Turned On All the Time

I've returned several times to the idea that photography is too easy in these posts, most recently in the revived post Return of the Slacker. It's certainly true that taking photographs is easy: anyone can do it, and millions upon millions do, every day. But too easy is a different sort of judgement. What is generally meant is that photographs are too easily achieved to be considered "art"; that in some way the results have not been properly earned. But making marks on paper with a pen or pencil, the basis of so much art, is easy, too – much easier – and millions do that every day as well, whether by making a shopping list, keeping a diary, or making notes and doodles at a meeting.

Few people would regard these artefacts, photographic or scribbled, as anything approaching the state of "art". Most of those billions of photographs perform much the same function as pencilled notes: annotations in the margins of a life, aids to memory, records of events, and even of meals eaten. And yet we can see shopping lists and snapshots presented as art on gallery walls, the same walls that have also displayed breathtakingly skilful drawings by acknowledged masters. Moreover, the Web is full of other very skilful drawings – usually photo-realistic portraits of people or their pets – that are regarded as little more than kitsch, and would never be considered worth hanging on those gallery walls, unless in a spirit of irony.

So what's the difference? How is it possible for work in one medium to be dismissed by some as too easy to qualify as art, and yet for very skilful work in another, more respectable medium to fail to make the grade, as judged by others? Does the "art-ness" of art reside in properties other than its difficulty, or the skill of a practitioner? The answer, self-evidently, is "yes".

Art is an idea, not a thing. The cave painters at Lascaux were not creating "art"– no-one has a clue what they were really up to – any more than the craftsmen who made the Sutton Hoo treasures, or even the painters of the Renaissance, filling the churches of Italy with devotional frescoes and paintings. Those people were highly-skilled tradesmen and artisans, on a par in society's estimation with furniture-makers and masons. Their place in the story of what we have come to call "art" is entirely retrospective: they were earning a living and competing with each other for patronage, not vying for a place in the art history books. Art as we now know it was "not even a thing", as we say, until somewhere around the 18th century in Europe, when a romantic idea of "art" as a quasi-religious human endeavour began to emerge, elevating its practitioners several social notches above other craftsmen.

The achievement of 20th century conceptual art (if "achievement" is the right word) was to complete the separation of the idea of art from the objects embodying it. Art – or what we might call art-ness –  has become a free-floating property, able to be endowed on pretty much anything by acknowledged practitioners, who – despite any posturing as rebellious outsiders – have generally passed through an accreditation process in an institution of higher education similar to that undergone by any middle-class professional. A shopping list dropped in the street becomes art because someone like Martin Creed says it is. You or I might disagree, but what do we know, and who cares about our uncredentialed opinions?

The contents of the idea of art-ness change, of course, as society changes. These changes are not progress, though, in the way that advances in technology or medicine are progress, so much as changes in fashion. Currently, many artists are concerned to be seen to be "interrogating" certain cultural norms of identity – gender and sexuality, or race and colonialization, for example – rather than creating simple objects of beauty or exploring the spiritual or psychological aspects of existence. As a consequence of such shifts in fashion, art history gets a regular makeover: overlooked artists who better match current concerns emerge from the background, and the importance of previous "greats" is reassessed. So it goes. You might say artists are priests of a religion whose core beliefs change with every new generation. Although it's also true that an awful lot of self-styled artists – mainly older and unqualified amateurs, it has to be said – are complacently content with the gospel as received a century or so ago.

Some photographers are artists by any measure – artists whose medium is photography – and there are thousands more every year who graduate with that ambition. But most professional photographers are not artists, strictly speaking, except in the broadest sense of "people who make pictures". Their practices vary tremendously – photojournalism, sports, fashion, corporate publicity material, and so on – and can be superb visual acts of witness or illustration, but a sustained engagement with the idea of art-ness is not what they do for a living. In its strictest modern-day sense, an artist is precisely someone whose main activity is a critical engagement with whatever the current ideas of art-ness are, and whose work is regarded by the relevant gatekeepers as significant, interesting, and ideally highly monetizable.

The main problem, though, where the estimation of photography as a medium is concerned, is not the millions of phone-users snapping their latest meal or selfie, but the existence of a vast infrastructure of hobbyist photographers – let's call them "enthusiasts" – who far outnumber the professionals and practising artists, are far more visible on the Web, and who have constructed criteria for the assessment of photographic "quality" which substitute equipment and technique for sensibility, imitation for originality, and have little or no awareness or regard for any of the concerns of contemporary "art-ness". To all but the most discerning eyes (that would be us, dear readers, obviously) these people are photography, and in their own minds what they do is art. But it's not.

This fundamental split between species of "serious" photographers has always existed – in Britain, it used to be between readers of Amateur Photographer vs. readers of Creative Camera or The British Journal of Photography – but the internet has amplified the imbalance in favour of the enthusiasts by several orders of magnitude. This is exemplified by the inward-looking world of self-styled "fine art" landscape photography, a particular bugbear of mine, where the "me too" imitation of popular models is reinforced by the feedback loop of validation provided by regular competitions whose judges claim to be looking for originality, but never seem to find it. I had a rant about this last year (see Extreme Locations and Iconic Conditions) so won't repeat myself. Let's just say I don't care if I never see another nocturnal shot of a glowing orange tent in a frozen wilderness spread out beneath the Northern Lights, or of anything silhouetted against a perfectly-exposed Milky Way. The first half dozen of such images might have been some sort of morphic resonance spreading through the collective enthusiast consciousness; the next hundred were definitely not.

Obviously, people are free to spend their time and money however they wish; there is a certain pleasure to be had, I imagine, from following the crowd, and it is not altogether surprising that the vast majority of enthusiasts fail to engage with photography's history and the work of its outstanding practitioners, past and present, or even to distinguish outstanding practitioners from self-publicising opportunists. Not everybody values taste, discernment, and independence of mind. But it is a shame that this enormous barrier of parochial indifference, incuriosity, and imitation can overshadow what is truly rewarding about photographs and the practice of photography, even more effectively than the disdain of some of art's more blinkered gatekeepers.

I like this quotation from G.K. Chesterton:

Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The great thing about the habitual use of a camera is that it can accelerate that process of de-familiarisation, assuming that is a "danger" to which you are happy to expose yourself. And why wouldn't you be? It's a lot less risky than microdosing, for a start. Whether what follows is or isn't "art" is beside the point.

Yes, photography is easy; but it can enable the more difficult act of actually seeing what is in front of you. And nothing is more calculated to prevent seeing what is in front of you than camera-club nonsense like "the rule of thirds", "leading lines", "blurred backgrounds", or "a full range of tones", not to mention a diverting obsession with window-shopping, disguised as guy-talk about gear, or the bamboozling complexity of most digital camera menus. These are all good ways to make photography seem more difficult, by making it more rule-bound, more technical, and more expensive than it actually is, or needs to be. But it's really very simple: look, see, click. Repeat.

As one very good photographer puts it in the closing words of his book:

It's not that you can just turn on your looking when you're shooting. It must get to the point that it's always on, no matter what you're doing.

It's what will make you aware of life around you. It's what will allow you to intuitively appreciate the light, the wall, the expressions on the faces of people around you, the graphics and typographics of your books, the quality of air around you.

It's being turned on all the time just by looking and being aware.

Jay Maisel, It's Not About The F-Stop