Is there such a thing as fine art photography anymore?

[Kodachrome25]

I do photography for my self and no one else....and get paid full time for that. When someone asks me what I shoot, Fine Art is one of the things I tell them I do. For me personally, the Fine Art distinction embraces the idea that the image can not be found slathered all over the Internet or on some place like Flickr. It also means that it will never be considered for editorial or commercial use, will remain fine art and that once an edition is sold out, that is it.

I have no problems using the term Fine Art under these beliefs and set of rules...

[Jay DeFehr]

I do photography for my self and no one else....and get paid full time for that. When someone asks me what I shoot, Fine Art is one of the things I tell them I do. For me personally, the Fine Art distinction embraces the idea that the image can not be found slathered all over the Internet or on some place like Flickr. It also means that it will never be considered for editorial or commercial use, will remain fine art and that once an edition is sold out, that is it.

I have no problems using the term Fine Art under these beliefs and set of rules...

Wow! That's great! Do you have a website?

[Richard Rau]

Yes! One minor point - the grade at the other end of the scale is "coarse art", not "rough art".

Yep, I stand corrected. (i actually caught it as soon as I posted it, but it was late and I was too tired to correct it.) None-the-less there is a lot of so-called fine art out there that could be described as "rough"? But then again, this is just semantics and everybody's a critic.

[Tajmul12345]

I am also to create picture for my own satisfaction

[gary mulder]

The expression Fine in this case originates from a moral domain. Most of the time a moral domain is claimed for ones own. Meaning ; it's not art if it does not meet my moral standards.

[John Brady]

At one of the shows I recently participated in, a person looked at my work and asked if it was art or photography? That kind of sums it up.

I am never comfortable describing my work as fine art.

www.timeandlight.com

[jp]

At one of the shows I recently participated in, a person looked at my work and asked if it was art or photography?

If they are at all computer/math nerdy, you could say "yes" and be confidently correct. If they are not nerdy they'll glare and wish they hadn't asked.

[Kirk Gittings]

At one of the shows I recently participated in, a person looked at my work and asked if it was art or photography? That kind of sums it up.

I am never comfortable describing my work as fine art.

www.timeandlight.com

The obvious answer is both. Why all the hand wringing over such an utterly naive question with an obvious answer that was fought for and won 30-40 years ago?

It still profoundly amazes me that so many people here are so stuck oftentimes in pre-60s aesthetics and ideology.

[Brian C. Miller]

The Online Photographer mentioned Bill Jay's vision, and this is what Bill wrote on the subject:

Photography-as-art has led us into a morass of problems that denigrate the medium. I am thinking of the fact that galleries—and not the photographer's peers—are now the arbiters of taste and photographic merit; that 'success' is equated with fame and not with an individual's struggle to transcend self; that photographic journalism is riddled with pompous, unintelligible art-jargon and that clear, informative prose is hard to find; that photographers' egos have become so inflated that the individual's integrity has floated out of sight; that differentness, perversity, and slickly presented banality is touted as photography of the highest quality; that gallery and media hype has replaced a long-term committed paying-of-dues and that instant 'stars,' created by publicity and comprising nothing more substantial than hot gases, have diverted attention from the serious worker who has quietly struggled to maintain his or her vision and faith over many years; that something inexplicably yet intrinsically photographic has been killed in the fight for art acceptance.

(Bill Jay, Camera Arts, April/May 1981, emphasis added)

So what was true 31 years ago seems to be still running strong.

Here's the real points to ponder:
1: What does it mean to photographically transcend self?
2: What does "paying of dues" really mean?
3: What constitutes a "serious worker?"

[Kirk Gittings]

I knew Bill Jay a bit (we were both at UNM at the same time) and IMO he was an interesting guy with strong personal opinions who liked to ruffle feathers. Beyond that I personally never took him tooooo seriously. The statement above I would classify as one of his efforts at ruffling feathers to get a rise out of people. Despite the statement above he sought out, studied and hung out with two icons of the "art photography" lexicon, Beaumont Newhall and Van Deuron Coke and lived in the rarified air of the "big leagues" of the academic art community.