In my last post, I mentioned the debate that continues about photography as art. Some of the reasons given for why photography is not art include:

“…unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.“ - art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing
“…art is a subjectively biased interpretation of the artist’s subject. In many ways, the choice of subject is largely irrelevant; it’s the biased interpretation that makes things interesting and unique.“ AND “As photographers, it’s not easy to see anything other than what is in front of our lenses – we can only photograph what physically exists, or what we can make physically exist. And, as such, it’s not hard to see why some people can be very dismissive of photography as an art form.” Jo Plumridge (https://contrastly.com/photography-art-form/)
In 1853, a member of the Photographic Society of London stated that photography was “too literal to compete with works of art“ and wasn’t able to engage the imagination.
A photograph, whether digitally captured or based on film, can be exactly reprinted over and over again - not true for a painting or a sculpture or other multimedia art.
These days, with ubiquitous phone cameras, photographs created just by clicking a button, without any thought or composition or technical expertise have proliferated exponentially, which can dilute or cheapen those images that may have taken hours to compose or execute.

I don’t buy these arguments, and today’s photograph was chosen to show why. It is an photo of my spouse undergoing chemotherapy surrounded by images of the flowers growing outside of the hospital. I created this with my blender pinhole camera - the center pinhole opened to capture my spouse, while the right and left pinholes brought the flowers into the photograph.

This photograph was carefully composed and certainly took time to produce. It engages the imagination - and tells a story. I call it The Promise of Chemotherapy, conveying the hope that the ordeal of chemotherapy will result in a blooming of health and life. Like a painting, this image shows a scene that doesn’t actually exist, it is an expression of my creativity.

But what about the ability to reproduce this image over and over again. I admit, that is a factor that sets photographs apart from other art forms. Photographers have dealt with this in a couple of ways. A limited printing can be made - for example, only print 10 images that are numbered and signed. And some photographers who shoot film have included the negative or transparency of the image when they offer a photograph for sale - thus ensuring that another photograph will never be printed (except by the buyer of the photograph).

I do lament the multitude of snapshots that are presented as art. Owning a camera does not make one an artist, just like owning paint brushes does not make one a painter. And I also dislike the photography “competitions” that are not competitions at all - just popularity contests, in which photographs are not judged on their qualities, but are merely “liked” by friends of the photographer - the photograph that gets the most “likes” wins, which means that the photographer with the most friends gets the prize.

My pinhole photography is art. However, out of the many photographs I take, very few end up making it into my stable of images that I am willing to present as my art.