It can be the extension of mind and heart…” John Steinbeck.
Art photography is an entire subject on its own. To be a good photographer is to have a creative streak and excellent powers of observation. Some of the secret tips to good photography are the simplest – such as being in the right place at the right time. .
A fine art photographer portrays their subject in some unusual, amazing or surprising way. He or she has the ability to see beyond the obvious. This type of photography requires you to apply considerable thought, visualization skills and intuition to create a work of art.
There are no universally-accepted definitions of the related terms “art photography,” “artistic photography,” and “fine art photography.” Yet you can find them everywhere – in reference books, in scholarly articles, and on the Web. The terminology is conditional, but the artwork speaks for itself.
Photography historians have claimed that the earliest exponent of “Fine Art photography” was John Edwin Mayall, who made daguerreotypes illustrating the Lord’s Prayer in 1851. In the twentieth century in the United States Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were instrumental in making photography an accepted form of fine art, and Steiglitz was especially notable in introducing it into museum collections.
Photography helped shape art in the late twentieth century, and in the twenty-first, it has begun to hold a dominant position. Artist-photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Struth, Martin Parr, Allan Sekula, Boris Mikhailov, Inez van Lamsweerde, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor-Wood and many others are being celebrated as contemporary masters all over the world.
Art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides visual support for stories, mainly in the print media, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to sell products or services. But at the same time, according to Art Market Trends, more than 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Art photography has become a separate, valuable art medium.
New technological trends in digital photography have opened a new direction in full spectrum photography, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared spectrums lead to new artistic visions. New possibilities make available new expressions and new points of view, and the results can be eye-catching, thought-provoking and highly memorable.
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