Photography Isn’t Art. Until It Is

There is nothing that separates a password mugshot from a photography master piece: you can use the same camera for both, the same lens, the same location. The physical objects (file or print) are identical. So what is the difference? Industrial The vast majority of images taken are not art: surveillance cameras, medical imaging, scientific imagine, and accidental snaps of the photographer’s ear (yes, that used to happen a lot) are clearly not art. Nobody would think they are, and in that it means that we have an intuitive understanding of what art is and how it relates to photography. The consequence is the following statement: Photography has no intrinsic artistic status. It only becomes art through the intention of making it so. When Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery or when Maurizio Cattelan put a banana on the wall, the objects didn’t change. What changed was the intend of usage of these objects. Clearly, the distinction art/not art has nothing to do the objects themselves.…