Fine art photography
Encyclopedia
Fine art photography refers to photographs that are created in accordance with the creative vision of the photographer as artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.
are:
, "who exhibited daguerrotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer
in 1851". Successful attempts to make fine art photography can be traced to Victorian era
practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron
, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander
and others. In the U.S. F. Holland Day
, Alfred Stieglitz
and Edward Steichen
were instrumental in making photography a fine art, and Steiglitz was especially notable in introducing it into museum collections.
Until the late 1970s several genres predominated, such as; nudes, portraits, natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams
). Breakthrough 'star' artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann
and Robert Mapplethorpe
, still relied heavily on such genre
s, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic
approach.
American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation
and the Museum of Modern Art
, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.
exhibition was unframed, the pictures pasted to panels. Even as late as 1966 Bill Brandt
's MoMA show was unframed, with simple prints pasted to thin plywood. From the mid 1950's to about 2000 most gallery exhibitions had prints behind glass. Since about 2000 there has been a noticeable move toward once again showing contemporary gallery prints on boards and without glass. In addition, throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints.
in Yosemite and Yellowstone provides an example. Adams is one of the most widely recognized fine art photographers of the 20th century, and was an avid promoter of conservation. While his primary focus was on photography as art, some of his work raised public awareness of the beauty of the Sierra Nevada and helped to build political support for their protection.
Such photography has also had effects in the area of censorship law and free expression, due to its concern with the nude body.
There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to "discover" it ready-made. Photographers such as Gregory Crewdson
, and Jeff Wall
are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography has opened a new direction in full spectrum photography
, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector's market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.
According to Art Market Trends 2004 (PDF link) 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the USA. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales. There is now a thriving collectors' market for which the most sought-after art photographers will produce high quality archival prints in strictly limited editions. Attempts by online art retailers to sell fine photography to the general public alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional "big names" of photography such as Ansel Adams.
and photojournalism
merit special attention.
In 1996 it was stated that there had been a "recent blurring of lines between commercial illustrative photography and fine art photography," especially in the area of fashion. Evidence for the overlap of fine art photography and fashion photography includes lectures, exhibitions, trade fairs such as Art Basel
Miami Beach, and books.
Photojournalism and fine art photography overlapped beginning in the "late 1960s and 1970s, when... news photographers struck up liaisons with art photography and painting". In 1974 the International Center of Photography
opened, with emphases on both "humanitarian photojournalism" and "art photography". By 1987, "pictures that were taken on assignments for magazines and newspapers now regularly reappear[ed] - in frames - on the walls of museums and galleries".
Definition
There are no universally accepted definitions of the related terms "art photography", "artistic photography", and "fine art photography", as exemplified by definitions found in reference books, in scholarly articles, and on the Internet.In reference books
Among the definitions that can be found in reference books are:- "Art photography": "Photography that is done as a fine art -- that is, done to express the artist's perceptions and emotions and to share them with others".
- "Fine art photography": "A picture that is produced for sale or display rather than one that is produced in response to a commercial commission".
- "Fine art photography": "The production of images to fulfill the creative vision of a photographer. ... Synonymous with art photography".
- "Art photography": A definition "is elusive," but "when photographers refer to it, they have in mind the photographs seen in magazines such as American Photo, Popular Photography, and Print, and in salons and exhibitions. Art (or artful) photography is salable.".
- "Artistic photography": "A frequently used but somewhat vague term. The idea underlying it is that the producer of a given picture has aimed at something more than a merely realistic rendering of the subject, and has attempted to convey a personal impression".
- "Fine art photography": Also called "decor photography," "photo decor," or "wall decor," this "involves selling large photos... that can be used as wall art".
- "Art photography": "Euphemism for nude photography".
In scholarly articles
Among the definitions that can be found in scholarly articles are:- Two studies by Christopherson in 1974 defined "fine art photographers" as "those persons who create and distribute photographs specifically as 'art.'"
- A 1986 ethnographicEthnographyEthnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
and historicalHistoryHistory is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
study by Schwartz did not directly define "fine art photography" but did compare it with "camera club photography". It found that fine art photography "is tied to other media" such as painting; "responds to its own history and traditions" (as opposed to "aspir[ing] to the same achievements made by their predecessors"); "has its own vocabulary"; "conveys ideas" (e.g., "concern with form supersedes concern with subject matter"); "is innovative"; "is personal"; "is a lifestyle"; and "participates in the world of commerce."
On the World Wide Web
Among the definitions that can be found on the World Wide WebWorld Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
are:
- The Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
Subject HeadingsLibrary of Congress Subject HeadingsThe Library of Congress Subject Headings comprise a thesaurus of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use in bibliographic records...
use "art photography" as "photography of art," and "artistic photography" (i.e., "Photography, artistic") as "photography as a fine art, including aesthetic theory". - The Art & Architecture ThesaurusArt & Architecture ThesaurusThe Art & Architecture Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary used for describing items of art, architecture, and material culture. The AAT contains generic terms, such as "cathedral," but no proper names, such as "Cathedral of Notre Dame." The AAT is used by, among others, museums, art libraries,...
states that "fine art photography" (preferred term) or "art photography" or "artistic photography" is "the movement in England and the United States, from around 1890 into the early 20th century, which promoted various aesthetic approaches. Historically, has sometimes been applied to any photography whose intention is aesthetic, as distinguished from scientific, commercial, or journalistic; for this meaning, use 'photography'". - Definitions of "fine art photography" on photographers' static Web pages vary from "the subset of fine art that is created with a camera" to "limited-reproduction photography, using materials and techniques that will outlive the artist".
- Discussions of "fine art photography" in Usenet newsgroups, Internet forumInternet forumAn Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
s, and blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s have not come to a consensus regarding the definition of the term.
History
One photography historian claimed that "the earliest exponent of 'Fine Art' or composition photography was John Edwin MayallJohn Jabez Edwin Mayall
John Jabez Edwin Paisley Mayall was an English photographer who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria. -External links:*...
, "who exhibited daguerrotypes illustrating the Lord's Prayer
Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
in 1851". Successful attempts to make fine art photography can be traced to Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....
, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Oscar Gustave Rejlander was a pioneering Victorian art photographer and an expert in photomontage...
and others. In the U.S. F. Holland Day
F. Holland Day
Fred Holland Day was an American photographer and publisher. He was the first in the U.S.A. to advocate that photography should be considered a fine art.-Life:...
, Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
and Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen
Edward J. Steichen was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Steichen also contributed the logo design and a custom typeface...
were instrumental in making photography a fine art, and Steiglitz was especially notable in introducing it into museum collections.
Until the late 1970s several genres predominated, such as; nudes, portraits, natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
). Breakthrough 'star' artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann
Sally Mann
Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.-Early life and education:...
and Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
, still relied heavily on such genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic
Snapshot aesthetic
The term snapshot aesthetic refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963 . The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and off-centered framing. Subject matter is often presented without apparent link from image-to-image and relying instead on...
approach.
American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation
Aperture (magazine)
Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine and a book publisher based in New York, New York. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography.-Magazine:...
and the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.
Framing and print size
Until the mid 1950s it was widely considered vulgar and pretentious to frame a photograph for a gallery exhibition. Prints were usually simply pasted onto blockboard or plywood, or given a white border in the darkroom and then pinned at the corners onto display boards. Prints were thus shown without any glass reflections obscuring them. Steichen's famous The Family of ManThe Family of Man
The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the 'culmination of his career'. The 508 photos by 273 photographers in 68 countries were selected from almost 2...
exhibition was unframed, the pictures pasted to panels. Even as late as 1966 Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.-Career and life:...
's MoMA show was unframed, with simple prints pasted to thin plywood. From the mid 1950's to about 2000 most gallery exhibitions had prints behind glass. Since about 2000 there has been a noticeable move toward once again showing contemporary gallery prints on boards and without glass. In addition, throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints.
Politics
Fine art photography is created primarily as an expression of the artist’s vision, but as a byproduct it has also been important in advancing certain causes. The work of Ansel AdamsAnsel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
in Yosemite and Yellowstone provides an example. Adams is one of the most widely recognized fine art photographers of the 20th century, and was an avid promoter of conservation. While his primary focus was on photography as art, some of his work raised public awareness of the beauty of the Sierra Nevada and helped to build political support for their protection.
Such photography has also had effects in the area of censorship law and free expression, due to its concern with the nude body.
Current trends
Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.-Life and career:Crewdson was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY...
, and Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall
Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early-1970s...
are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography has opened a new direction in full spectrum photography
Full spectrum photography
Full-spectrum photography is a subset of full spectral imaging, defined currently among photography enthusiasts as imaging with consumer cameras the full, broad spectrum of a film or camera sensor bandwidth...
, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector's market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.
According to Art Market Trends 2004 (PDF link) 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the USA. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales. There is now a thriving collectors' market for which the most sought-after art photographers will produce high quality archival prints in strictly limited editions. Attempts by online art retailers to sell fine photography to the general public alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional "big names" of photography such as Ansel Adams.
Overlap with other genres
Although fine art photography may overlap with many other genres of photography, the overlaps with fashion photographyFashion photography
Fashion photography is a genre of photography devoted to displaying clothing and other fashion items. Fashion photography is most often conducted for advertisements or fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, or Elle...
and photojournalism
Photojournalism
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
merit special attention.
In 1996 it was stated that there had been a "recent blurring of lines between commercial illustrative photography and fine art photography," especially in the area of fashion. Evidence for the overlap of fine art photography and fashion photography includes lectures, exhibitions, trade fairs such as Art Basel
Art Basel
Art Basel is an international contemporary art fair held each June in Basel, Switzerland. Similar to the Venice Biennale, it has been called "the Olympics of the art world". Art Basel features nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa...
Miami Beach, and books.
Photojournalism and fine art photography overlapped beginning in the "late 1960s and 1970s, when... news photographers struck up liaisons with art photography and painting". In 1974 the International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...
opened, with emphases on both "humanitarian photojournalism" and "art photography". By 1987, "pictures that were taken on assignments for magazines and newspapers now regularly reappear[ed] - in frames - on the walls of museums and galleries".
Attitudes of artists in other fields
The reactions of artists and writers have contributed significantly to perceptions of photography as fine art. Prominent painters, such as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, have asserted their interest in the medium: I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn. - Pablo Picasso; I have always been very interested in photography. I have looked at far more photographs than I have paintings. Because their reality is stronger than reality itself. - Francis Bacon. Noted authors, similarly, have responded to the artistic potential of photography: ...it does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart... - John Steinbeck.See also
- Fine artFine artFine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
- Tableau vivant photography
- List of photographers
Further reading
- Thompson, Jerry L. Truth and photography: notes on looking and photographing. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. ISBN 156663539X
- Bright, Susan. Art photography now. New York: Aperture, 2005. ISBN 193178891X
- Peres, Michael R. ed. The Focal encyclopedia of photography: digital imaging, theory and applications, history, and science. 4th edition. Amsterdam & Boston: Elsevier/Focal Press, 2007. ISBN 9780240807409
- Rosenblum, NaomiNaomi RosenblumNaomi Rosenblum is a historian of photography, best known for A World History of Photography and A History of Women Photographers...
. A world history of photography. 4th edition. New York: Abbeville Press, 2007. ISBN 9780789209375