There is nothing that separates a password mugshot from a photography master piece: you can use the same camera for both, the same lens, the same location. The physical objects (file or print) are identical. So what is the difference?
The vast majority of images taken are not art: surveillance cameras, medical imaging, scientific imagine, and accidental snaps of the photographer’s ear (yes, that used to happen a lot) are clearly not art. Nobody would think they are, and in that it means that we have an intuitive understanding of what art is and how it relates to photography. The consequence is the following statement:
Photography has no intrinsic artistic status. It only becomes art through the intention of making it so.
When Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery or when Maurizio Cattelan put a banana on the wall, the objects didn’t change. What changed was the intend of usage of these objects. Clearly, the distinction art/not art has nothing to do the objects themselves. Photography has the same logic: the camera produces objects that can be art, but most of them aren’t. That makes the difference is what the person behind the camera was intending to do.
Ansel Adams put it his way: you don’t take a photograph, you make it. Taking implies a passive process, nothing more than a physical transaction through the camera. Making implies a conscious process, a prior conception of the output, a controlled direction to the result. For Ansel Adams, art lived in the image that already existed in his mind before he even set up his camera. The negative was the result.
Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment (or “photography on the sly”, as it should really be called) if often misunderstood as an argument for spontaneity. In fact HCB didn’t just walk the street hoping something might come up he’d managed to capture. He had an acute sense of what was happening around him and could read and understand a scene to the extent of predicting the next events so that he could position himself to be ready for the photo.
In both cases, the object they produced was art because it was the intent and it was the result of a conscious process.
The counterargument is that accidents can be art. For example, a camera left running, a technical malfunction, all can produce something extraordinary. But I’d answer that what comes out of the tools isn’t art, and art shouldn’t be confused with extraordinary. However, there might be an intentional step, from someone’s decision to review and select extracts of the produced data, that could make it art. Curation is intention, and intention is what art needs. Once you decide that an image is art and another isn’t, you’ve made an artistic judgement. As someone said recently in a post here, the creative act can move from capture to edit.
The comparison between painting and photographing is interesting at this stage. A painter starts from a blank canvas. Every movement, every trace of paint on it, is the decision of the painter. That’s why nobody would seriously question whether painting is producing art. Photography works the other way round: the photographer starts from what the world gives them, under the circumstances of the moment. The photographer’s responsibility is to choose to respond to and remove from that pre-existing scene to create an object. Photography is not constructed from nothing, it’s extracted from everything.
One thing that confuses a lot of people is photography’s indexical relationship. A painting of a mountain tells you nothing about the mountain itself. Not even whether it actually exists or not. Photography’s relationship to its subject means that for a photograph to exist at all, light must have bounced on an object, hit the sensor or film, then the result was fixed for you to see. The photograph is a physical trace of something that existed, and this relationship to reality is photography’s unique property (let’s ignore for now the impact of Photoshop). That has long been the argument against considering photography art: if the image is just evidence of something real, where does art live?
The answer is: precisely as said before, in the intention: the painter invents, the photographer decides. The angle, the framing, the time of day, the gear, the settings, the aperture and shutter speed, what to include and what to exclude, all these determine the image that will be created from the real world.
Also the constraints of having to deal with the real world force artistic decisions in photography that aren’t necessary in painting. A painter that isn’t completely happy with the way their subject looks, can embellish them. They can add or remove trees from a scene. A photographer doesn’t have that luxury and needs to accept reality, but can still make decisions around it. These decisions require creativity that is unique to photography.
That’s why if you want to make artistic photography, your process must start before you even have your camera ready. Before you leave the house, even. Develop your intention because it is at the centre of your craft. Even more that gear proficiency. Otherwise, you’re just capturing what’s there as a machine and that is not art.
The billions of photographs taken daily prove the point: they’re not all art. some are pleasant and nice, but it doesn’t make them art. Occasionally, one is because a photographer has decided to make his object art by intentionally creating it as such.
The medium doesn’t confer the status. You do.
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