Will the Real Landscape Photography Please Stand Up ?

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

...Apparently Mike Johnston (of The Online Photographer fame) had nothing to say about your comment.

Still saying nothing about my comment, but coincidentally, he had another blog post the other day about "is photography art?"

I cherry-picked the following (bold mine):

Most contemporary commentators are content to dismiss the issue either by questioning its relevance or by concluding that it can't be resolved. Yeah, photography sort of is art, they seem to be saying, but it sort of isn't, and besides it really doesn't matter.

And the one close to my comment (again, bold mine):

what I believe: that photography is not an art, but that some photographers are nevertheless artists.

Except I package it a bit differently: those are artists who happen to be photographers.

[Iluvmycam]

Burt Glinn from the 1981 book World Photography by Bryn Campbell.


"Our world is so flooded with photographic images that when we preconceive we end up, probably unwittingly, taking pictures of pictures we have seen."

[Isaac]

Still saying nothing about my comment, but coincidentally, he had another blog post the other day about "is photography art?"

I don't think that blog post says anything much of relevance to your original comment:

"There is a profound difference between artists using photography as a medium, and photographers striving to create art."

"I don't have to give myself a label. What I can do is say 'no' to certain things. For example, if I'm invited to do a photography show, I tend to say no. The medium itself, I find, is a relatively boring context. You would never see a show about acrylic painting. If it's that kind of understanding of the medium, it's completely uninteresting on an intellectual level. I make art. I don't come from a photographic background and I try to stay away from contexts where the work is diminished down to how it's made. For example, I wouldn't do a show about Fuji film.
…
I don't teach photography students, I teach art students, and if they think they can make use of a camera that's fine. But probably they've started at the wrong end because they've chosen their medium before they've chosen their content."

Thomas Demand, pp14-22 Image Makers, Image Takers

Is there a profound difference between artists using painting as a medium, and painters striving to create art etc. ?

[NancyP]

"All" photographers do is select image contents and then modify to taste. There isn't the degree of individuality conferred by having to use hand and arm to create an image. Drawings and paintings show the characteristic pencil/crayon/brush/pen strokes and brush strokes of the individual artist - as individual as a person's handwriting. The more mechanical nature of photography accounts for its reputed objectivity and for the eternal question "But Is It Art?". In some ways the "new film", "alternative/historical methods" movement and the use of experimental photography as part of mixed media art are attempts to get away from the mechanical objectivity to something that feels more like traditional art. (and of course some people just like to mess around with wet plates, etc).

[Isaac]

Drawings and paintings show the characteristic pencil/crayon/brush/pen strokes and brush strokes of the individual artist - as individual as a person's handwriting.

Not really, "because there is never going to be a definitive Rembrandt."

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

...Is there a profound difference between artists using painting as a medium, and painters striving to create art etc. ?

Of course... the latter you pay by the square footage of your walls, plus paint.

[Isaac]

Of course... the latter you pay by the square footage of your walls, plus paint.

So "photographers striving to create art" you would pay by the square footage of your walls, plus canvas.

[Diego Pigozzo]

I still wonder what a "real landscape photography" looks like.

[Isaac]

Ask the blogger.

[Diego Pigozzo]

Ask the blogger.

He doesn't seems to know, either.

[Isaac]

If the blogger doesn't know a difference between what they mean by "real landscape photography" and what they mean by "landscape photography" then it's not anything we need to wonder about.

[Diego Pigozzo]

If the blogger doesn't know a difference between what they mean by "real landscape photography" and what they mean by "landscape photography" then it's not anything we need to wonder about.

That's what I thought, in fact...

[Gulag]

I still wonder what a "real landscape photography" looks like.

May I suggest Google Image Dresden Bombing before and after,  Stalingrad Battle Before and After,  as well as Hiroshima before and after? You will definitely witness the power of the Western technology and its most important concept of man.

For those who really want to make a more valuable commodity in the artwork,  let me quote this French guy:

"The market value of suffering and death had become superior to that of pleasure and sex, Jed thought, and it was probably for this reason that Damien Hirst had, a few years earlier, replaced Jeff Koons at the top of the art market."

— Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory

[Diego Pigozzo]

I'm not sure why the "real" adjective should apply to city bombing's photo but not to "postcard style" photo.

On the marketing value of death and suffering in art, I'm not sure it's a modern trait: most of ancient art deals with battles, fights between heroes and so on.
And don't forget the via crucis, or Michelangelo's "La pietà".

One can surely say that "La pietà" is not about death and suffering but about the love of a mother, but the same thing can be said about Kenneth Jarecke's dead tank driver, that is not about death but about the will of living.

No matter what, I think that death and suffering value in art is nothing new.