Is Photography An Art?

Is Photography An Art?

by William Lulow

This seems like a moot point at this time, but throughout its history, beginning in the early 19th century, photographs have had a unique ability to portray the world exactly like it is. Photography is a great documentarian! Everything that came before it, painting, drawing, etching, even sculpture, all saw the world through the eyes of an “artist” with the special skills needed to fashion a decent likeness of real life. The camera changed all that because we now could see exactly what something or someone actually looked like without the training necessary to be able to paint or sculpt. Abraham Lincoln was a seminal figure in American history, but unlike George Washington, we have photographs of Lincoln and know precisely what he looked like when he sat for the photographer, Matthew Brady in the 1860s. He was the first president of the United States to be photographed extensively! (There is a daguerreotype of President Adams made in 1843, however, but I believe it is a one-of-a-kind.)

But it seems that it is precisely this characteristic that makes photography suspect when it comes to being considered as art form. How can it be art when all you have to do is aim the camera, make sure there is enough light and press a simple button? But it’s the choosing of where to place the camera, the exposure and anything the photographer does to the image afterwards that transforms the image into a piece of “art.” It should also be noted that the history of photography shows that there was a fair amount of training and skill necessary for the photographer as well. Some made images with “pin hole” cameras (black boxes with no lens, just a tiny hole that managed to focus light rays), some with bulky view cameras which had learning curves of their own to master.

Here is a dictionary definition of ART: “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Notice here that photography is omitted. But it still fulfills all the aspects of the definition. It takes “human creative skill and imagination,” it is “visual,” certainly and the works are often appreciated for their “beauty or emotional power.” So, by  this definition, photography fills the bill. Yet it took many people a long time to consider photography “art.”

I recently attended an exhibition of some of the late Richard Avedon’s enormous Murals, at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. I also just finished a biography of him which highlights his struggle to have some of his work considered as “art.” (Avedon produced the bulk of his work from the early 1940s right up until his death at 81 years old in 2004.) He is one of my personal heroes because, for one thing, he was at the top of his profession for over sixty years. Not too many other people can claim that kind of accolade in their respective metiers. He was a man, like any other and had his struggles as a human being, but when it came to creating beautiful and innovative images, he truly excelled. It is a testament to his art, that just about twenty years after his death, he is still being shown in galleries and museums, attracting thousands of viewers. That alone, should qualify his work as art as it has for the likes of the Dutch Masters from the 1600s.

One of the things that I have always admired about his work was the fact that he wanted everyone to know it was “photography”- that all his images contained the edges of the film he used. The black frames around almost all of his images are the actual edges of the film itself. The large view cameras he favored all used sheet film, that is film manufactured in sheets rather than in rolls that we all became used to before digital cameras. Sheet film had to be loaded into film holders that had thin registers or rails that held the film in place. Here is one of my old film holders:

If you look closely, you can see the registers that would hold the film in place. Each sheet of film also had some notches cut into it that not only would identify it but let the photographer know which side contained the light-sensitive emulsion which, of course, had to be facing outward to register the image. You could feel them in the darkroom because you had to load all the film in the dark.

The photographer would set up his view camera, make sure everything was in focus and then insert the film holder which had what was called a “dark slide” that kept the film unexposed until just the moment it was to be used. He would then pull the dark slide out and trip the lens’ shutter exposing the film. The slide would be re-inserted so that the film holder could be taken out and kept until the film was ready to be developed. Since these thin registers that held the film in place, covered just its edges, they of course, would be completely transparent on the negative. When the negative was printed and turned into a positive, that’s when the black lines were printed.

The process of turning negatives into positive prints required exposing a sheet of photographic paper that was often held in contact with the negative thus producing a “contact print.” If your film was large enough, say 8×10″ or more, you would have a nice sized positive print to view. If you wanted to enlarge the negative to a size beyond that of the film, it required the use of an enlarger which could project the negative image on a wall or what was called an “enlarging easel.” If that was the goal, it would have required another step of making sure that ALL OF THE NEGATIVE was projected including the nowclear edges. This often made it necessary to use two pieces of glass that held the negative in place. The photographic paper was then cropped so that those clear frames of the film would be reproduced with the rest of the negative on the positive print turning everything clear to black. All of these steps had to be deliberate, which leads one to the conclusion that Avedon took some pains to make sure the frames were included. I did a similar thing with my 4×5″ negatives. I actually filed down my enlarger’s negative carrier so that the edges of the film would show.

I have always considered shooting film a much more involved process than making digital photographs, although digital images can demand a lot of work themselves. But I was always interested in showing that my images were made on film, just the way Avedon did. So, I made my “logo,” so to speak, a film frame:

Today, although I shoot everything digitally, I still consider my film “roots” and often seek to demonstrate to others that this is the way it all started for me. I explained all this to a friend who was a graphic designer at the time. He chose the design and typeface for the concept above. This “film frame” is made by the back of a Hasselblad camera. Hasselblads were manufactured in Sweden back in the 1800s, but the first, real, roll film Hasselblad was made in 1948.  Victor Hasselblad, the owner of the company that bore his name, sometimes was asked by photography enthusiasts if anything was wrong with his equipment if one or more of their images didn’t turn out right. In the beginning, Hasselblad couldn’t tell if the image was made with one of his cameras so he built those two “notches” in each of his film backs so that he could tell. So, I just adopted this design because I used to own a couple of these cameras and loved working with them.

My take on “art” photography is that if a photograph represents an interpretation of a scene, person or thing or is altered in such a way by lighting, post-production or any other means to create something new or different, it would qualify as a piece of art. I would probably exclude ordinary snapshots, but I have seen many beautiful images carefully crafted from cell phone cameras as well as very interesting images, made very carefully to look like snapshots. Here is an example of a scene originally recorded digitally and then altered to make it an image like an impressionist painting. This is done through the use of many different filters in Photoshop that alter the image and create something new:

It then becomes a piece of artwork.