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Somebody who produces sculpture, or oil paintings for a living - or even just prolifically in their spare time - they are artists in the traditional sense. That does not mean you like their work, or even consider it "artistic" - in the wider sense - but it's clearly what they do.
<SNIP>
Owning an camera IMO is no more a definition of an artist than owning a paint brush.
At what point does a photographer rise from being a snapper to an artist anyway? When they start to call themselves an artist or when others do?
All IMO and all "silly notions" I'm afraid ...
Bob
Hi all,
[This all is trigger by Bob's post above and the ongoing discussion rather than directed at his post per se.]
Disclaimer done, as a matter of sociology at least, I think the "who calls them an artist?" questions is key.
I'm neither an artists nor a hacker[*], but like to think of myself as on the edges of both communities. The hacker community seems to have worked it out as a well-entrenched explicit norm that you are not a hacker until hackers decide you are. (In fact, few people are thought of so poorly by that community as the self-nominated "hackers".) I think a similar thing applies to "artists".
[*] "hacker" doesn't mean "someone who does evil nasties to computers". Those people (term used loosely) are "crackers".
However, that works for "artist" and "hacker" only when they are understood as terms of praise. Functionally, someone who writes really poor program code and someone who paints dreadful poker-playing dogs on velvet are working as hackers and artists just as much as Linus Torvalis and Picasso are. The difference is, the bad practioners just aren't very good.
A certain elitism in any notion of "artist" which implies "good at making art" is inevitable. Sure, the community of artists can and does make mistakes in deciding whose work is good enough for the honourific of "artists" to be applied. (Toiling in obscurity and poverty to be discovered after death is all too common.) But in general, those who know about a thing are the best placed to (fallibly) judge that thing and those who do it tend to be among those who know it best. I don't want someone ignorant of aeronautics and programming deciding which code is "best" for the autopilot of a 747 -- and I'm sure that never happens ;-). Likewise, since 99% of everything is crap, it makes sense to look to the community of artists for some (over-rideable to be sure) filtering of who's worth spending some time on.
Of course, none of that means a lone programmer in a cabin isn't a hacker, or that your next-door neighbor who has a point and shoot digicam isn't the unheralded greatest photographer ever. But, as a betting fellow with finite time, I just don't see the elitism (in any bad sense) in thinking that the holiday snapper (or me, for that matter), almost certainly isn't an artist in the "term of praise" sense.
As to the claim which you can still see and hear occasionally that "nothing so mechanical as photographer could possibly be art" -- I've never seen that be advanced by anyone who betrayed an actual knowledge of the process of "taking" photographs and what is involved in *creating* good ones.
Those who says such things seem all too impressed by the true claim that what the photographer produces, perhaps more than any other creative product, has the input of physics and chemistry beyond the photographers creative control, and far too unimpressed by the equally true claim that some photographs are beautiful, inspirational, frightening, etc. and some are trees killed for no clear purpose. Since the aim seems to be quite similar to the aims of canonical arts such as painting, and clearly doing it well is at least a bit tricky, what could be at the root of the debate other than a stodgy conservatism and a bad elitism? -- Since the rabble have access to it, it can't be art! Oh, and its new, and I fear the new. -- I don't think it is an accident that the "photography isn't art" line has had something of a resurgence with the advent of digital photography.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Best to all,
brian vdB
