What, precisely are your reasons for this statement?
It does seem to fly in the face of a lot of critical thinking about photography and seems a very limited point of view.
What sort of "visual artists" do you mean? Are you thinking of traditional? Modern? Conceptual? to mention but a few.
John Mason wrote:
Photography can and does do themFor me, this is what photography does best. Other visual artists--sculptors, painters, etc.--can provide us with wonderful nudes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes (lives?), street scenes, charming vistas, cats, babies, and so on. We don't really need photography to do these things. It's good that photography does them, but we could do without.
We can't, however, do without photojournalism (whether still, video, or film--still being king) and documentary photography. There's no substitute, 19th century newpaper etchings and 21st century courtroom sketch artists not withstanding.
I don't mean to suggest that these are the only forms of photography for which there is no adequate substitute. Astrophotography and scientific photography in general come immediately to mind. As does the family snapshot (as opposed to formal portrait).
--John
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J. Mason
Charlottesville, Virginia
Cool snaps: http://wtju.radio.virginia.edu/mason/
to my mind exceptionally well and I believe we do need photography to do them!wonderful nudes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes (lives?), street scenes, charming vistas, cats, babies
I believe our society would be visually deprived if its public face were increasingly restricted to such a narrow field as photo-journalism.
Quite apart from the mind-boggling problem of what sculptors, painters etc are actually available to do the work (and the questionable quality of much of what appears and its frightening cost), art can only capture a time prolonged impression of the subject, be it nude, portrait, landscape etc. It smears the "trace", the instaneity which photography brings and which I suspect is the reason behind much of the rejection of photography as a significant visual medium..
For me, far too much current art is pretentious, uninterpretable indeed impossible to penetrate without an "expert's" critical explanation of its meaning.
Given the choice I much prefer to visit photographic galleries, and I get far more out of those than contemporary art displays such as I see at Tate Modern Tate Britain or the National Gallery, or on my visits to other galleries.
Or maybe I'm just a visual philistine... :'(
H. P.S. I do like the jazz images.
