Photography: Is it Art?

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What makes something art? This may be one of the greatest unanswered questions of all time. Of course, many people have tried to answer it in their own way. If it’s beautiful, it must be art. But is it still art if you don’t see any of the beauty it was meant to contain? If it was created from a purely original idea, it must be art. But then what is realism? The concept of art becomes much more vast and complicated once a person starts digging for answers. Many people believe that photography should not be considered art, but why? Photography has power; special powers that can change how people think, what they believe, and how they see the world. It can make celebrities look like gods. It can make a landfill look like the apocalypse. Photographs can create stories, controversies, and decorations to put above your fireplace. However, since the invention of the camera, painters and other artists all over the world have rejected photography as an art form. Yousef Khanfar, author of “The Language of Light”, an article in World Literature Today, once said “Photographers are the Mont Blanc of the art enterprise, for they create with beauty what they see with truth.” So, photography must be art, for a photographer only does with shapes and light what a painter does with paint.

It began with a man named Reiners Gemma Frisius. He was a mathematician who used what’s called camera obscura to observe a solar eclipse, way back in 1544 (Verma). The camera obscura was basically a big box with a lens that worked like a projector. It didn’t save the images like the modern camera does, but it was able to place an image of something anywhere you wanted it, within reason. Fourteen years later, it was used as a drawing tool, a sort of giant traci...

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... If you do it with a computer, if you do it in the darkroom, there’s a variety of ways of doing it — it’s not like one is better than the other.” (Lawton).

Works Cited

BBC. "Gallery." BBC News. BBC, 1 Oct. 2007. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

George Easton House, Inc.. "Image."Easton House. George Easton House, Inc., 1 Jan. 1962. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

Heiferman, Marvin. "The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian."Smithsonian Institution Archives. Smithsonian Institution Archives, 2 Feb. 2002. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

Khanfar, Yousef. "The Language Of Light. (Cover Story)." World Literature Today 87.2 (2013): 28. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

Lawton, Jenny. "Faking It: Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor - Studio 360." studio360. N.p., 16 Nov. 2012. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

Verma, Samidha. "Invention Story of Camera." EngineersGarage. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.

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