[Leica] Is photography art?

[lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com)]

        Is photography art? I depends on whom you ask. I serve as an art 
critic for several New York state regional newspapers and have plenty of 
opportunity to visit art and photo shows. Artists, critics and show curators 
have an implicit hierarchy of visual art roughly arranged in inverse 
relationship to the utility of the effort. Fine art is art with no apparent 
purpose except its own being. It is nice to look at but no one NEEDS fine 
art. At the top of the list are the painters who work in oils, next are the 
watercolorists followed by those who work in collage. Near the bottom of the 
list are etchers, printmakers and photographers. Indeed some curators refuse 
to let photographs be exhibited in art shows at all, consigning them to the 
purdah of photo shows.
        Lower on the list, in a separate category, are the applied arts. 
This is "art" with some functional use. The work of most photographic 
professionals, especially those whose pictures adorn magazines, 
advertisements, newspapers, etc. fall into this category. Architects are 
applied artists too, differentiated from sculptors because buildings have a 
use apart from being merely decorative. Commercial artists are clearly 
applied artists no matter how good their work. I know whereof I speak. I 
live in Westchester near the border of Connecticuit and advertising and 
commercial painters and photographers are as common as dust mites.
        At the bottom of the list are craftsmen. Crafts are artistic 
creations with a utilitarian purpose. It takes just as much skill to design 
a Barcelona chair or fabricate a fine pair of shoes as it does to make a 
painting except it is not considered "art." Most art venues will simply not 
exhibit crafts except during the holiday season where they hope to make a 
lot of sales.?
        For the last 50 years I have had a grasshopper weathervane fastened 
to the chimney of my house. It is a beautifully crafted sculpture of 
hammered copper made by the descendants of the very craftsmen who made the 
similar weathervane that adorns Faneuil Hall in Boston. If polished and 
exhibited as art it would be accepted by almost any art show but as a 
weathervane it has a function. It is not considered art but craft. I.e not 
acceptable as "art."
        The curse of photography (and etching and printmaking) is its 
reproducibility. Copies of the work can be made virtually identical to the 
original except not bearing the fingerprint of the artist. This caps the 
appreciation value of the original. There is a financial virtue in 
destroying the plates or negatives. While some photos can sell for a lot of 
money, the highest price paid for a painting is 60 times the highest price 
paid for a photograph. See Wikipedia for comparative pricing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photographs
        Those of you that consider photographs fine art remember that 
amongst artists it is considered a pretend art. A pseudo mechanical (OK 
digital) process of capturiing an image. At best it is an applied art.
        All of which reminds me of that old joke:?A young man buys himself a 
boat and a Captain's hat. He says to his mother, "Now I'm a Captain."
        His mother responds "You call yourself a Captain and I call you a 
Captain. But do real Captains call you a Captain?"


        Larry Z (a highly educated and reasonable photographer)