It doesn't even matter to all the makers themselves.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, for one, considered photography only as a tool to "reach eternity through the moment of capture", in his own words. He also had the following to say:
And he was hardly not a photographer.Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks
Are you sure about that? The presumption of truth in photography (erroneous as it may be) goes back more than 100 years in the public's mind. Do we really know what unique appeal will be left to the art if the public loses that presumption? Off hand, I can't think of what's going to replace it.
Amen. What makes photography its own medium is that the original image is made by projecting light to form the image, rather than by the hand of an artist in applying paint or whatever. The subsequent printing method does nothing to undermine the fact that the image was originally made by projection and not by drawing or some other manual application.
It seems to me that those who get hung up on this have an agenda unrelated to language clarity. It sounds more like an ex post facto attempt to narrow the definition of their art to what it is that they do.
Rick "is a watercolorist a painter?" Denney
+1.
Bruce Watson
I am.
What makes you think it needs replacing? People got along just fine before photography was invented. They would get along just fine if photography (digital and analog) suddenly vanished entirely. There is no need for photography to be truth. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Which is good since photography can not be, and never has been, truth.
Bruce Watson
You can take a digital image and directly print it on silver halide paper if you want or you can print it with an ink jet printer, or dot matrix printer, or an Etch-A-Sketch with computer-driven servo motors hooked to the knobs. It's still an image originally created by light reflected off the subject, same as with an old-fashioned photograph.
Real photography has been going down hill since photographers stopped making daguerotypes
Using this logic, everything displayed on a computer screen is a photograph, including charts, text documents, webpages, etc.
Aren't you being a bit of an analogue snob? I mean, don't get me wrong, I personally feel that an all-analog process has a certain "richness" and warmth that's very difficult to reproduce digitally. But now we are to go splitting semantic hairs just to exclude digital artists from "photography"?
Sheesh. NO! Because the painter does not create an image by projecting the scene. That distinction seems so obvious to me as to call into question the motives of anyone who would challenge it.
Rick "thinking some people must be bowed down by the burden of the agenda they are carrying" Denney
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