Since the age of 15 I've been dabbling in almost every kind of photography. Following a career in journalism, working for Practical Photography and then launching the first digital imaging magazine, I went on to create ePHOTOzine.
Every so often someone on our forums pops the question “Is photography art?…it’s a very emotive subject and our moderators are always to hand ready to remove expletives and abusive comments. The trouble is, as all the photography magazines have found out for years, is art and photography evoke passionate feelings and extremely strong views. This has become more so since the rise of digital technology.
I have a view I’m about to share which will no doubt cause upset to those photographers who like to shoot natural!
As the person responsible for introducing the first digital technique magazine into the UK, Digital PhotoFX, I was already on rocky ground when we filled the first few issues with those pictures that make people cringe. You know - Venetian masks superimposed on backdrops of gondolas or flowers with the find edges filter creating etched effects.
Well, for me, that was, and digital still is, a very exciting product.
On ePHOTOzine we get all kinds of digitally manipulated imagery, and we also get photographers complaining that it's “not photography”. Well it isn’t, as such.
Let’s go back in time, way before photography and look at landscapes as a subject. Painters were either good or not. There were those who took a scene and were clever enough to replicate that using oil or water colour. The scene would look as close to reality as it could. There were those who could take the scene and, through imagination, make the lighting more imposing, the colours more vivid or the items in the scene more visually balanced than those in reality. Then there were those who created a pile of tosh.
Then photography was invented and it changed everything. If we take our three types, the first could recreate a scene just as he/she had done when painting, but with much more ease, the second could add filters, use a spot meter and light to expose for subjective tones or some darkroom treatment to make the scene better, but for most photography took away total creative control, and the third could, providing the camera was understood, create a scene almost as good as the first group.
So in my view the people affected most when photography arrived where the creative artists, because, unless they had incredible darkroom skills, their photos would rarely be too far from reality and they had their vivid imagination bottled up.
And then along came digital. The first can still do as they always have, the second can go wild with their imagination and the third will produce the sort of shots that make you cringe.
Back to me. My mother was a painter, she painted street scenes and pets and did, to her ability, paint as close to reality as possible. Apart from one occasion where she painted a portrait of David Bowie for me and removed the bracelet he was wearing. She thought it should only be worn by a women! She would have enjoyed digital!
I wanted to paint like her, but didn’t have the skills, I took up photography but couldn’t photograph the objects/scenes I could see in my mind. I tried doing the creative darkroom work, but still couldn't get what I wanted. And then I found Photoshop. Sadly, in the early stages, a machine to run it cost thousands, but these days it's affordable and allows those dreams to come true.
For the first time, photography became, in my mind, real art! We've just gone from painting with oils, to painting with light, to painting with pixel. Although I do agree with views that a lot of crap is passed off as art, but that happens in the canvas world too.
http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Digital-Photography-as-an-art-form/257498
