Walking down any street in New York City, one can witness tourists taking hundreds of photographs. Similar to when Kodak introduced the brownie camera in the 1880s, our era of point-and-shoot photography is confronted with the question: what defines photography as a fine art? The brownie was a simple box camera that enabled photography to be accessible to the general public. Two schools of photography, f64 and Pictorialism photographed and staged scenes in which the artistic and aesthetic quality took precedence over what was in front of the camera. Though both groups believed that photography lost recognition as a fine art through its accessibility, the groups diverged in their aesthetics. While the f64s photographed very sharp and clean subjects, Pictorialist images had painterly qualities such as a soft focus, image imperfections, and a low contrast. Greatly blurring the line between a photograph and the painting, Pictorialists explored what defined a piece of art as a masterpiece, a painting, or a photograph. The everyday use of digital photography compelled me to question: What distinguishes my, or any photographer’s, images from those of tourists’? What compels “photographers’” images to be lauded as artistic? Over Thanksgiving vacation, I applied the Pictorialists’ struggle to digital SLR photography in New York City.
my images (in very low quality) in no particular order:
