By OGP Reporters / Members Contribute File Photos
Oh Good Party
Photography may be used both to capture reality and to produce a work of art. Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
Creativity evolved with the medium, but so did the ways of manifesting it. While the purpose of photography has always been to provoke emotion, to send a message and to show another angle of things, the ways of sending that message changed radically. With digital manipulation at hand, photography’s once sole aim to represent reality became optional. Something that once took a lot of time and effort to create, something that included a ritual and a handful of things: rolls of film, the film camera, dark rooms, processing labs, Polaroids and Kodachrome, now takes half a second, with a mobile phone. Photography became almost entirely immaterial. Furthermore, the technology developed to the point where you no longer even need an actual photograph, as anything can be created digitally, using a single software.
The fact that such gear is available to everyone, everyone can and is becoming a photographer, but their tool is making most of them them be so, not their talent.
With billions of images produced on a daily basis, Do you really think the photography as we know it appears to be slowly fading away?
Today's technology has made image editing relatively simple for even the novice photographer. There has been nothing more democratizing than the cameraphone: not only can you take a quality image anywhere, any time, but you can also have it seen instantly by an extended network of people. Obviously the images that are widely shared and viewed, think of them as making it into the visual culture of society - are inevitably the ones that are the shoutiest, not the best.
It’s also hard for people to see an artistic value in photography when it’s possible to make nearly identical copies of the same image. A photograph can never be a one-off like a painting, unless of course you print one copy and then delete all traces of its existence!
Photography may be used both to capture reality and to produce a work of art. Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
Clive Bell in his classic essay Art states that only "significant form" can distinguish art from what is not art.
The definition of art is the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
What is art? What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?
Roman sculptures, Chinese ceramics, and the masterpieces of Pablo Picasso…… Whether that something is an event, a place, a person, or a thing, is irrelevant. Monet’s waterlilies show us his unique interpretation of the scene, according to the impressionist school — which is yet another subjective way of looking at the world. Only one answer seems possible — significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.
We do believe that some photography can be viewed as art. The value here is in the thinking uniqueness of the interpretation.
The works of these artists are considered to have excellent collection value.
