“I recently wrote an article about photography and art; the essential point being that photography is an art but by and large as it is practiced by most photographers, will be remembered as a minor art because it lacks the essential ingredient of all major arts which is invention. Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. I feel the more a photographer intrudes into the photograph, the more he creates. But people expect less from photography than they do from the other arts. They’re quite happy to simply reproduce someone’s face and they assume that that represents the person and if that person looks attractive, so much the better. It’s the most democratic of all the arts in that anyone can take a photograph or has had their picture taken; so accessible that we don’t demand as much and that’s what makes me angry. Even the pace setters and the professionals in the field, the people who define photography themselves never expect more from the medium than that. Szarkowski, it seems to me, feels that the history of photography has already been defined and it’s simply a matter of refining that definition. Photography is not even a hundred and some years old and it’s already this staid, ossified institution. People are still lighting candles under Stieglitz and under Weston’s green pepper, and rightly so, but let’s get on with it! I’ve seen enough of France at the turn of the century! If photography is a viable living art form, it has to change. It should not be threatened by a handful of non-conformists. The real danger to the medium is the photographer still photographing parking lots in California and being heralded a genius.”
I couldn’t not agree more with this. It’s weird because if you think about it photographers are really nostalgic. I mean i think photography has invention, but people feel like invention and experimentation is constrained within the tools of photography (i.e. a camera) whereas with painting and sculpture theres room for experimentation. But with photography i think a lot of people have this idea that if you’re not using a camera then its not photography. It gets really confusing to talk about this really fast because photography is such a ubiquitous thing. I mean everyone can take photos now and theres so many categories and things that we use photography that its hard to define it as a medium. Maybe instead of trying to define photography its more important to define who/what a photographer is? that might help clarify and move the medium forward? But yeah, something to think about i guess.
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