Essay: Is Photography Art?
“Photography is only a mechanical process that handles all the work. So how can photography be art?”
This might be the argument most people use to prove that photography can not be art. It is not so complex like drawing a beautiful painting and spending hours on that. A photographer just needs to use one button and here we go.
But is this really the truth? How do people think about Art and Photography today and how did they before?
In this essay i want to compare on main focus two totally different photographers: Jeff Wall, who is famous for his “drawn photographies” and Nan Goldin, who is famous for her trivial photography, so the opposite. And then, i might get a conclusion of what photography really is.
The first photographer got their inspiration from paintings. For 180 years now people have been asking the question whether photography can be art or not. They say that they’re unable to boost the imagination. Its just a mechanical process that handles most of the work. This thought of course decreased by time because of the increasing number of photographers and different creative styles and techniques they’re using. But unfortunately this conception of photography as a mechanical recording medium never fully died away.
In the 1960s / 1970s Nan Goldin provoked all people with taking trivial pictures with real hard moral discussed topics like homosexuality, transexuality, love, drugs and self-destruction. In that days people were very superficial and didn’t want to see such scandalizing pictures which were obviously the truth.
Nan Goldin was born in the USA and early confronted with death and tabu-topics. Her elder sister commited suicide at the age of 18. Nan Goldin was only 14 years old and begin to photograph one year later. She sliped iinto the dark scenes and had many bi-sexual and transexual friends which she photographed as a snap-shot. First, she got famous because of publicating these pictures with the sex- and gaymotives the upper classes
This might be the argument most people use to prove that photography can not be art. It is not so complex like drawing a beautiful painting and spending hours on that. A photographer just needs to use one button and here we go.
But is this really the truth? How do people think about Art and Photography today and how did they before?
In this essay i want to compare on main focus two totally different photographers: Jeff Wall, who is famous for his “drawn photographies” and Nan Goldin, who is famous for her trivial photography, so the opposite. And then, i might get a conclusion of what photography really is.
The first photographer got their inspiration from paintings. For 180 years now people have been asking the question whether photography can be art or not. They say that they’re unable to boost the imagination. Its just a mechanical process that handles most of the work. This thought of course decreased by time because of the increasing number of photographers and different creative styles and techniques they’re using. But unfortunately this conception of photography as a mechanical recording medium never fully died away.
In the 1960s / 1970s Nan Goldin provoked all people with taking trivial pictures with real hard moral discussed topics like homosexuality, transexuality, love, drugs and self-destruction. In that days people were very superficial and didn’t want to see such scandalizing pictures which were obviously the truth.
Nan Goldin was born in the USA and early confronted with death and tabu-topics. Her elder sister commited suicide at the age of 18. Nan Goldin was only 14 years old and begin to photograph one year later. She sliped iinto the dark scenes and had many bi-sexual and transexual friends which she photographed as a snap-shot. First, she got famous because of publicating these pictures with the sex- and gaymotives the upper classes