What is fine art photography?

[Nick K]

Fine art is just marketing mumbo jumbo. It is a term used by people trying to sell prints of photographs and denote them from any other kind of photographs. The whole process of photography is so broad and deep and there is such a gradient of people who engage in all these different processes with myriad styles that you cannot pigeon hole one as being better than the other. So defining "fine art" is going to be a fruitless effort, a completely subjective term which exists only to help people who are trying to make money in the art world.

The only thing that can really determine whether or not, in the long run, what is sold as "fine art" has true artistic merit in the long run, be it fine or not, is the test of time.

I think a lot of people may be trying to define the term "art", which is one of those things people will always hem and haw about. There are a lot of ways to look at that question, I guess. I always thought of art loosely as anything which makes me think based on some kind of aesthetic impression. Yeah its a terrible, loose definition but then the art world itself is pretty loosely defined.

Whatever art is, it needs to be framed, so you know where art ends and wall begins.

Loosely quoted from Frank Zappa

If I spray a stencil on a wall with spray paint, it can be (though is not by necessity) urban art. If that wall happens to be in my home, on someone elses house, or a government building that meaning can change significantly in each case. Sorry...just being a pissant.

[Kirk Gittings]

J,

Having juried hundreds of photo exhibits over the last 38 years, I have to say that (just as now) prior to digital there was plenty of crap in all photo media pretending to be art. Little has changed in that regard with the advent of digital.

[Nick K]

J,

Having juried hundreds of photo exhibits over the last 38 years, I have to say that (just as now) prior to digital there was plenty of crap in all photo media pretending to be art. Little has changed in that regard with the advent of digital.

But really it is my general observation that this is true of almost any "art" area that I see for sale. I don't really think I am that harsh of a critic, either.

[Leonard Metcalf]

A couple more definitions I found:

“Fine art photography, sometimes simply called art photography, refers to high-quality archival photographic prints of pictures that are created to fulfill the creative vision of an individual professional. Such prints are reproduced, usually in limited editions, in order to be sold to dealers, collectors or curators, rather than mass reproduced in advertising or magazines. Prints will sometimes, but not always, be exhibited in an art gallery.”

en.wikipedia.org 2007

"Fine Art Prints are prints of photographs that were created solely to fulfill the creative vision of an individual artist and where the print itself is the final physical expression of the creative process. “

Nick Rains 2007

Regards, Len

[Gary L. Quay]

I was having a version of this descussion on the Ilford Forum site. I come down on the art side of the coin. I believe that photography can be art. I mentioned the exchange on Ilford to my wife, and she agreed. A few days later, we went a favorite spot of mine: the Hawthorne Bridge here in Portland. After a few shots at an angle that I've been working on for years, I decided to move my camera to a spot that I haven't shot from often. She said, "It's never good to always shoot from the same spot too much." To which I replied, "But I haven't gotten that one right yet." She said, "Yep, you're an artist."

Art is a pact between the atrist and the viewer. If they both agree, it's art.

--Gary