Why Photography Isn’t Art

Given One Key Assumption

In contemporary aesthetics, the first question asked when assessing a thing’s artistic value is whether or not it represents. Representation refers to the communication of ideas — to the characteristic properties of a work through which it communicates an idea or conveys an emotion. Whether a work represents depends solely on whether or not it transmits ideas to the person engaging with it.

For the philosopher Roger Scruton, representation is a necessary quality for all artistic media. If a medium doesn’t allow for representation, if its fundamental properties don’t make it such that output can communicate ideas, then that medium cannot produce art. The question to ask of any medium (i.e., brush and canvas, instruments, letters, cameras) is, “Can I use this to produce something that represents?” If yes, then that medium can be used to produce art. If no, then it cannot.

The issue with photography as Scruton conceives it is that it cannot represent.

Scruton takes for granted a difference between what he labels actual photography and ideal photography. The former refers to pictures produced using all of modern photography’s tricks, whether in the dark room or using Photoshop. The latter refers to photography’s purest, almost-Platonic form: The simple point-click-develop photography that results in completely unadulterated images of people, places, and things. Scruton doesn’t seem to care about actual photography, believing it to be a chimerical child of painting and cameras. In generating his analysis he’s solely concerned with ideal photography — the form that must be analyzed in discussions centered on the question of photography as art. This is the central assumption in his argument. If you buy the distinction drawn and the reasons given, the subsequent argument is, I’m afraid, airtight.

Here’s a photo of water lilies:

And here’s a section of one of Monet’s famous paintings of water lilies:

In the latter, one isn’t interested in the real water lilies that inspired Monet. We’re not interested in the subjects of the painting. What draws our attention and generates interest is the work itself — the choice of colors, the brush strokes, the framing, the philosophical notions motivating the Impressionist style. A painting is art because of how it represents — how it communicates and transmits ideas. With respect to the photograph, we’re not interested in the picture itself. Instead, what captures the attention, the only thing(s) doing any representation-work, are the subjects — the water lilies themselves.

That is the reason photography isn’t art.

What we’re interested in when it comes to pictures isn’t the photograph itself. A series of mirrors positioned such that a subject is properly framed do the same sort of work as a photograph. A photo is just a window. The subject of the photo may represent, sure, but that doesn’t mean the photo itself represents. We are forever interested in the things photographed and not the photographs themselves. This is rarely, if ever, the case with other creative media. We’re not interested in the water lilies when we admire a Monet, nor are we interested in the paint company that Pollock frequented. The paintings of those subjects in and of themselves capture the imagination. That is not the case with photography, at least in the ideal sense.

And this brings us back to Scruton’s key assumption.

Of course actual photographs represent, in the sense that a photographer can edit a picture such that we the viewers are made interested in it for its own sake. Scruton claims these edits are simply artistic techniques borrowed from painting, and that the pure photographic medium cannot claim them as its own. He does what any good contemporary philosopher should do: Strengthen his argument by making a clever linguistic distinction that he implicitly asserts is also an ontological one. It’s possible, then, to side-step his conclusions by simply disagreeing with his central assumption.