Photography: Artist vs technician

Tony wrote:
Some of us got into photography because we didn't have the drawing skills we
wanted.
What I have noticed over the years though is that relatively few
photographers are interested in it as art. They have never studied art,
don't look at art and talk only of the technical aspects.

For once I am agreeing with Tony, perhaps I should be concerned!

But I think it's entirely true that most texts on photography, and
discussions by photographers, are very, very poor on "art", and by
"art" I do *not* mean "artzy", far from it; too many people, especially
amongst photographers, seem to have the naive misconception that "art"
is something you do whimsically, with a twist of the waist and a mess
in the mind, but that *******ization is far from the truth. In fact,
"art" has been formalised since antiquity and refined over the
millenia, and it could easily take a lifetime to get familiar with; it
is literally a discipline, in that it requires immense discipline.

I think in photography it would be useful to distinguis between the
"craft", and the "art". The "craft" is all issues of equipment and
"technique", particular to photography, but photography really has *no*
"art" that should set it apart from drawing, painting, sculpture,
architecture, cinematography or any visual medium; "art" is just "art",
and to be illiterate in it, and too many are, won't be changed by a
practice of the "craft" of photography, however long or frequent,
regardless of how many cameras you own or years you've used them for.

Those who come from a background of "fine arts" though, the formally
trained ones at least, and their texts, seem rich on the "education" of
art. The best photographers I have seen are those who come from a
background of painting, drawing, sculpture, architechture or so on, not
.. Their "art" may not be obvious to all. And here it is useful to
distinguish between "art" and "taste"; like I said before, "art" is a
language that has its conventions and formalities, and though you may
"break the rules", it's usually evident when an "artist" "breaks the
rules" that they are quite familiar with them, rather than when someone
who is clueless about them does it, which, unfortunately in common
misconception, they usually have no rules to start with yet they want
to "break the rules"! "Taste" on the other hand, is whether you like a
thing or not, and too often people mistake it for "art". A piece of
"art", if you've trained yourself or had been formally trained, can be
admired regardless of taste, and in fact, that should be the case. The
more you learn about "art", the more your tastes develop, and become
aligned to what "art" actually is, hence an "artistic taste"; a little
akin to wine, but not to confuse here, the more you learn about it, the
more you appreciate a "fine wine" and its subtleties.

I could've perhaps written more about this but I've just become
distracted and my train of thought interrupted, and I have to go.

Regards.







In many ways they
sound like the guys who put a supercharged bored and stroked mill into a 36
Ford -- right after they destroy the lines of it by chopping it and painting
flames on the cutaway fenders.

--
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com
home of The Camera-ist's Manifesto
The Improved Links Pages are at
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com/links/mlinks00.html
A sample chapter from "Haight-Ashbury" is at
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com/writ/hait/hatitl.html

"Siddhartha Jain" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi,

I had a small discussion with some members of my photography club on
post-processing. Some thoroughly enjoy PP and come out with superb
results. Then there are the likes of me who hate to sit on a computer
and work on Photoshop. Everytime I open a photo editor, there is a deep
rooted disinterest in doing all the complicated PP. I am also not too
much into portraits and *artistic* photography. Prefer lanscapes and
architecture more.

So here's what I am wondering. Does photography have different sides
that attracts people with different leanings? I, for example, work in
IT Security. I enjoy machines (all sorts), coding, and hacking. I can
at the most identify 5-6 colours. I am attracted to photography because
I enjoy producing nice looking photographs and less often some candid
portriats.

- Siddhartha