Art in a Photograph? The subject or the "Art" added by shutter and "darkroom"?

Hi Asher,

'So, perhaps, my concept of artistic merit, 'prettyness', is what you mean as art.'

As in most things, it depends where you are coming from, how set in our ways, that we are.

My version of art is more a) 'human creative skill or its application' whereas yours appears to be b) 'work exhibiting this'. The 'arts' are 'associated with creative skill, as opposed to scientific, technical or vocational skills'. These are just dictionary definitions, 'book learning', but a few examples describing more or less how I view this stuff. It seems every word needs defining, a cigar is not a cigar, unless it's Freud's, when it is what, exactly?

Anyway, I was saying that if you are looking at the final image, and describing it as art, then I would have to be considering the final image in a different way then I normally do, trying to see if it has any 'artistic merit', or 'prettyness' (pretty- attractive in a delicate way, without being truly beautiful or handsome). I was thus trying to revise what I see when viewing, trying to redefine my interpretation of what I refer to as 'art' with how you may view it. I can't do that, so I have to translate your use of 'art' into something that makes more sense to me. Does that make sense to you? For example, dierk's B&W of the policeman's bum, you note the pose, the significance in that, I'm looking for the manufacturer's name on the gas mask.

I think that for me, the original mandolin photo from Charles, it is the subject material that has the artistic merit. The photo itself is not art, for reasons Charles has said, and which I understood by just looking at the photo. I am not sure how one could get a photo 'worthy of my definition of artistic merit' from such a subject, without involving gimmicks of some sort. However, Charles is trying. His years at art school may help, but I suspect it may hinder. I think I gave my thoughts in a previous post, summarised in the paragraph beginning ' Exactly the same photo could have been taken by many photographers,....'

Maybe you need to set fire to the mandolin, use its own flames to illuminate the photo, is your art worth that, (you'd only get a few minutes to get it right)? Or, burn some sticks, photoshop it in. Or draw/paint flames, in or out of a graphics package...., maybe do what the great painters did, get someone else to do the boring bits...

Best wishes,

Ray

Ray and the Mandolin

When Ray says

"it is the subject material that has the artistic merit. The photo itself is not art, for reasons....."

He echoes the great late-18th/early-19thC English landscape painter John Constable, who--in a June 16, 1833 London lecture on landscape painting, said that the 18thC English landscape painter Thomas "Gainsborough has been compared to" the 17thC Spanish painter Estaban "Murillo by those who cannot distinguish between the subject and the art."

The subject is never the art.

If a great subject were the guarantee of a great picture every Crucifixion would be a masterpiece, including every photograph of actors posing as Christ and the other figures in Renaissance Crucifixion paintings.

The definition of art has always been elusive.

It involves knowledge and precise definition of so many faculties and operations of the human organism: mind, seeing, feelings, memory, imagination, body that it is best to begin with thinkers who have given the matter careful, professional, informed and rigorous attention.

To my knowledge, the best investigation into a theory of art to start with is the mid-1950s volume Feeling and Form by the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (author of the monumental and universally praised 3-Volume work Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling )

In Chapter 3 of Feeling and Form after having put the major previous theories of art to a strict philosophical and linguistic test and having shown them to be incoherent, contradictory, vague, fallacious, based on false definitions of words, etc., Langer hazards her own definition of art (not just pictures: all art):

"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling."

There is no better place to start than at the end of Chapter 3, on the page where this sentence occurs and to read through the next chapters, on the three traditional branches of visual art: pictures, sculpture and architecture.

Discussions of art that don't take Langer into account are likely to wander into error almost before they begin.

She was a lucid writer who used plain ordinary language whenever possible and used professional philosophical terms only when absolutely necessary. Reading her is like sitting by the fireplace with an old friend, sipping port, and listening to her tell you about her recent travels. That these travels are of the mind does not affect the ease and pleasure of the hearing.

Every photographer to whom I have recommended this book says that the only thing that makes it difficult to read is the excitement it stimulates in them as they read it: the things she says about pictures, they say, make them want to put the book aside, grab their cameras and rush out to photograph.

I wish you all many hours of pleasant and exciting reading.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com

Ben Lifson said:

The definition of art has always been elusive.

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No wonder, most people don't consider the two structurally different forms of definitions:

1. Observational or descriptive
2. Declarative or prescriptive

The former is what most of us understand when somebody mentions 'definition'. We look at a number of instances and try to find the essence [yes, in the good old Platonic sense]. The vernacular version goes, 'We know it when we see it'.

The latter is what all scientists [incl. philosophers, mathematicians, excl. biologists] do before studying a subject, they clearly delimit what they are going to look at. The vernacular version could be phrased as 'I rule this to be such and such.'

The observational definition has lots to go for it but the big disavantage is that it breaks down when closing in on the boundaries, that is when the definition, the line it draws, is reached. IME most people can go a long way when discussing Art without problem (examples see Ben's post). Only when they come up to Avantgardé Art - which, by definition [method 2], tries to go beyond boundaries - the disagreements will abound. Thus my own flippant idea that Art is defined by time - wait long enough and any particular artist/work of art will be comfortably within the definition (i.e. Jackson Pollock).

The drawback of method 2, OTOH, is a certain kind of inflexibility, which is particularly problematic with art in any form (incl. literature, music etc.). Unfortunately we tend towards thinking that anything we like is good while anything we don't like is bad. So we declare our own likings to be defining Art.

How did we veer from SFX b/w to the discussion about Art? Didn't we already have that in another thread?

Ben, I am familiar with Susanne K. Langer through her book *Philosophy in a New Key* (1963).

I am new to trying to practice the plastic and visual arts myself, so am delighted to learn about *Feeling and Form*. Thanks for telling us about it.

My artistic efforts have in the past focused on "creative writing" (so-called) and critical writing about literature.

It is from this background that I am approaching taking pictures with my G2 and trying to enhance them in an image editor.

Mary

Quoting Dierk's last question:

How did we veer from SFX b/w to the discussion about Art? Didn't we already have that in another thread?

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Yes, we did.

And I'm not sure how the discussion in this thread veered, but it finally lured me in.

Mary

Dierk Haasis, Jackson Pollock and W H Auden

Jackson Pollock's paintings can easily be shown to fall within Susanne K. Langer's definition of art and to be exactly what she talks about in her chapter on pictures as "virtual space"

Mr Haasis's comment

"Unfortunately we tend towards thinking that anything we like is good while anything we don't like is bad. So we declare our own likings to be defining Art."

Echoes W. H. Auden's illustration of the distinction between taste and judgment.

There are, Auden says, only five verdicts that an adult reader can render of a book:

I see that this is good and I like it.
I see that this is good but I don't like it.
I see that this is good and I don't like it but I understand that with perseverence I could come to like it.
I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
I can see that this is trash but I like it.

The same applies to our verdicts of pictures.

Liking and not liking are easy. Seeing whether something is good is difficult and requires not only looking carefully at the object at hand but also years of disciplined looking at art in general.

At a public lecture on her work, in Philadelphia, 1984, the American photographer Jan Groover said "Any picture reveals everything there is to know about it if you only look at it long and attentively enough."

Duke Ellington said "If it sounds good it is good." But remember, it was Duke Ellington who said it.

Happy trails to you...

ben

www.benlifson.com

Hi Ben,

Discussions of art that don't take Langer into account are likely to wander into error almost before they begin.

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I think this is a problem - slicing the pie the same way.

I guess you will know who said something like -'you see things as they are, and ask why, whereas I see things that are not and ask why not'.

Best wishes,

Ray

W.H. Auden, almost my favorite among the 20th Century English poets and critics.

Do you know his "Musee des Beaux Arts"?
Link: http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/musee/museebeauxarts.htm

Fair use quote of the beginning and last eight lines of "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; ...

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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Truly one of the great poems in our English heritage.

Mary

Ray West said:

Hi Ben,


I think this is a problem - slicing the pie the same way.

I guess you will know who said something like -'you see things as they are, and ask why, whereas I see things that are not and ask why not'.

Best wishes,

Ray

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Always the pedant, I must correct Ray's quotation of GB Shaw. The quotation should read "You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

I think the difference between "see" and "dream" is important.

Charles L Webster said:

Always the pedant, I must correct Ray's quotation of GB Shaw. The quotation should read "You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

I think the difference between "see" and "dream" is important.

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I do agree with you on this.

Mary
< somewhat of a pedant, herself >

It was me-

I guess you will know who said something like -'you see things as they are, and ask why, whereas I see things that are not and ask why not'.

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In the same way that Constable said something like that which I previously wrote.

The particular bit in the quote above, is wrongly attributed to various people, JFK being one. I think it originated somewhere like Sweden or Finland. However, my interpretations of 'dreaming' and 'seeing' are different. Dreaming is too 'wishy washy'. I prefer seeing.

Best wishes,

Ray

Ray, irascible as usual, has claimed that the subject, for example, the building that took craftsmanship to carve the stone, an architect to design the structure and builders to put the whole thing together, merits the rank not the photograph captured so easily.

At first impressions, there is some respect here for attribution. There is a sense of justice being served by recognizing all the training, inspiration and steadfastness that brought to life something spectacular out of lesser starting points.

So is this a question of justice in attribution? Do we have a fight against people "carpet-bagging" the spoils of other people's work?

Does it matter that set designers, lighting experts, painters, tailors, dressmakers, hairstylists, makeup artists and more, after hundreds of hours of work, put before the photographer their joint effort: a model breathtaking to behold. Moreover, the model follows the photographers vision, altering pose, posture and mood until the vision is ready to be stored in the camera on its way to becoming a final image to share.

When we are moved by this image, is it art or just a record taken by a nice camera by a sufficently competent guy?

So here we discuss the subject versus the photographer taking the picture.

I commented on the portraits taken by Gary Ayala of heads of Romans sculpted almost 2000 years ago. I felt his work did indeed constitute enough new merit as art.



http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=704

Faces of the Getty can be found here:

http://garyayala.smugmug.com/gallery/1654748

Now I don't have the influence, power or authority to stamp Gary's passport on the way to fame. His own body of work speaks for him well. But I do find that his photography illustrates my feeling that the photographer is indeed the artist when his work transmits a reaction and feeling as a result of the design and choice s/he has made.

Asher

Well, I am prepared to make exceptions - after all they prove the rule.

I have spent a number of minutes, looking at this image.



http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1411.


I can not put it in with sports, it is not portrait, it is more than that. I can see the skill that went into getting it, somehow the love of the artist towards the task in hand. What is happening here? I have to think this through.

I had not read Asher's post re the statues before I posted my last email, since I wanted to get it down before I decided I couldn't be bothered. but, in the same vein as I mentioned, heres another, by the same artist. http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1099.



I will resist, I will not be assimilated......

Ray West said:

Well, I am prepared to make exceptions - after all they prove the rule.

I have spent a number of minutes, looking at this image.................

I can not put it in with sports, it is not portrait, it is more than that. I can see the skill that went into getting it, somehow the love of the artist towards the task in hand. What is happening here? I have to think this through.

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Well Ray, such sayings as the "Exceptions prove the rule!" are themselves either long philosophical topics for a college exam or else trite. They have no place, IMHO, in evaluation of photography as art.

In any case, the very fact that you do indeed consider some photographs may merit the worthy distinction of being art, shows that indeed photography can be considered as art by you.

That, in my mind is a majuot point that you have made to yourself!

Further in the second picture that made you question your own views and have pause,



I entirely agree. The picture with the position, tension and stare captured faster than the player can change, with added the out of focus lights artifact, offers us more than the sum of the objective parts. This is ceretainly not documeentary, since for sure, the view did not look like that to anyone with their own eyes. When we are transfixed by this image and ask questions of ourselves and the player, the piece works, not because of the subject, but because of the artist's skill, many choices and his medium.

Asher

Hi Asher,

There should always be a question, should it not be so?

My problem here is how do I redefine my views, since what I was saying before sort of contradicts this, I had forgotten that last image, in this context. So, another navel examination begins. I am trying, in my mind to seperate the different sorts of skills. The definitions I have for art, say painting, does not involve technology, it is creative, it adds to a blank canvas. Photography is technology, the aims are different, not always for art purposes, and in my mind I need to understand what I am trying to sort out. It is, at the moment interesting, a puzzle. I think most photographers understand there is a lot of technology involved in getting the picture. With brush and paint its different. Both are called art. If I take a photo of a painting, where is the major art? Most people, non painting photographers, would say the artist was the original person with the brush, and in most case, I would agree. If I think of wedding photography, I think of set things in a period of time, too fast for any painter, but skilful in a different way, very quick. If I think of sports, a lot of spray and pray, afaik, quick print job, sell on the pitch, whatever. Skilful, but not the same.

Now I have included the above two photos in my definition of art. Why? I do not think the skill is that much different than taking a still life shot, the lighting, depth of field, etc, has to be considered in a similar way. I think the difference is a heck of a lot of luck sort of 'f8 and be there', and the fact you do not have the control so much over the lights, etc. in this case, the artist was there, all prepared, and with luck the subject was snapped at that instant. Anything could have happened at that instant. Now it may be a few thousand shots were taken, and only these two were worthwhile - still luck. Having got the luck, it was worked on. The cropping is spot on, the colours etc. are spot on. I've looked, and I can't fault them, and I know just how picky I can be. I'm not the quiet considerate type you see here ;-) . So, My definition is going to be adjusted, that was the whole point of these laborious discussions, a journey, if you like. So, I can adjust it so far, as requiring creative skill of a none mechanical nature, the skill includes being able to create your own luck - thats more or less how it stands now. Luck is a big proportion, so mechanical skill is a lesser proportion.

I suppose, it is sort of like an artist wandering around for a few days, deciding where to set up the easel, then just glancing down, and seeing the subject he wanted, in that instant. In photography, the actual doing is generally quicker, though assessing the viewpoint should really take longer than for a painting, since there is less control, more mechanics, in the photo. If the painter had not had the luck, he would have not had that viewpoint to raise the level of his art (not quite said right, as most of it)

we got art - the skill, art the product, need more words

Best wishes,

and thanks for your patience,

Ray