Photography is not art!


Isaac Crawford



         With the advent of reasonably priced digital photography equipment, many purists worry about the "art" of photography. What they are talking about is the use of "traditional" (at least in their lifetime) materials such as silver halide based films and printing papers. The worry is that digital is so easy to use that the old ways will be forgotten and we will be left with a newer, lower quality product.
         This fear is misplaced on many different levels. First of all, what many consider to be "traditional" photography has really only been around for 50 or 60 years. The materials used, and even the techniques of the photographers from the 1930's would be completely foreign to most photographers today, even if they are film based. There are only a handful of photographers alive that can reliably produce images using techniques and materials from the 1850's. The truth of the situation is that photography has been evolving since the day it was stumbled upon. As the years have gone by, the pace of those changes has picked up, closely mirroring the technology advances of the rest of the culture. You can be sure that the old timers in 1920 were lamenting how easy those new dry plates and smaller cameras were to use. "Everything's been done for you!" Sound familiar?
         The thing that most of the worriers need to understand is that photography is not art, it is a process. It is a process that encompasses many different photomechanical and photochemical processes. In addition to the well known color and black and white film, there are platinum and other non silver processes, photo lithography, photo silkscreening, photograms, and now digital photography. They all use the capturing of light to form an image as their primary means of creation. In fact, all of photography is a subset of what I call "imaging". Imaging consists of all forms of making an image, usually 2d in nature. Painting, block printing, drawing, photography, mechanical printing, these are all ways of making an image. All of them are different processes requiring different skill sets and result in different results. Just like photography has many different types under its umbrella, so do the others. The key is that none of them are "art" in and of themselves, they are processes used to create an image, and some of those images could be art
         There is a huge misunderstanding when it comes to issues of craft and of art. The term "craft" is usually used to describe the skills and knowledge needed to produce whatever it is that needs to be made. There are definitely different levels of craft in any given discipline, but craft on its own can never guarantee a successful image. In addition, for those of you worried about a certain type of craft becoming obsolete, don't fear. As long as that craft can fulfill a need, it will stay around. There are still people making daguerreotypes and wet plate emulsion pictures. Why? Because those people feel that that particular craft cannot be duplicated by anything else. For many current photographers, digital technology has indeed replaced film based photography. For them, the new type has more benefits over the old. There are still some people (myself included) that see unique benefits to film based photography. As long as that stays true, the craft will not go away.
         So photography is changing (shrug) when has it not? It is still in its infancy compared to the older imaging kings like drawing and painting. It is much more tied to technology than the others so it will continue to change and new avenues of vision and craft will come out of these changes. One thing that will continue to be the same is that people will continue to make images that matter to them. Some (there are more photographers now than ever before) will take pictures, some will paint, some will draw, and some will do something else. The subjects won't change much, landscapes, people, still lifes, street scenes, etc, but the materials and equipment will continue to evolve.
         So fear not, art will never fade away! Image making will never fade away! Yes, the materials you use may no longer be available in 5 or 10 years, but many many other materials went before them, even before you were born products came and went and photography and imaging kept going on. The future will be no different.