DOES THE CRAFT OF PHOTOGRAPHY LEAD TO ART? CAN WE HAVE ART WITHOUT CRAFT?

By Miranda Ryan

CONTENTSHistory of photographySkepticisms of photographyWhat is craft?What is art?Is photography an art or a craft?Case study- Arts relationship to craftQuestionsReferences

BRIEF HISTORY- 1822 – Nicéphore Niépce 1835 – William Fox Talbot creates his own photography process.1839 – Louis Daguerre patents the daguerreotype.1839 – William Fox Talbot invented the positive / negative process widely used in modern photography. He refers to this as photogenic drawing.1851 – Introduction of the collodion process by Frederick Scott Archer.1861 – The first color photograph, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, is shown by James Clerk Maxwlll.1871 – The gelatin emulsion is invented by Richard Maddox.1887 – Celluloid film base introduced.1888 – Kodak n°1 box camera is mass marketed; first easy-to-use camera.1891 – Thomas Edison patents the "kinetoscopic camera" (motion pictures).1895 – Auguste and Louis Lumière – Invented the cinématographe.

 

1948 – Edwin H. Land introduces the first Polaroid instant image camera .1949 - The Contax S camera was introduced, the first 35mm SLR camera with pentaprism for eye-level viewing.- 1957- first image scanned into a digital computer1975 – Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the Bayer filter mosaic pattern for CCD color image sensors.1986 – Kodak scientists invent the world's first megapixel sensor.2005 – AgfaPhoto files for bankruptcy. Production of Agfa brand consumer films ends.2006 – Dalsa produces 111 megapixel CCD sensor, the highest resolution at its time.2008 – Polaroid announces it is discontinuing the production of all instant film products, citing the rise of digital imaging technology.

SKEPTICISMS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

•When the camera was first introduced portrait artist were concerned.•Landscape artists were threatened. •”photography is just mechanics”•”Photography is just realism”•“Anyone can take a photo”•“Everyone has a photo album”

ART VS CRAFT

WHAT IS CRAFT?

- From the German word ‘Kraft’ meaning power or ability.

- Usually a human element associated with craft

- There is a level of technique involved

- Craft work is skilled work: any kind of craft must involve the application of a technique. (Dutton, 1990)

WHAT IS ART?Definition-

1. The expression or application of human creative skill and

imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture,

producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or

emotional power.2. Works produced by such skill and imagination. 

- Some say that Art is the application of emotion whereas craft involves a

technique.

WHAT IS ARTS RELATIONSHIP TO CRAFT?

-Craft can be quantified whereas art is not. -Originally artist were scared and intimidated by photographers and other craftsmen, however in today's society it has become increasingly more

common for artists to acknowledge craft as a means to art.

-However there are still some that do not see this viewpoint, looking down on photographers

because there is ‘less artistic skill required’.

Making something purely technically is a feature of craft and implies a preconceived end this sort of claim about the impossibility of foreknowledge for Art is made frequently in art theory and has something in common with the divine inspiration view (Bailin 1988)

'Art is anything that adds something new to the sum total of human aesthetic

experience. Craft is a means to art, craft is merely the craft of making something. It is making something that has no more to do

with art than it does with wagons. You have to be a craftsman to do either one, but they serve totally different functions, and to call something a craft, to make a noun out of a craft I think is ridiculous; it isn't – it's a verb as far as I'm concerned.’

Robert SperryInterview by Lamar HarringtonArchives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute

The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture. The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has led to the separation of 'having ideas' from 'making objects.' It has also led to the idea

that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as 'creativity' that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things. This has led to art without

craft.'

Peter Dormer The Culture of Craft

CAN WE HAVE ART WITHOUT CRAFT?

There are two sides to this story…

ON ONE HAND

YES-

solution- ‘why not say more simply there is a kind of excellence peculiar to the arts that any form of activity that can achieve this form of excellence is

an art?” (Passmore, 1991)

 Creativity is a basic human ability that is just as

applicable to art as it is to math and science. Anyone who can achieve excellence is capable of

achieving art.

On the other hand…

NO- Instead of hard-earned craft and artistic masterworks, we have junk that shows us that "Art is...everything to do with love.

 Students are encouraged and rewarded for personal and "creative” writings which seem to be judged by the same.

prizes for writing brief diary entries which involve as much craft as making breakfast with cereal from a box. long apprenticeship in a craft, such as sculpture or painting.

"There are no shortcuts” in academic expository writing or in art.

Artists and writers who try to take a shortcut and skip learning their craft turn out junk. Perhaps we should consider expecting our students, if not our modern artists, to try for a little higher level of achievement than craft-free junk?(Fitzhugh, 2008)

IS PHOTOGRAPHY AN ART OR A CRAFT?

WHAT IS ART???????

Who has the ability to define what art is and what is deemed artistic?

Photography in particular had become the chief catalyst in rendering out of date many mythical and notions about art. It is

in the process of changing right now. (Lovejioy 1990) 

Some photographers have been considered art, some are considered commercial.

 Rethinking the notion of art

CREATIVITY 

Is art as is assumed by common sense more creative and thus more valuable than craft?

 Harold Osborne points out in Aesthetics and art theory that ‘the making of aesthetic objects has been almost

universal through human history.  

There have been comparatively few peoples at any time that did not produce artifacts that were

beautifully made.  

The idea of creativity in the modern romantic sense in connection with the arts was absent from Greek

philosophy equally foreign to their mentality was the idea of art as an expression of the artists personality

(Osborne 1968 pp 13-14)

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

“Annie Leibovitz has been making powerful images documenting American popular culture since the early 1970s,

when her photographs began appearing in Rolling Stone Magazine. Ten years

later she began working for Vanity Fair, and then Vogue US, creating a diverse

body of work. Following a record-breaking tour in the US and Europe, this

hugely popular exhibition showcases commercial, documentary and personal

works selected by the artist.”

-MCA

"I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for

any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about,”

she said at the time. Disney claimed the young singer and actress had been

"deliberately manipulated" but Leibovitz defended the portraits, calling them "very

beautiful" and claiming they had been misinterpreted.

DOES THE CRAFT OF PHOTOGRAPHY LEAD TO ART?

NO_____________________

•Anyone can take a photo•It is simply just recording an event not taking into account the time it has taken •‘Artist and their publics think that no two objects produced by an artist should be alike. But for good craftsmen, that is not a consideration, on the contrary the artists craftsmen control shows in his ability to make things as much alike as he does… nobody wants to buy a copy from an artist, only from a craftsmen (Becker)

YES____________________

•If the photographer has an artistic vision and has planned a concept it is art•Editing techniques allow the original photo to be altered, subverting the original and letting the photographer create.•Anyone can take a photo but not anyone can learn the craft and take it that further to create art.

 The arts have always been with us and so have

the ideas of beauty, sublimity, and transcendence along with the virilities of the human condition:

love, death, memory, suffering, power, fear, loss, desire and hope’

Ellen Disseankye

QUESTIONS?What do you think?

Are there any photographers that you think are artists?

Should the arts include photography?

REFERENCESBecker, Howard S (1982), Art Worlds. Berkley: University of California Press

Collingwood, R, (2005). "Man Goes Mad" in The Philosophy of Enchantment. Oxford University Press, 318.

Csikszetnmhalyi, M. (2004) Extract from: ‘Creativity Across the Life-Span: A Systems View’, online, pp1-2.Dissenkye, E, (1980) "Art as a human behavior: Toward an ethological view of art", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38/4, 397-404.

Harvey D. (1990) ‘The Work of Art in an age of Electronic Reproduction and Image Banks’ in The Condition of PostModernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp347-349. Liebovitz, A, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005Museum of Contemporary Art,(2008), Annie Liebovitz exhibition websitePassmore, J, Serious art : a study of the concept in all the major art, 1991

Price, D and Wells, L. (2003) ‘Aesthetics and Technology’ in Liz Wells (ed) Photography: A Critical Introduction 2nd ed., Routledge, London, 2003, pp12-24.

Singh, A, (2008) Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus: Vanity Fair photo scandal made fans relate to me, The Telegraph