by Nick Servian
Now there's a question! A lot of photography is a sort of applied art. Most of it consists of producing images to serve a purpose - to show the world how awful war and natural disasters are, or how fat some celebrity looks in a bikini this summer, or how glamorous the latest fashions you can't afford are. It can show a politician with mud on his face, or gold medal winners with tears in their eyes. It can show what a wonderful lifestyle you'll have when you buy this wine or that perfume. Or you can use it to show your friends how clever you were in picking that resort for your holiday.
But because we're so used to photography depicting real things in a recognisable way, when an abstract photograph comes along someone always asks "What is it?" Ever since Kandinsky we've been used to looking at abstract paintings and accepting that they are just images created for their own sake, not meant to depict anything other than a mood or a feeling, but we seem to struggle when photographs do the same. (Yet music is nearly always abstract - when it is described as "programatic" it's almost pejorative.)
Occasionally the photographic image, abstract or real, becomes an end it itself. Something to hang on your wall, or save as wallpaper on your screen, simply because you like it. Then I guess it becomes "fine art". There are lots of photographs that are now regarded as art. A black-and-white photograph of a bloated dead cow beside a road can be art if a curator says it is, and then writes a long fancy note to hang alongside it in a gallery to explain why. I suppose they have to justify themselves somehow. I go into lots of photography exhibitions with a very open mind, and come out with it firmly shut. "I'm sorry," I mutter under my breath to no-one in particular, "but that was a load of old crap!" But when I go on "I've got better pictures than that in my rubbish bin," it starts to sound like sour grapes, so I shut up. It seems you just have to be in the right circles, on the curators' circuit, to be considered an artist, and then you can do no wrong.
Anyway, my photograph Red on Blue has just won the International Prize in the British Institute of Professional Photography Towergate Fine Art Competition in London, so I must be an artist too. What is it? It's art, mate!
