Art Photographers and the Camera Market

[Ed. note: TOP takes the day off on Saturdays, so I can pretend I'm doing housework and paying the bills. Oh boy.]

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To conclude the discussions from earlier in the week, in the posts "I Don't Want to Farm" and "The Rest Is History"—if you're an art photographer or fine-art photographer, you really don't have to worry. (Before I go on, "art photographer" is a useful term and not just a snooty claim-staking one, and I don't mind it. If you do, you can substitute expressive photographer or some other unfamiliar phrase, although if you use uncommon terms you run the risk of people not understanding what you mean.)

I suppose professional photographers of various types have always had to concern themselves with an understanding of a broad range of current mainstream tools, and they're the most likely to be heavily invested in one or more solutions, so they have to care about the camera industry to a certain extent. But art photographers don't. We have always been on the fringes, and we have always gone our own way and done our own thing. Finding the right camera is part of the creativity of creative photography, and it can range from a fanatical and involved pursuit of specific needs, all the way to the other end of the scale, namely, not giving a damn. Plenty of art photographers down through the years have used cameras they built themselves, cast-off cameras from earlier eras, common mid-level commodity cameras, toys, the latest fashion, custom or luxury offerings, or whatever they started out with and got used to. They might switch between formats with abandon like Mary Ellen Mark or use the same camera for decades like Henry Wessel, use a cheap plastic Diana like Nancy Rexroth or oversized 8x20-inch "panoramic" view cameras like Michael A. Smith. Alfred Stieglitz used a shabby old view camera on which the bellows sagged so much he had to hold the middle of it up with a loop of string during the exposure. Joel Meyerowitz might still be using his 8x10 Deardorff that was manufactured the year he was born. On the other hand, Alfred Eisenstadt was ceremonially presented with a custom Leica by the company, and the glamour and pinup photographer Peter Gowland invented and built his own cameras. Then there's the woman whose name I don't recall, who sent me a marvelous portfolio at the magazine I worked for. When I asked her what kind of camera she used, she replied, "I don't really know. Do you want me to go look?"*

With the advent of Internet communication, a lot of people got interested in learning about the camera market, and a lot of today's enthusiasts are deeply into "what's coming next" and the fate of specific companies from a business standpoint. But art photographers have always been a minuscule percentage of the camera-owning population, and we've never been much at the mercy of the direction the mass market is going. When the market switched from rangefinders to SLRs in a big way, a lot of us followed—and some of us didn't. Burt Keppler of Modern Photography said SLRs felt to him like coming home, and he happily made the switch. Were all of us suddenly doomed when point-and-shoots took over the market in the 1980s? Not at all, but Daido Moriyama adopted point-and-shoots and made art with them. Was it a disaster when digital came along? Not at all. Most of us just kept shooting film until we felt like making the switch—a switch that even Charlie Cramer, an expert dye transfer printer, eventually made. But John Paul Caponigro dove into digital right from the very earliest days. And a huge number of people were enabled by digital who hadn't been photographers before. Yet you can still outfit and run a B&W darkroom today, even one based around sheet film and a view camera, if you're one of the few who choose to.

Michael A. Smith with his 8x20-inch view camera.
Photo by Hans Bol.

We go our own way and do our own thing. While occasionally there is a photographer who abandons the work because of some shift in the technical winds, like Frederick Evans did when commercial platinum/palladium paper went out of production because of WWI, and you can't say we're not affected by the camera market at all, we've never been particularly attached to it. And certainly never at its mercy. Nowadays we have all sorts of choices: old film cameras of all types, old digital cameras, a broad range of new digital cameras in a broad range of sensor sizes, phones and other "devices," drones, on and on. If you can't find something to use to get yourself to where you want to be, you'll create some other possibility. Creative people find what they need.

Wherever the industry goes, it won't affect us. It doesn't matter if one company disappears or another does something revolutionary. Right now there are great photographers nobody's heard of quietly building bodies of work made with smartphone cameras; others are doing the same with aging 35mm film cameras. If someone builds a new 35mm camera, a few people will do good work with that. But it won't have much if any effect on the market as a whole. Part of the reason all this doesn't matter is that there will always be choices for those who are alert to them, and there will always be creative people willing to explore what they can do with whatever tools happen to interest them. If they can't do one thing they'll think of another. Their choices will be quirky and idiosyncratic, inventive, adaptive, and innovative. Because they always have been.

So while change might not go our way, it never really has. Is it anything to mourn, or moan, or worry about? Nah.

Mike

*Sadly, I never got to publish that portfolio, and I don't recall now what the reason was.

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bassman: "Artists use the technology that’s available to create the art they want. The manufacturers are often behind the curve on the possibilities offered by their offerings, sometimes way off the mark. An example from the guitar world: when electric guitars were first being used widely during the 1950s and 1960s, most manufacturers were trying to make the electric instruments sound like the acoustic guitars they were replacing. After all, the whole point of electrifying them was to allow them to be louder. That the electric guitars didn’t sound like acoustic instruments was seen as a flaw to overcome. Artists, on the other hand, embraced the electric sound and the distortion the amplifiers exhibited to create the sound of rock and roll. They didn’t care about sounding like the older technology; they saw infinite possibilities with the new technology."

JH: "Bravo to Bassman, driving what he enjoys. People like him were the typical Porsche drivers until the mid-1980s when the new President of Porsche—who came from a US tractor company—started treating it like a brand to be milked for the highest profits. After I retired from racing in 2002 and did a couple of years teaching at track days for car clubs, I refused to take Porsche drivers as students. BMW owners were almost as bad. You could not instruct many of them—they knew it all....

"In several years of instructing, I only had one Corvette owner. After five laps with me driving at California Speedway, he got out of the car looking as white as a ghost and refused to drive the track himself...he'd had enough already. I quit instructing after a couple of years when I decided the majority of my students were trying to kill me. I live in a town full of posers here in California. The new big thing for posers is the 'urban rednecks' driving tarted-up giant pickup trucks. You can always tell a poser: they have pricey wheels and a cover over the bed of the truck to make sure it says perfectly clean."

Pieter Krigee: "On the picture Michael is not using an 8x10inch camera. Probably it is an 11x14inch camera or maybe even a larger one, a 30x50cm!"

Mike replies: It's an 8x20, and sorry. That was a typo. My brain thinks 8x20 and my fingers type 8x10 because that's what they most often do. It's like having a built-in malapropist spellchecker. Fixed now.

Bill Tyler: "I absolutely loved the story about the woman who didn't even know what camera she had, but was producing excellent work. Clearly, she had her priorities straight."

Comments

[Helmut the Austrian]

Hi MJ,
it sounds so true: „Creative people find what they need.“ Hope to be among them. Thanks a lot for this article and in particular for mentioning all those outstanding photographers. There is almost ever someone new and his / her work to discover for me. Regards
Helmut the Austrian.

[darlene]

Yeah, they are tools for creative endeavors, and everything evolves as time passes. I continue to shoot 4x5 black & white film for art projects (35+ years) and digital for various reasons, one being to 'create' some moolah.

[Stan B.]

Agreed, although... I really dread seeing the "fine-art" photographer nomenclature, nine(.99) times outta ten it's technique over content- a Beatles cover ever so sadly and meticulously reproduced note for note.

[Sal Santamaura]

Michael A. Smith with his 8x10 view camera

The ground glass proportions indicate that's likely his 8x20, not 8x10.

[Yes, very sorry for the error, that was a typo. Fixed now. --Mike]

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Camera industry changes?! Pfft. That’s so early 21st! The AI tech industry is moving at lightning pace in so many simultaneous directions only old fogies will actually use cameras to make most pictures soon. *

* Not really an exaggeration. Many segments of the ad world have long ago replaced expensive studio and location photo shoots with 3D modeling composites straight from the product design stream. Augmenting with AI-generated material is a no-brainer. Say goodbye to the $100k shoot days!

[Bruce Bordner]

Like most artists, I have never had money for these "toys" - even worse, I have been married and on a budget. So I've bought 4 Nikons over 50 years. I splurged horribly on the D800 new as a retirement present when it listed in 2011.
I just got a small inheritance and I'm 70 and I want a new toy! (It's still more luck than choice.) My wife approved when I explained that the flip-out screen would let me take low-angle shots without her help to get back up... I'm just waiting for Nikon to say EOL for the F-system and put the D850 on sale. I have good F lenses; I'll stay. BTW, as purchase advice which company gives you the best kickback? This is your fault anyway, keeping me thinking about cameras....

[John Krumm]

I've been thinking a few of the same things, though much less coherently. I like the term art photographer a little more than fine art photographer (which to me sounds like a job you get in a museum, photographing fine art for the web site). Creative photographer is not bad. It's better than "creative," which I really hate in noun form (would all the creatives please gather on this side of the room). A pomp of creatives (collective noun). Artistic photographer just sounds bad, like you have to spell it out (please believe me, I really am). In the end, photographer, plain and simple, works for me. Let others figure out the adjectives.

[Rob de Loe]

First of all, Michael A. Smith needs to be a lot more careful! Yikes. One gust of wind and he and his camera are the reason someone installs a fence at that cliff edge.

I enjoyed your thoughts in this post. Often when we do the "there are two kinds of people" thing we simplify too much; I thought you found a nice balance here.

Having said that, I do think there's room to do some more sorting in your "art photographer" category. To my mind, these people are photographers, in that the photograph is still the valued and respected product of their work.

In contrast, there are lots of artists who use cameras and/or photographs in their art making who don't think of themselves as photographers at all. If your art photographers are generally unconcerned by the winds of change that blow through photography, these folks are utterly disinterested, and likely view cameras and photographs as only a stage in their practice, or just one element that gets mixed in with other media. They just don't care.

I'm not sure this adds much, if anything, to your point. But I personally find it helps me make sense of how photographic images are used in contemporary art. I like photography, so I find it hard to relate to a lot of the work that is produced by contemporary artists who happened to use a camera.

[Gary Nylander]

I like to think of myself as an art photographer, often when I introduce myself to others I say that I'm a photographer and I will sometimes further explain if the person is interested that I'm an art photographer. But sometimes I also tell them at one time I worked as a newspaper photographer. Then the conversation can get really long if I start explaining what camera equipment I use. If the people listening are not photographers they will be bored at this point.

[s.wolters]

As graphic designer I always worked with ‘art photographers’ when I had the chance. But they never presented themselves as such. The ones who did were not.

[Richard Alan Fox]

I think we should call ourselves what we are, artists, if that is what we are.

[Dan Boney]

One of the more interesting examples of how “artists often use tools in unintended ways” was Polaroid SX-70 manipulations -using blunt instruments to alter the still developing image to create an impressionistic derivative, there are artist/photographers such as Michael Going that worked almost exclusively this way... Not sure what Edwin Land thought about it but given that he was such a visionary himself I imagine he would have admired that additional expression that his invention provided...

[David Smith]

@Kenneth Tanaka -- one might surmise the high-end 'pro' camera (etc) market is going to shrink precipitously, there are only so many doctors, dentists and lawyers to support the thing.

"I don't really know. Do you want me to go look?" -- my kind of photographer!

[T. Edwards]

"You can always tell a poser: they have pricey wheels and a cover over the bed of the truck to make sure it says perfectly clean."

I have bed cover on my pickup because I've found that it's really useful for covering up and securing the Pelican cases containing my cameras because without the cover, people could, you know, just reach into the bed and take them out.

I guess that makes me a poser.

[Jnny]

How does that 8x20 camera work? Is that a Fresnel lens?

[Dan Newell]

Is Art Photography like Art Painting?

[If you mean art painting as opposed to house painting or finger painting—IOW, a useful distinction—then yes. --Mike]