photography . is it art ?????????

How many times will this question be asked , I wonder. Why does it pop up with such regularity -  again  and again and again.

 I moved out of painting to a practice of photography that I did not want to see as Art. I did that a long time ago. There was a lapse in the 1990s . I rue those days when I was part of an effort to get photography recognized as an art by the official bodies of the Government of India. That battle was won but photographers did not suddenly become Artists.  It was the wrong battle to fight and win.


I saw this review in the Guardian, and it set me thinking of those sad battles to see photography as Art.  All through the 19th and 20th centuries


For 180-years, people have been asking the question: is photography art? At an early meeting of the Photographic Society of London, established in 1853, one of the members complained that the new technique was "too literal to compete with works of art" because it was unable to "elevate the imagination". This conception of photography as a mechanical recording medium never fully died away. Even by the 1960s and 70s, art photography – the idea that photographs could capture more than just surface appearances – was, in the words of the photographer Jeff Wall, a "photo ghetto" of niche galleries, aficionados and publications.




The show is not a survey but rather examines how photography's earliest practitioners looked to paintings when they were first exploring their technology's potential, and how their modern descendants are looking both to those photographic old masters and in turn to the old master paintings.



If early photographers had no option but to negotiate their own engagement with painting their modern descendants can call on nearly two centuries of photographic history. 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/oct/19/photography-is-it-art



It is in HIstory that the problem lies. The History of Art. A History that photography has become a part of in its desire to  be an Art.   A history full of Master Photographers and Master Photographs. A history  that photography borrows from  at its own cost.  Photography can be and is something much more than a mere Art.  Reducing it to that  would be  destroying its power.  

I found this series of blog posts very interesting. They echo my thoughts and feelings about photography, its history and its place in not just history but in the social and political spaces of  society. . 

Once again we are confronted with the unruly, fractured nature of this thing we too simply call photography. But also of what is at stake in its study—subjectivity itself. My posts to Still Searching have suggested that a tracing of photography’s dissemination, as evidenced in particular photographic instances of repetition and difference, reveals the medium always to be fraught with its own divided and multiplied identities. One can find evidence of the effects of this division and multiplication wherever we look, from photography’s beginnings to the present, in high art as well as vernacular practices, in the West and elsewhere around the planet, in the photograph and in our experience of it. Certainly an investigation of photography’s reproducibility has allowed, even forced, me to address issues and practices insufficiently dealt with by existing scholarship. I have proposed here that a pursuit of this one theme might therefore offer up a productive way of writing a new kind of history for photography.

Abandoning the linear narrative structure and hierarchical values of most existing histories of photography, this new version would seek to engage the medium’s entire history at once and as part of the same story. Chronology must be discarded as an organizing principle in favor of clusters of specific “practices” of photographic reproduction drawn from throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Art can of course be included (as it has been in my posts) but ordinary and vernacular practices will necessarily dominate any history that attempts to tell us something useful about photography as a total phenomenon. On this basis, our histories of photography can at last abandon the effort to be comprehensive (an impossible and perhaps even dangerous ambition anyway) and instead aim to be at least representative.

What I’ve tried to persuade you is that, if we are to finally to have a history that seeks to tell us something useful about photography, that tells us what photography does and how and why it does it, a traditional narrative centered on origins, great individual achievements, and purity of medium will simply no longer be adequate. We need to set about inventing a mode of photographic history that matches the complexity of actual photographs. In short, we need to come up with an entirely new kind of history for photography.

http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/10/5-a-subject-for-a-history-about-photography/