Not so much an opinion but an assertion, perhaps. Since the days of Marcel Duchamp it seems that anything can be made art by simply declaring it so. This does not preclude the likelihood that it is thoroughly bad art worth ignoring.
im not thinking of marcel duchamp or r mutt, but other things. there are plenty of things that can be considered art, from origami, to hand made paper to sushi to fish rubbings.
no one said all art is good art, and there is plenty of art by "the masters" that so many people hold in esteem that i think is a load of cr@p, i won't go naming names but there are a lot of them ...
any art is worth ignoring if you wish to do it, but you might miss the message, and sometimes bad art has even a more important message than the stuff people swoon over.
The contrary can be put convincingly. Photography is the only picture making process that is absolutely and physically bound to its subject matter. All other pictures are built by mark-making devices controlled by information in the form of coded instructions. A photograph is an existence proof of subject matter. A digigraph, or painting, or drawing is not.
while i believe some of that to be true, yes, something had to be there to interfere with the light on the media but that can be just the beginning. i have made things that just consist of emulsion painted
on paper exposed in the sun and they have no bearing on reality any more than a painting. and i find it to be strange that a sensor isn't light sensitive ?
it is as light sensitive as film or paper. the technology is different that is about it.
Photography is making pictures out of light sensitive materials. Digital picture-making, painting, and drawing don't work that way. It's always possible, absolutely and unambiguously, to distinguish a photograph from a digigraph by following the work-flow that produces it. There is no imperative in the simple-minded notion that if a camera is at the front end of the work-flow all resultant pictures are photographs and the credited picture-maker is a photographer.
digital image making DOES work that way, you just dont see it so.
it is every bit possible to record information on a sensor, have it create a file and have it printed out on film or paper, just the technology is different. the work flow might be different
but the result can be every bit the same as a traditional silver based image, just like making a xeroxagraphical duplication of a photograph can be used to make a paper negative and a cyanotype can be made from that. or are cyanotypes not photographs either ?
Always and consistently I insist quite the opposite. "Photographic prints" is misconstrued weasel expression for "Photographs". It's almost as if some people are ashamed of the word "photograph" and need to apologise for its plainness and directness by adding "print". Photographs on paper are not made like prints. Rather, they are produced in exactly the same way as photographs on film. The only difference is that the subject matter for photographs on paper is often (but not always) another photograph. Again there is no imperative in the notion that if a photograph on paper looks like a print it is a print. I say "photograph" and I say it without diffidence.
agreed
Like it or lump it, that's how H.C-B and Karsh and Leibovitz and Stern and Nadar... the list is very long... operated. The tradition that acclaims them as photographers is, I reckon, a lousy one and not worth worshipping. I don't see the denigration in admiring them as exposure-makers supported by a team of picture-making employees. It's just another path to great art. But it isn't the art of the photograph maker. The argument would be moot if it were not for the existence of acclaimed photographers who don't just stop at exposures. I'm thinking of people like Julia Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams...the list is very long...and many people at APUG who actually make the photographs they sign. The two groups are different, the makers and non-makers, and I know which lot I admire.
i understand what you are saying, but i don't really buy it. i find the list of people you suggest are just exposure makers to be photographers as much as
anyone who does the chemical work themselves. its like saying da vinci or michaelangelo weren't sculptors, painters &c because they had assistants who worked with them and did some of the work ...
.. but to each their own