Category talk:Photographers/Art photographers (merged category)

message: I'm puzzled by this new category. What is it for? I see that Robert Capa is in it, and, excellent though his work is, I can't see how he was an "art photographer" other than in the sense that people have gone to see exhibitions of his photos hung on the walls. But if the criterion for "art photographer" here is as loose as that, then it would seem to include most of the photographers who get articles here. If that's too big a group to contemplate, well, all those in :Category:Japanese photographers (with the probable exception of one Yoji Ishikawa, who seems to be a producer of pornokitsch).
(The category includes Fine art photography -- thus counting a kind of photography as a kind of photographer, but we'll let that pass. Art photography redirects to Fine art photography and this article defines both terms as "high-quality archival photographic prints of pictures that are created to fulfill the creative vision of an individual professional". By that definition, "art photography" is the product of any professional who makes such prints from any negative. So somebody working for a museum that has access to negatives whose significance is purely documentary can turn those negs into "art photography".) -- Hoary 12:51, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting discussion. Taking up the question of 'what is an art photographer?', the case of Robert Capa is a sort of pivot point. I don't imagine that Capa took photos as a self-conscious "artist" more than as an aesthetically-aware recorder of events. Did he expect his photos to wind up on the walls of museums next to paintings by Manet? And thinking of later photographers (who have worked in an era when the art status of photography is no longer the question it once was), are people like James Nachtwey, Susan Meiselas, Alfredo Jaar and Sebastiao Salgado art photographers? Because their work has certainly been exhibited in museums. And although they are all obviously very conscious of the importance of aesthetic and artistic concerns it's hard to consider Nachtwey and Meiselas art photographers, and not unproblematic to do so with Jaar and Salgado. Going back in time, what would you say of 19th century photographers who most definitely did not consider what they did to be art - yet who produced beautiful objects that have often been exhibited and who have posthumously been considered artists of one kind or another. Was Carleton Watkins an art photographer? He made many artistic views of fruit trees in bloom and of Yosemite... A more pointed (if lesser-known) example is Ogawa Kazumasa, whose 19th century photographic studies of flowers could reasonbly be compared with those of Mapplethorpe, and who was once commissioned to photograph one hundred Tokyo geisha... but who could only have thought of himself and been thought of as a successful commercial photographer. The upshot of all this is that such photographers only become art photographers when someone else decides to make them so. Personally, I think it could be slightly more justifiable to put Ogawa in this category than Capa, but it has nothing to do with their relative abilities as photographers and everything to do with the work they produced and their intent. Maybe this category has legitimacy only when the photographer has defined herself or himself as an art photographer...? Pinkville 16:38, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Those are important points. There may be artists who use photography as a way of making art, and photographers who take pictures of art objects, but "art photography" isn't a subject in the way that "landscape photography" or "documentary photography" are, it doesn't indicate subject matter, but instead (attempts) to makes a claim as to the status/perception of the work itself. Pinkville 20:08, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Or we could just delete the category...  Postdlf 01:18, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't argue with that. Let's give this a couple of days, and if there's no convincing defense then one of us can proceed. -- Hoary 07:27, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool.  I love the 55 volumes, btw...  Great for taking on the subway.  Not so true of most of my photography books... : )  Postdlf 15:22, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Use ["art photography"] for the movement in England and the United States, from around 1890 into the early 20th century, which promoted various aesthetic approaches. Historically, has sometimes been applied to any photography whose intention is aesthetic, as distinguished from scientific, commercial, or journalistic; for this meaning, use "photography." For discussion of photography as a fine art, use "photography" plus "art theory." Regarding photography of art, use "photography" plus "art objects" or "works of art." Pinkville 21:33, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think scientific or technical photography and photojournalism are easily definable categories, because the use to which the photographs are put dictated their creation in the first place.  I don't think that's true of "commercial," which can vaguely mean "made for hire," "made for a profit motive," or "made for advertising," or a derogatory term meaning "only made for a profit motive rather than artistic"...  I'd advise against creating such a category.  Postdlf 21:37, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry. it was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion on my part. For several reasons, I don't feel comfortable with any of these categories: they're hard to define and therefore hard to use, most photographers work in more than one field (category) anyway, and they're unduly limiting. The combination of these problems mean that in the end the categories don't do what they ought to do, which is to organise and contextualise knowledge. For example, instead of spending time discovering Man Ray's work, one struggles to figure out how to fit him into one or more pigeonholes. Categories based on subjects make more sense to me (even with certain inevitable ambiguities). Pinkville 18:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: What's this category for?