Is Digital Photography Art?

I log into several online groups as a way of avoiding doing something constructive. One of the groups features photos of New Mexico. Some of the photos are spectacular, some are way over-processed. One guy started labeling his photos as “No Filter New Mexico.” This means the photo has not been doctored beyond the camera’s initial setting. A long-winded argument ensued pitting photographers (the guys who watermark their embarrassing, Willie-Wonka-colored Martin-landscape shots in an attempt to retain rights) and snap-shooters.

If I shoot a scene and then push the photo edit sliders to their limits did I create art or am I just working within an algorithm provided by the software manufacturer? Is the coder who designed the software the real artist? If I successfully dial a number on my cell phone is that art? No way! Now say I invite 500 people to a theater and I go on stage and successfully dial a phone number on that exact same phone. Is that art?

Maybe art is made when its creator declares it as art. Even bad art like those over-processed photos are art if Slider-Man says so. The watermark guys proclaim their saturated images as art, who am I to deny them their petition?

My biased opinion is that everything we do in life is art. Of course there are differing degrees of artiness. Photo shop doctoring is art on the level of a child playing with the classic stick-on toy Colorform. With Colorform you apply provided objects and characters onto a smooth vinyl background scene. The sticky bits are reusable so you can change the image to suit your taste. Colorform is a lot like Photoshop in that rearranging premade objects becomes an act of art.

In the days of film, and before that when oil painting was the best way to record a scene, a modest-to-hard level of difficulty was involved. Cameras have become so good that nearly anyone can take a technically decent photo. Selecting the best angle and framing the photo are artistic things but they pale in comparison to carving a block of marble or tossing feces onto a canvas.

Each artwork has its own built-in level of difficulty and because art is defined by one man’s opinion the whole world blasts open to artistic endeavors. Eating lunch, mindful of our ways, becomes art. Driving to work with an emphasis on the driving is much harder than pushing a shutter release so it too becomes art. My Facebook buddy Ren has turned coffee making into art because he cares so much about the process and the resulting drink.

So click that shutter my fellow Da Vinci’s, slide that saturation bar to the max and marvel at the purple skies you have created. Use the render bar to mimic that hyper-realistic, Steam-punk thing used in tough-guy motorcycle advertisements. We are artists with a lower case “a!”