Photography and Fine Art

Last Updated on August 1, 2016 by Patrick

Today I’d like to write about certain artistic aspects that are in photography also, as well as in any art medium or what have you. I was wondering one day why do they call some works of art “fine art”? And the answer was quite simple, because it is created in accordance with the vision of the artist as a photographer, according to wikipedia. It is different in many ways than other kinds of photography. And that’s what I’d like to talk about right now.

The vision the photographer has begins with recognizing the moment or the subject matter (while out there, in the field, working, and while he or she is in a state of awareness, or presence) and building upon it using one’s own imagination, the photograph or the work of art. Often it comes to triggering a sort of interpenetration effect in one’s own mind and consciousness. Pretty complicated, isn’t it?

Well, imagine you’re in a room full of mirrors and you would put a lit candle in the center of the room and every mirror reflects that candle and its light and you. The same thing goes with us. When we are out there in the fields trying to see, to photograph that moment we are all waiting for, what we encounter triggers in our mind what we think and what we feel about that moment, it doesn’t matter what it is about. You could call this process subjective, because often it is. Everything we think of right then and there we put into our images that we produce. So, it is often called that our photographic work describes us or some parts of us. We reflect each other in our work and in nature etc.

Of course, the medium has also a lot to do with what we create. Whether it’s the camera, the lenses, the filters, or even the post-production processes, they’re our tools of trade, so to speak, with which we produce our finally resulted images. It could be that we like to do an HDR photo, or turn a negative into a black & white photograph, or make it sort of moody kind of composite image, it doesn’t matter, it is still the tool with which we create our fine art images.

This is actually the art of photography. Of course, there is still a lot of controversy over the subject of post-production. Some people say that by processing an image we cheat, others are fine with it. I’m not going into much detail on this but I think it is all a matter of choice, taste and it’s the free will of everyone to do whatever they want with their images.

On the other hand, photography can be used for commercial only purposes like stock photography, or fashion photography, although the latter can become artsy, as it is often the case. There are many photographers out there that do fashion shoots and they’re very creative in such a way that their images are truly artworks.

So, when we talk about commercial photography we can also talk about photography for tourism purposes. This is the kind of photography that some people do for different agencies, or they like to sell postcards with their photos, or other kind of prints and so on. Now, one can say that if there is a difference between photography only for day to day purposes (including commercializing prints to hang them on a wall somewhere) there could be similarities also. The truth is that fine-art photography can overlap with other kinds of photography, meaning that one can do fine-art to sell postcards or photobooks and so on. I mean that there isn’t a straight limit between doing photography without adding trancendental or subjective meaning and doing actual fine-art photography. But it’s very easy to recognize which one is which.

And therefore I would also say that it is only a matter of choice, taste and creative abilities anyone can have when doing photography.