place things in neat boxes, these boxes then placed in opposition to one another.

There was, there's no denying it, an era of smudgy gum bichromate prints and the like, the hand-worked era chronicled in "Camera Work". This is what is usually meant when people say "pictorialism" and as such that would be a fine and useful definition. Historians, following Newhall, though, seem unwilling to stick to that. They want to chuck in Emerson, for instance, whose work was diametrically opposed to the hand-work (Emerson was rabidly opposed to hand work!).

If pictorialism is to be larger than simply the hand-worked stuff, and it more or less has to be if you're going to set it up as the major movement that predates modernism, then the only definition that seems to make much sense it "photographs that look like paintings" in which case - radical notion - Adams lived and died a pictorialist.

There is certainly a case to be made for: photographs mainly looked like paintings ("pictorialism") until they didn't ("modernism") but then you get in to trouble with Adams, at least.

Be that as it may, the boxes history assigns to movements and so forth are always problematic. I just find them particularly so in photography, where the cross-fertilization has always moved at such a furious pace as to render categories for photographs and photographers to be nearly meaningless.

[Trecento]

Mike,
I really enjoyed this. Very much. It feels true to me.

When I reach a stopping point, I'd like to send you a set of my photographs, and see what you can read in them.

[John Dykstra]

At the same time, you could argue that painting is not automatically art either. Not all painting is art painting; there are painters who paint signs and other illustrations, and there are painters who merely paint walls and other objects.

Nearly everyone has painted, even if it is simply finger painting as a child or painting your basement a new color. One might not have ever painted a fine artwork, but they have still painted nonetheless. And what do we call the man whose business it is to paint walls and buildings? A painter.

So while you insist that photography is not art, I agree with you, but I would propose that painting is not art either. I believe that photography, like painting, has many applications, one of which is for the purpose of acting as fine art.

[Dean Johnston]

Hiya!

> If that's not true, don't tell me, I don't want to know.

Okay, I won't. Either way.

Dean
(Writing from New Zealand, but who lives 27 minutes north of Tokyo)

[Mahn England]

Architecture is regarded as an art and yet not all work produced by architects is, nor is it expected to be: thusly photography.

[Chuck Albertson]

Wait a minute! Nothing about that picture of the woodpecker with a baby weasel on its back?

[tex andrews]

There's something peculiar about photography: Its self-imposed apartheid. It was not always self imposed---it was imposed from without. But now this otherness is alternately enforced by its practitioners and rebelled against, and often by those very same practitioners as the mood strikes them.

Looking at this from outside the medium, as a trained painter/draftsman/printmaker/sculptor/installation-artist, it's just another medium to me. But for "Photographers" (and I am not one of you), the medium seems to just have to be so damn precious. This is both grating and intriguing. The insistence on(and alternately the rebellion against) its difference keeps the spotlight on whatever differences from other image-making media there are supposed to be, which would wind up being pretty trivial if not for all the attention paid to them.

Again, to me, and after everything the visual arts have gone through since the middle of the 19th century, it seems like a lot of baggage Photography (capital P) drags along behind itself, like it had a way worse childhood than it actually did. This thus makes it the most neurotic medium. See a shrink already, and get over yourself!

[Richard Newman]

OK Mike, you had to open this freight car full of worms, so here goes:
- Art exists as an art object. Art is the product of someone exercising a craft, and producing the object. That means that the object is the art, not the process of production. Etching, sculpture, painting, ceramics, photography, holography, etc. are crafts. Crafts are a set of skills and techniques which can be used to create an object (print, sculpture, painting, etching, screen projection, hologram, or…). Is that object art? Sometimes, and it can be great, good, poor or lousy. How is its status determined? That’s the problem. We each have our own criteria for art, for what ‘looks good’ and what doesn’t. Much of our criteria are culturally and educationally determined. And as the history of art shows, is subject to considerable revision over time. Even the “rules” of art are more notable for the exceptions than their being followed. Perhaps Picasso is the best known example of rule breaking successfully. Or the Impressionists, who were derided when they first displayed their work, and are greatly admired today. The same shifts in taste have occurred in photography. The f64 school is far less exalted today than it was 50 years ago. But most people feel the need for some ‘expert’ to guide them, and indeed there are things that can be learned. But this need has also led to the huge volume of “artspeak”, which substitutes long sentences of long words combined in arcane and meaningless combinations, for real thought or knowledge. No wonder the average person is confused and intimidated. And this isn’t likely to change.
- So what are we left with? My answer is: If an ‘’art object’ arouses some degree of emotional response when you look at it or interact with it, then it may well qualify as ‘art’. Sometimes knowledge of the artist’s intent helps understand and appreciate the work, but not always. Sometimes work done for purely functional purposes (e.g. documentary photography) will qualify as art. In any case, if you like it, good. Don’t let any ‘expert’ tell you your taste is bad.

[Andrew Molitor]

Art in the modern formulation, is largely conceptual. It is in the idea. Photography moreso than most forms. Lots and lots of expensive Art Photos could be made by anyone - the point is that anyone didn't have the idea, they didn't take that picture.

This, really, supports Mike's thesis. This is why, really, you can't "fake it" by following the forms. You can't just go out and take some sharp pictures of mountains, push the contrast up, and be the next Ansel Adams.

For one thing, we've already had Adams, so you're just making copies of the idea, and secondly you're not wrestling with your own ideas, you're not being true to yourself, you've not Doing The Art Thing and (one imagines, at least) the attentive viewer of your photos can tell.

[Kefyn Moss]

Great read Mike. I consider myself an artist with a camera, which of course means that I agree with you. This also very nicely addresses another issue (although not completely) which crops up on the internet these days, that of talent and how anyone can supposedly "develop" it just through practice. I have written on the subject several times but nowhere near as eloquently or thoroughly as your article. If you ever want to visit the specific topic of talent it would be most educational.

[Mathew Hargreaves]

As I am building a photo book covering Kodak's Velvet Green gaslight paper, it included reading 100+ year old photography magazines. The reviews of the Paris and German photography shows talked a lot about Pictorialism. One review mentioned the American contingent on display were the only ones still practicing this approach to photography. Though they did get high praise for their efforts. Sadly, the reproduction of the images was so poor as to be worthless for studying if one wanted to revive it themselves.

Surprise, the new issue of Black and White has a nice article about one of the better female practitioners. She even joined the group in New York headed by Alfred Stieglitz. The photo reproduction looks to be good but it leaves me wanting to see a genuine print of this style. Since this was a monotone print style, it would be interesting to see a modern adaption using color, and the end result from the effort.

[Victor Bloomfield]

"What is art?" is not a question that is asked just of photography. Ever since the Impressionists, new movements and disciplines have emerged that radically challenge the existing definitions of art. I've come to feel that the only sensible answer is a sociological one: art is whatever the dominant community of artists and art functionaries (museum curators, gallerists, critics, etc.) eventually agree to call art and include in their exhibitions, collections, etc.

An example that applies to photography: Perusal of the "Art" section listings in any recent issue of "The New Yorker" shows that a significant fraction of the exhibitions at museums and galleries deemed worthy of note involve photography in some form. Therefore, the art world at large now seems to accept photography as a medium as an art form.

[Bruno Masset]

> the Japanese steakhouse, is called "Benihana of Tokyo" in
> New York and "Benihana of New York" in Tokyo

The possibility that such a culturally gauche epithet as "of New York" would actually be used in Japan piqued my curiosity, prompting me to google the issue.

I'll just say that the way Benihana communicate their alterity in Tokyo is quite adroit.
Click on the links only if you care or dare to know ;-)

http://tinyurl.com/benihana-usa
http://tinyurl.com/benihana-japan

[Steve Smith]

No medium can be considered as art. Photography, painting, sculpture, etc. are just mediums.

Art can be produced by all of them - as can utilitarian items.

[Arg]

Brilliant. Old and new. This is the Mike I Like. As well as all the other Mikes of course.

[Thingo]

Well put. This is why I read TOP: thoughtful writing about the subject for which we have a passion.

I've been trying to nail down my style for years, yet it won't remain still for very long. Maybe that's something to do with this 'photography'.

[Alan Hill]

The fundamental question we are exploring is the definition of art.
I cannot believe that art is confined to 'art objects': that would demean literature, music, dance and more (and throw most of the classical Muses out of work). Our test must work for these art forms too.
I think the concept that a work of art should 'convince' is appropriate across the whole spectrum: in other words an artist is someone who can stimulate an emotional and intellectual reaction in an observer.

[Lance Evingson]

Over the long term I have tried to clarify my personal answer to this question. Early on I assumed photography was an art form aided & abetted by writings & images from Adams, Weston to name but 2. We certainly do not ask if painting is an art form simply because sign painting exists & we don't confuse or conflate the 2.
Personally I concluded that the only way to answer critics who claim photography cannot be an art form is derisive laughter - I find it axiomatic that it clearly is. Johnathon Jones is a recent example of a critic whose ideology seems to filter his perceptions, rendering him incapable of seeing beyond it in this instance. A blind spot. (He does write perceptively about the art he does see - I am in debt to him for his highlighting the paintings of Frank Auerbach, someone who is defining what painting currently is, for instance.)
About 3 years ago (I put off reading this book for way too long) I finally read "The Criticism of Photography as Art - The Photographs of Jerry Uelsmann" by John L. Ward, first published in 1970. Bingo! Much of it felt like Ward had been rummaging around in my own thoughts; and some of it seemed to draw out & clarify thoughts of mine that were vague, not fully formed. He even gives up intention as a prerequisite for art. His definition is highly democratic, inclusive, yet sensible. Art as Revelation.
Mike touches on some of this above & includes some common sense experiences as diagnostic - the individual can query what is in front of him or her & find authority in subjective response.
Ward's book is required reading for this topic. (It is only found used. Sadly out of print.)
I also find Denis Jenkinson's "The Racing Driver" to be the first source of the notion that racing can be an art form, just to add to the stew we are nourished by digesting.

[psu]

I find this to be many enjoyable words to read, but I i'm not sure about the conclusion, or maybe the premise, I'm not sure. I don't know why *photography* is any different than anything else.

You seem to be hung up on the notion that great pictures can be made/found in contexts where there was no intention for greatness from the creator of the picture. But I don't understand why this should change how we evaluate photography as an art form.

Consider: if you had the proverbial millions of monkeys (computers) generating text at random for long enough eventually all of the great works of literature would fall out of the stream. Does that make writing "not art" but writers "artists"?

If you what you are saying is that this question comes up because "the art world" places a diminished value on photography because of the potential for this found nature, then this is just another reason for me to ignore what "the art world" thinks about things.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

"Good Art Convinces!"

Perfect for licensing for bumper stickers, t-shirts, and coffee mugs, Mike! You haven't sold TOP tchotchkes for a long time.

(Maybe I would start a line of camera straps bearing the slogan, "Better Art Evinces!")

[Heinz Danzberger]

Photography! Isn't it the greatest joy and toolset, you can do whatever you want with it!

To Richard Newman's piece: two thumbs up!

[Kenneth Tanaka]

My earlier comment (bumper stickers, etc.) was offered in humor. (I actually do think that Mike could stick that slogan on a new line of TOP coffee mugs, don't you?) Sorry if it came across as rude.

Re: what I think is the main topic of the article I can only offer this thought. "Art" may be presented and sold as a product but it's actually a process. More specifically it's a communication process. Whether that process produces a photograph, painting, drawing, sculpture, film, or skywriting is only tangentially related to ART. I think that therein lies the source of confusion experienced particularly by photography enthusiasts. All pretty photographs are not the products of art. Conversely, all photographic products of art are not pretty. I think photography's easiness and immediacy make it uniquely susceptible to overstatement. This is one of the reasons why we see so little regard for new happenstance photography in the "Art" world today.

[Sarge]

tl;dr

Of course, I did (including comments), which is why this is late.

[Wayne]

Thanks for reproducing the writing. Even though I sometimes have difficulty in fully appreciating the Art discussion, I am always attracted to it...It seems a worthwhile effort to pay attention. You write about it in such a way that I do not tire of the subject.

After reading this, my most forceful thought on the subject: Art is a time traveler; you do not become bored with it. Your understanding of the Art may change as you age; but you will always be aware that it represents something worth understanding.

Your writing is often times like that.

Thanks again.

[Gary Nylander]

Great article, Mike, when I think of photographic art, Edward Weston's pepper picture comes to mind, its a photo of a pepper, but end up being more than a pepper picture. Also interesting that you mention about pictorialism, here is a recent blog post that I wrote on the subject: http://garynylander.blogspot.ca/2015/02/a-conversation-about-landscape_27.html