Artists Say Photography is Art

Photography must be respected as a legitimate art form equal to all others, agreed four major figures from the worlds of photography and conceptual art in a presentation at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum Tuesday night.

“Losing the prejudice against [photographs] should be the important thing,” said well-known photographer and painter Ed Ruscha. “It doesn’t matter how you make your statement, but what you say.”

Discussing the various artistic journeys that led them to photography, the artists said that photography has traditionally held second-citizen status in the spheres of art and art-education.

“The students who, when I went to art school, couldn’t draw, became photographers,” quipped Mel Bochner, whose photographs made up the exhibit, currently on display at the Sackler Museum. “Photography was seen as a lower form.”

But Bochner also said the degradation of photography allowed him and his fellow artists greater leeway in their exploration of the medium, because its purpose was less clearly defined.

In fact, some of the work for which the artists take credit include photographs that they themselves did not take, a process referred to as “de-skilling,” according to Bochner.

Ruscha, whose book of photographs Thirty Four Parking Lots features stock photography—culled from others’ portfolios as well as his own pieces—called the notion that artists must produce all the components of their own work “hackneyed.”

“If you do it yourself, you might mess it up,” he said.

Ruscha added that he gave the same right to artists of other media.

“I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have someone else make your paintings,” he said.

But others said even work that was done by the artists themselves strayed from traditional notions of photography which emphasized accuracy and technology.

Dutch artist Jan Dibbets’ work focused on using perspective and angles to create images of hills and valleys from flat meadows through the arrangement of individual photos into seeming panoramas.

“All of the questions that seemed logical had never been asked,” Dibbets said. “I was researching photography as if it had not been or existed before.”

Some of the work that painter-turned-conceptual-artist John Baldessari used in his talk included photos that he took while holding his camera out the window of his truck and not looking through the viewfinder.

But despite their varying styles, the artists all agreed that photography is a method of capturing a conception, not a strict process with clear limits.

And they agreed, too, that such limits would pose a danger to art, projecting that a new medium that further stretched boundaries would capture the attention of the art-viewing public in the future.

“The number one rule in art,” Baldessari said, “should be that there are no rules.”