The Photograph as Contemporary Art

I recently finished reading a book from the course reading list, titled 'The Photograph as Contemporary Art' by Charlotte Cotton. Overall, the book was helpful as a primer in how photography functions in the context of fine art, and introduced me to a lot of photographers working in fine art (over 200 in fact). As such, it was a very broad look at the subject as a whole, which although provided food for thought on occasion I felt was hard work digging through the over-complicated writing style.

As I often found the narrative quite confusing, I didn't fully grasp every concept discussed, especially the images of scenes that were (in the words of the author) banal. What makes a snapshot of someone's dinner fine art by one particular photographer, and not by the millions of people who post 'food' pictures to social media sites every day? Many of the images certainly didn't look 'professional', and look like they could have been taken by the average person on the street with a cheap disposable. I think this highlights the different between 'beautiful' photography, taken by a photographer, who's main object is a professional and attractive image, and photography taken by artists. As I'm not an expert or enthusiast of fine art, this is where my understanding of the concepts broke down, although I can generalise that for the artist the photograph is not the end goal, it is often simply a way of portraying an artistic concept.

The book did introduce me to new genres and techniques of which I was previously unaware, and also put a name to genres which I recognised, such as deadpan (in a portraiture sense, not in architecture), seen in many of Steve McCurrie's images in his book In The Shadow of Mountains. The various images often made more sense when presented with the back-story, and so the artistic concept was made apparent, although I'm unsure how a lot of the images would stand on their own without the support of textual narrative.

Some ideas really resonated with the imagination, such as Sophie Calle's project where she secretly followed a man from Paris to Venice, documenting his journey. If anything, this has been the book's main draw for me; exciting the imagination and encouraging a 'think outside the box' mentality, along with making me aware of the multitude of possibilities within the photography as fine art genre.