Photography And Art
For
many years photography has been used
to document the most significant of events,
whether they affect an entire
society, like a war, or a specific persons' life,
such as a wedding. The
reason that photography is used for such occasions
instead of painting,
drawing or sculpting is quite simple. It is because
photography is the most
remarkable of the fine arts. Other forms of art, are
aesthetically pleasing
and important in their own rite, but photography is so
monumental because of
the power that only it possesses. This is the power to
depict fact. One
aspect that makes photography so creditable is that it can show
feeling and
emotion so much more vividly and doubtlessly than a drawing can.
For
instance, during the Great Depression "the harsh realities were
recorded
thanks to the initiative of the Farm Security Administration (Daval,
186)."
At this time, Dorothea Lange "documented the bitter poverty of
migrant
workers and their families (20th Century Photography, 1). These
images, such as
Migrant Mother and Cotton Picker near Firebrough, show,
so clearly and almost
effortlessly, the pain and despair that was occurring
too frequently at this
time. There is a loss of hope that is so clear and
evident in these photographs
from the longing in the eyes of the images
shown. Such raw emotion is hard to
come by in any other art form. Another
reason photography is more trustworthy
than other forms of art, is because
the image that appears in a photograph,
whether it is of a person or an
event, has at one point existed or happened.
This statement does not
always hold true for paintings, sculptures, and
drawings. It is simple and
usual for an artist to conjure up an image of a
person that has never existed
and turn them into a work of art. For example,
there has been a great deal of
speculation about whether or not Leonardo Da
Vinci's Mona Lisa is a
portrait of a real person. Before the relatively recent
technological
advances, it was not possible to have a picture of a person or an
incident
that was fictitious. A further example that photography is perceived as
more
realistic than other methods of art, is that it is possible for an artist
to
elaborate, emphasize, erase, or even completely change an image that they
are
trying to capture. Once again, preceding modern advances, this was not
possible
for a photographer to do. Based on this, and the preceding
statement, throughout
history viewers have been able to trust that the images
they were seeing were
genuine, and therefore were able to trust the realism
of photographs. Over the
years, photography came to be depended on for its
ability to show factual images
for the reasons stated earlier. Proof of this
statement, is the great demand for
photographs in magazines and newspapers.
"The newspaper and newsmagazine
depended on his (a professional
photo-reporter's) pictures, even more than on
the written word. They were an
international language of communication, the one
language needing no
translation (Daval, 190)." The rise of photojournalism
made the public even
more believing of photography and "the status of the
photograph: from a
document before, it now became evidence, irrefutable proof
(Daval,
173)."
Bibliography
Daval, Jean-Luc. Photography:
History of an Art . New York: Rizzoli
International Publications Inc. ,
1982. 20th Century Photography: http://www.masters-of-
photography.
com/L/lange/lange_articles1.html Dorothea Lange
Photographs.
http://www.masters-of-photography.
com/L/lange/lange_migrant_mother_full.html