... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light.
How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.
... the battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.