Hi Dave
I still disagree. Not completely of course - A lot of traditional art is a high form of craft. Painting, drawing, sculpture for example that requires a great deal of mechanical, physical skill that has to be learnt by practice. It is not so easy to translate a vision into a piece without the years of graft behind you.
Photography is perhaps not so constrained, in that technology handles a great deal of the mechanics. But that is not the whole story. Sometimes a perfect picture is found quite by chance, an opportunity presents it and all you have to do is spot it and snap. But...
... photographic skill usually comes into play. The photographer, having spotted an opportunity often has to work the scene to find the optimum viewpoint, to frame it pleasingly, selecting an appropriate depth of field or shutter speed, using the best focal length, controlling the look of the image with filters. There is craft here but also aesthetic judgement. This continues after in post when further skills and judgements are called upon (cropping, choice of aspect ratio, adjusting levels curves, saturation, sharpening, dodging and burning, vignetting etc), even through to printing, mounting and framing, all of which require judgement and craft. An accomplished photograph is rarely the result of a casual snap.
Many photographers can photograph the same scene or subject but not all photographs have equal merit. And that is Roland's earlier point about photographs that have something extra is the key point, I think.
It's easy to take a sharp, well exposed, pretty but boring, samey picture of a rose. Most of us can do it without trying. It's a lot harder to make that rose make the viewer ooh and aah with delight.
The internet and digital technology have highlighted this. There are now so many photos, technically good but boring for everyone to view. A browse of photosig is an exercise in depression simply because of the routineness that technology has made possible. I no longer want to see a perfect macro of an insect because it is routine. These days, a macro has to have something extra to catch my attention.
And that "something extra" isn't easy to find or to produce. It requires a bit of "art"...
The above is a good post, and you've made the strongest argument I've ever read for your point of view. Seriously, you ought to save it, keep it on file as a mini-essay. Really.
My only, err, "critique," is that you have to do something about this sentence:
"It is not so easy to translate a vision into a piece without the years of graft behind you."
While I know the above is a typo, it made me think of the painter Tina Brown, whose main talent as an artist was a pair of breasts she showed at every opportunity.
Look, in my opinion, strong argument or not, you reveal our difference in the above sentence (without the typo). Is a craftsperson an artist? After all, our photography you admit is a craft, and who can deny that learning to paint or sculpt also involves the learning of skills that are also "crafts?"
Our difference is that no matter how skilled, no matter how gifted (because an eye for taking or manipulating a photograph, while it can be learned, can also be a "gift") we record, an artist creates.
As in the artist whose painting I photographed - Is there any way for me to do what she is doing? Her painting, created out of her imagination, put together with her craft, is far better than my photograph of the place -
Even though there's nothing particulerly wrong with that photograph. (Maybe a wider angle lens?
)
In other words, if you stood in front of her painting, you would "feel' the place, whereas my photograph, or ANY photograph, merely "records" it, and records in a flat tasteless manner. And while no doubt someone else could do a better job of photographing that corner, it's not a good subject..
No photographer would even try.
Yet, she subtly changed the scene to leave or add things, even so, it packs more "realism" then my photograph.
Dave
