Is photography simply providing an authentic record of the artwork – photographic evidence, or as a part of artwork itself?
You can’t have one without the other, is my answer.
To start with “documenting journeys” I believe art photography, by these photographers, Paul Graham, Robert Frank, Alec Sloth, Stephen Shores is true art. It’s not travel photography, or photo journalism, it’s a series of photographs which as a collective alongside the words of the photographer, turned into a photo book or photo essay creates something whole. You can say one photograph can’t be art, but what about a series, with accompanied words, titles, laid out in a book with balance and composition, or displayed in a gallery. To say Robert Frank is not an artist is wrong, but perhaps to be a photographer, in the truest sense, means more than being an artist. Why has art become elitist? Everyone uses different tools, it’s within the context of the work we should look, not at the medium.
I believe the same could be said for photo journalism, when journalists where on the front line, when they were risking their lives, and when the photos are taken in a non-documentary fashion, but in a humane one, depicting truth and realism.
The turn of the digital revolution diluted this medium in a way which can never be recovered, but instead gets worse with every new smart photo and app. I’d like to know when photography stopped being considered art, or was it ever? The arguments against are more now than ever.
It reminds me of craft vs art, or fashion vs design? Why has we got these categories which defines one from the other. Has one side got a higher price tag than the other?
Photography is a necessary partner in land art for documentary reasons, but this doesn’t mean the artist doesn’t use this tool to manipulate the art, controlling what the viewer sees. How is that photograph then presented in form at a gallery/ museum, is it large, or small, framed, or projected. The ways of seeing change within the surrounded of that photograph.
The sequence of photography is the same, in Keith Arnatt’s Self Burial, the progression of images, slowly being deeper into the ground, can only be made sense of in a presentation of photographs, a contact sheet, a depiction of change in time.
Any art seen in a controlled environment is subject to the variable including the space, lighting, colours, words, and noise. A photograph is not the art piece, it’s only a vessel to bring forth the whole. The same as a photobook, it’s but a vessel to show the work, the journey, the time.
Creative Arts Today 