Is there such a thing as fine art photography anymore?

[cyrus]

Is photography as a fine art form, dead? Are we so saturated with images, cheap and easy-to-create images, that they have lost any significance? When any 9-year old with a cellphone camera and Photoshop can be a photographer, does it mean anything anymore? This isn't a wet-vs-digital rant. The question is whether photography as a whole, wet or digital, reduced to banality.

[Bill_1856]

Same as it's always been.

[jon.oman]

It does not matter, I create images for my own satisfaction....

[cyrus]

For my own satisfaction, yes, but gosh I'm having a crisis over that now and not just in photography -- I paint and do sculpture for example and noticed that you can buy mass reproduced Chinese sculptures and paintings at very small $ nowdays so who would want my stuff when you can get a mass reproduced chinese bronze of whatever subject you want for pennies on the dollar of what it would cost me to make it? It costs me a LOT of $ and effort and years of whiffing chemicals...and no one appreciates it because there's BILLIONS of other images out there on Google. Maybe generations ago, the product of skilled labor was appreciated, at least if only for the sake of the craftsmanship nevermind artistic merit. But nowdays, it has become not only cheap and easy to simulate the skills, but we also have this whole idea of art as entirely subjective so there is no "good" vs "bad" art anymore either. Some scribbles on canvas? ART! Even if an elephant did it. The important thing is to make it BIG - the bigger the canvas the better, regardless of content.

So if you stick with it as an artist, you can go one of two ways -- either produce banalties that sell (if you're lucky) to a mass market, that billions of others can do equally well with "Instagram" etc. for people who don't know the difference between a pixel and a enlarger and just want a pretty picture to put over the sofa or a pretentious coffee table book as decor, or go make stuffed sharks in tanks that while the masses may not appreciate but the frou frou all-black wearing crowd can feel is 'exclusive' (and expensive) and sets them apart from the hoi poloi... but really, is just silly & is really more about celebrity and hype and sensationalism than about art. And in the end, Does anyone care? Is there such a thing as Art, meaningful Art, anymore? or has everything been reduced to an empty hype and banality for and by hipster poseurs.
Should I chuck it all and go sailing?

[Erik Larsen]

I shoot for myself, let other folks label it however they like it makes no difference to how I enjoy myself in the pursuit. Fine art photography isn't dead, there's just a lot more fine art photographers than there used to be
Regards
Erik

[adam satushek]

You know what they say, "make it big...and if you can't make it big make it red."

[C.T. Greene]

I shoot for myself, let other folks label it however they like it makes no difference to how I enjoy myself in the pursuit. Fine art photography isn't dead, there's just a lot more fine art photographers than there used to be Regards
Erik

Depends on how one defines art & photography then the aspect of craft respectively to what you call 'Fine Art Photography'?

[Vaughn]

I still feel appreciated for the fine art photography that I do. A few sales here and there are also much appreciated (two this month). I am my primary audience -- and since I tend to be a fairly honest critic and editor of myself, what I put out there seems to strike a chord with other people -- except those, of course, who are biased against B&W and/or landscapes.

IMO, millions (or billions) of banal images just makes the good ones stand out a bit more -- not hide them.

But sailing would be a nice break.

Vaughn

PS -- I will be in a group show at the Ansel Adams Gallery next month (honoring the Merced River), if anyone happens through Yosemite Valley.

[cyrus]

Well I certainly appreciate that people do art for their own satisfaction but it seems very limiting and self-referential -- is that all that there is to being an artist? I mean, people fix cars because they enjoy it too, or golf, or collect seashells. There's gotta be more meaning to being an artist than "I do it because I personally enjoy it". Generations ago, the Expressionists brought us a new way of seeing things when they rebelled against the worn academic art of the time. We don't even have anything to rebel against because its all lost any meaning and significance. The best you can hope for is to piss off some fundies by putting christ in a jar of pee or something but that's just a cheap way to bait them and create some sensationalism. And apart from the fundamentalists, no one really gives a hoot about that either.

[Erik Larsen]

Depends on how one defines art & photography then the aspect of craft respectively to what you call 'Fine Art Photography'?

It's difficult for me to come up with a definition, it's kind of like pornography - you know it when you see it. That's why I don't put a label on it.
Erik