Category talk:Photographers/Art photographers (merged category)

What's this category for?
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)


 * I think we have a need to distinguish photographers whose work transcends documentation and rises to a level of art. I think the definition in the category, Fine art photography could be tightened up, but haven't yet taken a stab at it.  Regardless, the fact that something is hard to define, doesn't make it not real (Justice Potter Steward's definition of pornography, for example).  For now, the bright line of museum shows is workable and has been used for years to define which painters or other craftsmen work merit being called art.  For example, Andy Warhol would clip news photos from newspapers, silk screen them, hang them in museums and call it art.  This definition would also negate your comment on Japanese photographers -- they couldn't all possibly be hung in museums.

As far as "someone working for a museum that has access to negatives whose significance is purely documentary [turning] . . . those negs into "art photography"," I believe that someone would have to be a museum curator, with significant art education to achieve that task. In that same way, curators are the arbiters of defining which painters are worthy of being called artists.

I agree that we shouldn't have circular links and will remove those. But I think if we have categories as broad as 'Portrait photographers' that we can certainly support an art photographer category. In fact, I think its important for an encyclopedia to highlight the photographers whose vision defines the medium. And yes, Robert Capa is more than worthy of being called an artist. SteveHopson 14:38, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

We're starting to get somewhere, but only starting.

First, museums. Let's put aside Warhol, whether he was a genius or (as I happen to think) a huckster, his feats were rather anomalous. Let's look at Japanese photographers. Of course I didn't mean all the photographers of any note in Japan when I wrote the comment above, but yes, I think just about all those in Category: Japanese photographers have at one time or another had their work hung up in galleries of the kind that either do charge or could charge for admission. Not one-man shows there, true. At least a few prints by a number of them, possibly the great majority, are held by this or that museum. (Some have been more celebrated than that: at least two Japanese photographers who haven't yet got articles, Domon and Ueda, have entire museums to themselves.)

So in your view (i) Capa is an art photographer and, I infer from your website, (ii) you are one as well. Can you tell us of photographers who you are sure deserve articles in Wikipedia but who you would not call "art photographers"? And does "photographers whose vision defines the medium" really mean something different from "great photographers"? -- Hoary 16:10, 13 March 2006 (UTC)


 * 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)

I don't see any merit to this category. The distinction it tries to make is far from the obvious, objective sort needed to make an effective category. As much as I'd personally love to elevate Cindy Sherman far above Anne Geddes, this is a POV evaluation (one based on subjective notions of high art as separate from pop culture) rather than a description. From the descriptions above, it sounds like little more than a division of Category:The best photographers from Category:Ordinary photographers or Category:Functional photographers.

Apart from the invalidity of the organizing concept, "Art photographer" is also not an appropriate designation. I don't believe it is used at large, at least for this purpose, and it appears ambiguous&mdash;it may suggest one who takes pictures of art rather than one whose pictures are art. Postdlf 19:58, 13 March 2006 (UTC)


 * 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)

Or perhaps "art photographer" is indeed used to mean any of the meanings claimed for it in the discussion so far, which effectively renders it meaningless unless one knows the context or the point of view of the speaker. Meanwhile, in WP there is no context, no particular speaker, and (in principle) no point of view; so one would have to say at the top of the category page that "Art photographer" is here used to mean such and such. But this too would be unlikely to work, not only because there's little sign of any agreement here on what working definition to specify, but also because the category would very likely be applied to irrelevant photographers by well-meaning editors who would either ignore or argue with this definition.

As for "Art photographer" as some conflation of "photographer whose works are treated reverently in museums" and "great photographer", here's a photographer/lecturer/curator on Chris Killip [Red linked. Oh well, he's clearly of less interest than this photographer to the average WP user]: "[Killip] praised [Boris] Mikhailov's uncompromising vision over what he termed 'product': work 'produced for galleries, for Hollywood, produced for the art scene. . . . he will praise the honesty of a commercial job well done before the pretensions of solipsistic 'product' manufactured for the gallery wall" (Gerry Badger, Chris Killip 55 [Phaidon, 2001], p. 3.).

If we're going to have Category: The best photographers, then I think membership would have to be determined independently of the whims of individual WP editors. One could have a formula: 10 points for having been a member of Magnum at some time, 5 for having a Phaidon "55" volume; etc etc; but again we'd quickly have arguments over the alleged anglocentrism, bias toward mere prettiness, etc., of the formula or its components. -- Hoary 01:15, 14 March 2006 (UTC) (reworded slightly 23:38, 14 March 2006 (UTC))
 * Or we could just delete the category... Postdlf 01:18, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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)

I agree with both waiting and deleting. By curious coincidence I just came across this definition (by negation) of "art photography" in an article by Karna Basu on photography in India : art photography is "work that, if commercial or journalistic, is not primarily so". That seems very helpful! We can reduce the categories to 3: commercial, journalistic and everything else, i.e. art! ;~) Pinkville 21:25, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

While I'm at it, here's the final nail in the coffin for the category (as far as I'm concerned). This is the definition of "art photography" from the Getty Foundation's Art & Architecture Thesaurus (an excellent resource, by the way):


 * 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)
 * 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)


 * 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)