The time-immemorial question in photography is WHAT is photographic art, when presenting something that someone ELSE has done!?

 

The three images that I am showing here illustrate this question well – and, yet, there may be differing opinions.  I will also add another picture to the group, but it is a MENTAL picture – that I want you to imagine.  The gedanken picture is of a building, a beautiful glass building, with many curved surfaces, in layers along the length of the building, and palm trees interspersed within these layers.  The picture is taken at sunrise, so that the image of a bright sun is reflected off several different layers of curved glass, silhouetting the palm fronds, and giving the entire building an eerie glow.  Now – this picture shows the ENTIRE building.  If I were to print the picture and frame it and hang it on a wall for sale – would it be ART that I am selling, or just the documentation of a great building that someone else built?

 

That is the question that I would like to pursue here.

 

Consider the image on this page that shows a strange stone face peering out through a space, also seeming of stone, with lots of ornate and gorgeous surfaces.  This is a photograph I took in a cave that was carved out of sandstone in northern New Mexico by a great and basically totally unknown artist by the name of Ra Paulette.  He took me to five of his hand-carved caves – a labor of love requiring decades of his life, and I gratefully photographed them.  The piece that I am showing here is quite lovely and interesting, but it is not really MY art.  It was my technical proficiency that allowed me to capture HIS art – perhaps somewhat in a different way than he intended, but HE lived with these spaces as he created them, and HE was the mastermind behind the work.  Maybe I have presented it in an exciting way – but it is not MY art.  I do NOT show these works as mine in a gallery or in an exhibition.  I WILL sell them, but only when Ra and I each share in the profit.  This is a collaborative work – he MADE the work, I MADE the presentation using MY eye and reflecting the things that I found exciting about the spaces HE created.

 

Consider the color image on this same page – it was taken in Bisbee, Arizona last year – and shows a part of a wall that a number of artists had painted in a very appealing way.  The IMAGE that I have captured is also very appealing, it is exciting, and, no doubt, when printed large and with lots of color depth, it would be wonderful to hang on a wall.  BUT – it is NOT MY art – it is the art of the painters.  I DID capture it in a way that might be different from what most people see.  I selected FROM the whole work what I liked and presented it dramatically – but it was a flat surface that was painted – how many people could have done the same thing that I did with it – MANY!  The cave photography might well NOT have been captured that way by anyone else that had the experience of being in the cave, and certainly not with the professional camera system that I needed to use, but it is not that much different.

 

Now consider the Fijian Ceiling photograph – the complex arrangement of wooden beams and rafters that make the inside of this building.  This building was constructed using typical Fijian techniques, and the contractors that built it certainly didn’t consider it a work of art, or even particularly creative.  The IMAGE that I created from the space they created, in this case, is created in such a way as to highlight what others, including the builders, might not even see.  THIS is MY art – based on a foundation of human endeavor – much as an image of a fishing net, presented elsewhere in this site, creates a graphic image that is appealing, but represents work done by someone else in a very special way and arrangement.

When things made by man, NOT to be art, but to be utilitarian, are presented to us with a graphical beauty and an appeal that transcends the mere existence of the object or space, but elicits curiosity about WHY the object or space was created, WHO created it and HOW – then both the visual condition and the emotional and intellectual conditions for art have been met – and where the creator of the space or object is secondary to the larger goal.

So – while all three of these pieces I show is ART – each is beautiful in its own right – each elicits curiosity about what is represented – each you would hang on your wall and visitors would enjoy it and get an interesting story related to it – only ONE would I sell as MY art, ONE I would sell as collaborative art, ONE I might hang on my own wall, but would NEVER sell as my work, and the mental building image should remain forever locked away in my negative file, no matter how beautiful it is.

If you are an artist, and more particularly a photographic artist,  I would love to see you continue this discussion – it was started on my Facebook page and it is worth considering further …  I must admit that I struggle a bit with some of the nuances  … but that is what a good discussion is all about!

Michael Duggan