Is photojournalism art?

<p>The question has that nasty little qualifier "fine" in it, and as a person who is an escritura in Nicaragua without qualifications (despite telling people I write fantastika) and a science fiction writer in the US (qualitifed, not just a writer), I tend to feel that this is an utterly bogus distinction that betrays the instructor's agenda. The Nicaraguans don't care what I write; the USAnos insist on finding out what I write so they can peg me. The problem isn't art; it's trying to privilege some of it as "fine" and the other as something else. It's treating "fine" as a privileged genre, not a thing that any genre can be or not be (genre defined as a group of writers who bounce ideas off each other and whose work tends to require specific strategies in observing/reading/listening to it).</p>

<p>I think one of the issues here is trying to make one kind of doing photography, with the weight on the esthetic side, the "fine" art photography, and the other kind of photography, with the weight on the representational side, the non-fine art photography. Fine isn't a genre -- fine should be a description of things that continue to hold our interest beyond the first seeing or first reading or first listening.</p>

<p>All human art (cooking, building a house, making clothes, writing a novel, taking photographs) can be done better or worse. It's not fine art unless it's actually really good. And most of the stuff that tries to be fine art is merely pretentious. </p>

<p>I've found that most people who claimed to have broken new ground hadn't.</p>

<p>Gary Snyder said that you can learn more about doing things well from a master carpenter, things that will apply to doing art in completely different mediums, than you can from a mediocre photographer, or that I could learn from mediocre poets when that was what I did.</p>

<p>"Fine art" is the problem. I was assigned to teach from a textbook once that declared that what people enjoyed was not as good literature as what people didn't enjoy, pretty much in those terms. Fortunately, I liked what I liked, read things before they were introduced in the classroom. With rare exceptions (generally black students), none of my students read poetry for pleasure. I don't think the US has had a popular poet since Ginsberg, maybe Snyder still is, and Frank O'Hara was outside the the university but not as popular as Ginsberg, but better to read after one grows up. </p>

<p>And a rather shocking number of faculty didn't read it for pleasure either. Either people like (are entertained by) shocks to their preconceptions, playing with their visual cortexes, or they're faking it to continue to hold a job or a self-image. Or somewhere in between.</p>

<p>The best way to be repressed in art is to feel that the only thing worth doing is "fine art." I like fooling around with cameras and I realize I wasn't going to break any new ground in photography when one of the people here treated me as a student at 60 (and I know what I think of people who want to be "serious" writers after retirement). I still enjoy messing around with cameras and looking at photographs. I take the photographs I can take.</p>

<p>Someone who can think visually generally does interesting work, whether it's drawing or photography, just as people who like language qua language, who think about how language works, tend to be better writers than people who want to write a tract for the world. </p>

<p>Can photo-journalist shoot photographs that hold our interest after the event they were documenting isn't interesting anymore? Depends on the photograph.</p>

<p><em>If we're going to be honest, most people who do "Fine Art" as a deliberate things are tediously boring, in the same ways that "Poets Against the War" tend to be.</em><br>

<em>…</em><br>

<em>There is really no progress in the arts other than getting bored with what's been done. The best work of the Paleolithic doesn't get invalidated because of 20th Century Art. Eyeballs and visual cortexes get bored and move on to something that's more currently stimulating. When I was a kid, everyone thought the Victorian houses were ugly. Sometime a bit later, people decided they were really cool.</em><br>

Rebecca, interested as I am to read what you write, I totally disagree with almost all of it. “Fine” art simply means art for its own sake, not a functional purpose. Most people I know who make fine art do so in response to the world around them, shaped by the post-modern era since 1945, which has been aptly named the “Age of Uncertainty.” Most modern practitioners embrace the opportunity of this age to make work for a broad public, not the rich middle or upper classes who demand objects of exquisite workmanship as a confirmation of their own exalted financial and social status. Instead, like it or not, the prevailing style is conceptual art, where it is the idea that counts. The art world is sadly not free of second- and third-rate talents whose work may or may not be worthwhile, nor of frauds who may or may not have any genuine ideas at all – that’s the risk you take dealing with a flow of contemporary work as it is produced.<br>

Finally, I totally dispute that the question as to whether photojournalism can be art is a lazy one. Photojournalism is or has been thought of as ephemeral (to the extent that most of the b+w negatives showing the great news events of the past were processed extremely sloppily and in many cases thrown away when the news story in question was felt to have run its course), in retrospect we can now see that many images went beyond their temporary purpose and held some lasting truth.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>As part of my university course I am trying to find the an answer to what I thought would be a relatively easy question. Can the work of the photojournalist be considered as fine art?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Not sure how that is a useful question... particularly for a university level course. I mean if you walk into a museum and see several photographs that you really like and someone informs you half of them were taken by a photojournalist does that make you like them less? Some of the work some photojournalists produce would be considered fine art to me. And conversely a lot of the work that a lot of so called "artists" produce would be considered crap to put it nicely. I don't care what people call themselves. I just care what their works looks like. I mean is the stuff in <em>National Geographic</em> photojournalism, fine art, or both?</p>

<p>Luis, nobody else cares, really, what claims artists make about their work -- the people who put it in a gallery, or whatever, are viewers interested in their esthetic pleasure. They may or not be better informed viewers than not, but the history of art forgery is littered by highly trained but aging viewers who thought they were right about misattributions. They function as viewers. Viewers, too, can be better or worse, fakes or really competent, understand the history of the medium or not. </p>

<p>The gallery and museums are run by viewers more than they're run by artists, and artists are viewers of other people's work. When artists want to declare themselves above viewers of any kind, including other artists, they're generally crap or very young and maybe capable of better. You're admitting that the viewers always decide (unless artists run their own galleries which can be good, but then they're each other's viewers). Intensional fallacy is a no-no. The artist tries; the viewer/reader decides (I'm back in print with some books I went through periods of hating deeply, but they made their own friends while I was off pouting).</p>

<p>Plenty of things I've found interesting at one point of my life and went back to and shook my head. It served a purpose in my life for a short while, but it had no staying power with me. And people can be fooled, though the frauds generally are one generation deep (William Dean Howells, though not a fraud, was a friend of all sorts of really first rate writers despite being less than first rate himself). </p>

<p>The obvious observation anyone who's been in art or writing scenes is that the worst are sure they're wonderful and the best are far more diffident (appears to be true of all sorts of human endeavors -- it's always the third rate colleges that brag they're equivalent to the first rate ones because they offer courses in the same things; the incompetent don't see how incompetent they are; the competent have an informed measure for competence that may not be completely fair).</p>

<p>Since I was the one who brought Yeats into this, I'll reference W.H. Auden's http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544 elegy for Yeats. </p>

<p>People who wrap themselves with the Art is so superior to the Unwashed masses generally do crap work. Not always, but that's a good way to bet. </p>

<p>I assigned going to a faculty reading to my students and went myself. The work was not experimental in the often common academically derivative experimental way, and wasn't as bad as I'd feared. My students said that it wasn't as bad as they'd expected. I'm a fairly sophisticated reader; they weren't. The college prof writers were claiming they wrote literature. It simply was fiction or poetry that wasn't awful, not that different from what any range of amateurs produce.</p>

<p>Sometimes, it's just fiction unless literature is now the amateur fiction that academics do.</p>

<p>Allen Herbert, then there's the photographer who saved the life of his subject, the burning girl in Vietnam. She's now in Canada. I believe they've met since and have done presentations together.</p>

<p>The problem with arts now in the US and possibly in Europe is that they've been taken over by the idle and often unaccomplished rich. People who inherit money don't always have any better taste than my grandfather, who had a decent eye for photography and for certain art and had nothing tasteless on his walls (can't say the same for one of my uncles, or for the rich maternal uncle in California).</p>

<p>David points out “Fine art simply means art for its own sake, ..." (i intentionally left out "... not a functional purpose." for personal gray area reasons ) . IMO opinion it was not the best choice of words when chosen (whenever that was) to subcategorize in the art world. ? but it does put most people in the appropriate section of the store. Labels are starting points and safe outs/departure from boring conversations.... imo a signpost. convenient.</p>

<p>When asked what do I photograph? I will start the conversation with the generic explanation 'fine art photography'. Instead I could say I photograph and print everything i.e. color/bw, dig./film/, street, abstracts, nudes, portraits, still lifes, journalism, statements, etc. But 'fine art' works well enough. Which for me tickles the why I photograph also. If the conversation continues I will break it down much more. 'Fine art' What an awkward loaded label it has been unfortunately. and for as long as I can remember. But i am not invested in changing the label. It does the job well enough. And I do see a need for labels and sub categories. Without them I would have to invest and often waste a lot of time explaining what I do as an artist. And that is a boring waste of time for most.<br /><br />So for me the op put me in an appropriate frame of mind to question, consider the 'distinction'(s) made (line drawn) between photo journalism and art/fine art. (as intended i hope). <br /><br />"<strong><em>Is</em> photojournalism art?</strong> " and then "<em>Can</em> the work of the photojournalist be considered as fine art?" I would have x2 slightly different answers but I believe it was genuinely asked as 1 question leaning to <em>can the work</em> of the photojournalist be considered as fine art?<br />In what I hope is the spirit of the original question my answer is yes I often view the work of photojournalists as art/ less often as fine art. For me depending on context, history, and the circumstances of my exposure to it i may sub categorized as fine art but only when asked. I have no need of the distinction of art- fine art for internal conversation/reflection. As others have pointed out any craft/ job/ .... endeavor can be art. Some of course take less effort to imagine and for me that includes photojournalism. </p>

<p>David, the thing is that fine arts vs. utilitarian arts is basically late. What's a portrait? What's William Blake? Fiction is all art for its own sake, only the claims for one genre being literature (good) and other genres being crap are part of the loading that trying to say art for its own sake is "fine" (loaded adjective) and other things are not are problematic. </p>

<p>What about non-functional art and functional art, where the semantic loading would be in the other direction. Is there ever art for art's sake, really? Or representation without composition? Fine is a value-loaded word. Art is for playing visual games with your brain on one end and representation on the other, with a lot of things being not heavily weighted either direction. </p>

<p>Representation is an expected value in photography; plot is an expected value in fiction, still after all the 20th Century experimentalists' attempt to dislodge it. We can play various games around those expectations (everyone who reads French New Fiction raise their hand; everyone who really likes abstract photography raise theirs). Narrative is a way people have of making sense of their worlds; fiction can be more or less transparent about this.</p>

<p>Sentimentality is dragging in strong associations we have and attaching them to mediocre work. If we decide that what the general public likes is facile and stupid, then we're likely to commit sentimentality in liking things that the general public doesn't like simply because they don't like it. Arts tend to be either inclusive or exclusive -- about building a community or about separating oneself off from the general community. Some arts have been both -- jazz is an example. It's now an identity art, but it was a community art. Photography has both identity and community strains. The interesting thing might be to play across those two poles -- which I think some people have been doing for a while.<br /><br /><br /><br>

Luis seems to want an identity art -- something that distances itself from the community. Cartier-Bresson moved from being a surrealist to being more of a community artist, but the surrealism and formal art training was there, too.</p>

<p>Sentimentality isn't just for people who like Thomas Kincaid with his kinky fiery houses and demented gingerbread.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"Luis seems to want......"</p>

<p>It's hard to bait a fisherman, Rebecca. I'm not biting.</p>

<p>On the face of it, this is a pretty simply question to answer: some are, and some aren't. If you look at the photographs published in a big daily newspaper (my papers are the Washington Post and the New York Times), you'll see that some of them rise above the ordinary; some are remarkable.</p>

<p>Some photojournalists have thrived by transforming the ordinary (like a Weegee) and some from documenting the extraordinary (like a Sebastio Selgado).</p>

<p>How about a forum with links to the best (or favorite) news photographs of the day?</p>

<p><em>… Is there ever art for art's sake, really? …</em><br>

I do believe so. To take the example of Damien Hirst, I get a strong feeling that his work has been created through a process of having an idea, being fascinated by it and giving it free rein (I have the same feeling about many other works by other people which I find particularly powerful). People have of course commented on Hirst ‘s vast capacity for self-promotion – some criticize him for it, if anything I applaud it – but I do not think this detracts from the purity of the original inspiration (which, to be clear, I am not necessarily saying is very profound, just pure in the sense of being an idea pursued for its own sake).</p>

<p><em>The gallery and museums are run by viewers … </em><br>

<em>People who wrap themselves with the Art is so superior to the Unwashed masses generally do crap work. Not always, but that's a good way to bet. </em><br>

You’re certainly firing off some interesting thoughts! Once again, though, I find I do not agree. Galleries and museums, in my experience as an ex-employee of the V&A Museum in London and occasional exhibiting art photographer, are run by curators, a sub-species of civil servant, who in most cases have their own agenda and are happiest talking to each other. Being confronted with a living breathing artist is very often a severe embarrassment for these people.<br>

Art/superiority – joke: “What’s the difference between a rock guitarist and a jazz guitarist? A rock guitarist plays 3 chords to an audience of thousands, a jazz guitarist plays thousands of chords to an audience of 3.” If your comment is in any way meant to relate to Auden, I can only say that things sure have changed in the era of mass consumerism and juggernaut advertising. It is far from true to say that any art with limited appeal is sure to be good, but very likely that any art aimed at the broad masses will be unoriginal pap (with some exceptions, as with any rule).</p>

<p>Quick Google suggests that Damien Hirst is doing art for at least ego-boo's sake. Viewers are not artists -- artists who do good work have to find a way to be viewers as well as artists. (I used to ask my students if they'd read their essays if they found them in a newspaper). Most mediocrity comes from not being able to cultivate the internal disinterested viewer/reader who can spot the places that don't work.</p>

<p>Theodore Sturgeon -- "90% of anything is crap." My particular field is Janusian -- sometimes popular and sometimes rather esoteric and not easy to read. Good and bad work has been done by both ends of the spectrum. My prior field was big on conceptual and formalist considerations and on difficulty of access. Most things have limited appeal because they're just not that good. William Burroughs thought people who assumed that popular works were all about promotion were kidding themselves. </p>

<p>I haven't seen in 40 years of being involved with various art scenes that there's purity on one or the other side of the identity/community spectrum. (One of the dimmer academics wanted to believe that things like SF weren't the product of people with Ivy League or Oxbridge eductions just like the identity arts, but the product of the broad masses, whoever they're supposed to be these days).<br /><br />Probably NYC has better art than London because the gallery owners and museum curators were more likely to actually like artists (head of the Museum of Modern Art was Claus Oldenberg's brother; Frank O'Hara, earlier at the same museum, was friends with all sort of young poets and painters and wrote poetry).</p>

<p>If a person has a heavy investment in the identity of liking art with limited appeal that is more original than community art, then he's perhaps easier to fool, than someone who wants vicarious winning experiences shared by his community. Rowling may not be a great artist, but she did something new when she blended the style of boys' school stories with fantasy. I know a number of people who like her work very much, and none of them particularly the "broad masses."</p>

<p>There's nothing more unoriginal than yet another concept artist these days, another chance musician, another cut up fiction, another portrait with mood lighting (yeah, I've done those, too). Really looking at the conventions and understanding them and riffing off them in a way that isn't obvious can be more exploration of the media than "challenging the bourgeoisie," given that the people who have the leisure to learn the conventions of the unconventional are likely to be the bourgeoisie. Dada was a long time ago.</p>

<p>There are cultures where curating isn't a gig, where there are no gatekeepers for art. These cultures do tend to be conventional. A friend was in Guatemala recently and in one of the areas where people do superb weaving but most if not all of the motifs are traditional. Things that are conventional can be superb or not. In cultures where every woman is a weaver, some are better than others. </p>

<p>I think it's currently harder to do good work out of popular conventions because it means breaking down one's self-defensive resistance to community art and really looking at the popular genres and understanding them well enough to rift off them in ways that add some different insight to the genre. You don't get a free pass for doing things that look like other limited appeal works.<br /><br /><br>

Anyone who says "broad masses" is mis-educated. I tell young writers to get a job as a journalist on a weekly country newspaper for a year or two -- really write for a living. If you're not a good enough writer to get such a job, then why in the world would you imagine that you can do "literature?" Working on a newspaper also breaks down the mis-education pretty fast. I suspect that working as a photo-journalist after the Rhode Island School of Design or the Slade would do the same thing. Deepen your understanding of people (perhaps not really necessary for a photographer as much as it's critical for a novelist).</p>

<p>I agree with Auden -- people who don't get the recognition they deserve are far rarer than people who get more recognition than they deserve. People are all clever primates, none of them significantly smarter than others, just with different backgrounds, advantages, and disadvantages.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Rebecca:<br>

<em>Anyone who says "broad masses" is mis-educated. I tell young writers to get a job as a journalist on a weekly country newspaper for a year or two -- really write for a living. If you're not a good enough writer to get such a job, then why in the world would you imagine that you can do "literature?" Working on a newspaper also breaks down the mis-education pretty fast. I suspect that working as a photo-journalist after the Rhode Island School of Design or the Slade would do the same thing. Deepen your understanding of people (perhaps not really necessary for a photographer as much as it's critical for a novelist).</em><br>

<em>I agree with Auden -- people who don't get the recognition they deserve are far rarer than people who get more recognition than they deserve. People are all clever primates, none of them significantly smarter than others, just with different backgrounds, advantages, and disadvantages.</em><br>

Again, while I am interested in your views, I disagree totally. Working on a local newspaper will not teach you how to do real writing – it will teach you how to write descriptions of non-events in a bland way which will not upset major advertisers, with the editor’s disapproval and loss of job as the price for non-conformity. Similarly, working as a photojournalist will not deepen your understanding of people, except in a very negative way, as you see real news stories being pushed aside, or even not covered at all, in favor of pictures of starlets falling out of nightclubs/their dresses. <br>

As regards deserved/undeserved fame/obscurity, I don’t know if you are familiar with the popular music business. If you were aware of the hosts of Afro-American R&B and jazz artists who were paid a pittance to make records, were denied distribution, had their work covered by white artists without adequate payment, had their publishing rights stolen by white managers or given away in whole or in part just to get their music on the radio, and in certain cases had their work rediscovered decades later and used in commercials without a cent in royalties, I genuinely believe you would change your opinion. Yes, the principle of “famine or feast” applies to many creative activities, artists who do become big stars are arguably overpaid, but they are a tiny minority!</p>

<p>You've got published fiction and a Ph.D. dissertation based on your novel and someone else's novel? I do. Journalism made that possible. Perhaps I was fortunate in the chance encounter between me and the weekly newspaper I worked for. The thing is that it's hard to maintain the typical stereotypes of the police after you've been in a cop shop when people heard about a highway trooper being murdered, or talked to people about their jobs that weren't like yours. I know a couple of other writers who've gotten very good things from the journalistic work they've done. <br /><br />Given that Sony has had a fit over the FSLN using "Stand By Me" as their election campaign song and the FSLN not really giving a damn, and me checking to see who wrote what Sony was claiming as their property, yes, but we do know Ben E. King wrote "Stand by Me," after all. </p>

<p>What Auden was talking about were people doing "art" more than popular music people getting their work stolen by white musicians and large corporations. Black culture is community culture more often that not, what people who don't have Ivy League/Oxbridge eductions make as their music. I've lived in an Appalachian area where most of the local musicians were actually quite good, where at least music wasn't something that set one apart from the "broad masses." People in those communities generally have good taste for their music, and the people who do better jobs than others tend to get recognized. Cf. the Mayan weavers -- every woman in the culture is a weaver, some better than others. (And we had one moronic doctor's wife who wanted to save the locals from their terrible hillbilly music and who brought in a white boy who paid flamenco guitar -- white boy immediately found the local musicians and played with them for several hours).<br /><br /><br /><br>

The US is racist. even more so in my youth (I grew up in the US South) and it's easy to see that for a lot of blacks in the US, sports or music is a way to escape or console themselves. Did they make huge amounts of money from it? Some did; some didn't. Did they get recognition in their communities? I suspect so -- that recognition was what attracted those who robbed them. I could make an argument that native non-representational art was looted by Europeans for the transformation in the arts there.<br /><br />I'm still waiting for Sony to invade Nicaragua. That had to have been the funniest breach of copyright I've ever seen (Ben E. King wrote the thing -- John Lennon has covered it). Ben E. King is still alive, born in Henderson, NC, now living in New Jersey. I don't know if he leased the rights to Sony, or if they bought them outright.<br /><br /><br>

Most of the horrors of modern media for "the masses" come from people who have considerable contempt for people who weren't educated as they were, who don't have the leisure to investigate what they had the leisure to investigate (here a non-rich child who goes to high school is also probably working, and that was true of many working class people in the US). </p>

<p>It's still the case that a lot of things that wouldn't pass the photo editor at a half good newspaper get hung as art photograhy by museums because the photographer has the right cultural capital.</p>

<p>One of the better photographers I knew was a guy in rural Virginia. He had a good eye. Frankie Robinson. Sometimes, people only get recognized by a few people. I had him shoot the cover for one of my small press books.<br /><br />And I still say W.H. Auden was right -- most people get more recognition than they deserve than get less recognition than they deserve. How the world pays or doesn't pay them is a completely different matter, but it's easier for bad "fine" arts people to get a sinecure than it is for a hiphop artist to get one. Yet, kids here know hiphop, not Milton Babbit (one of the town murals is apparently of an American hiphop artist).<br>

</p><div></div>

<p><em>You've got published fiction and a Ph.D. dissertation based on your novel and someone else's novel?</em><br>

Just for the record, no I don’t – what I have is 7 years’ professional experience as a photographer plus 36 more as a professional journalist. In the latter capacity 99% of my output has been as English translations of German company magazines – for a while I used to write original magazine articles, mainly on music and photography, under my own name, essentially for my own satisfaction, since the financial return was much lower than for translation. I stopped doing this when the British “Amateur Photographer” magazine cut its rates from mediocre to painful and I felt I could no longer justify working 3 to 4 times longer for a given amount of money just for the sake of my ego.</p>

<p>The problem for artists is how to survive (and recognition is orthogonal to that problem), and whether sacrificing for the art makes one a better artist than simple finding some way to make money and do art. Academia in the US is what a lot of artists get involved with; here it's various political things and advertising (Nicaragua). Some countries, it's journalism.</p>

<p>My impression is that some cultures value art more than other cultures -- black US culture doesn't appear to have put so sharp a knife between popular and elite arts as white US cultures (academic hostility to the genres where that exists). Here in what's a provincial small city in Nicaragua, everything from coffee to cast mould ceramics to paintings on canvas is at the local art center. <br /><br />When I wrote poetry, the thing people did was get an academic position; otherwise poets got hammered by their coworkers if they ever mentioned what they did (with some exceptions) and live in a world that has no basic use for poetry that's not music lyrics. Or poets had enough of a trust fund to get buy on, sometime, quite a trust fund (Kenward Elmslie, a couple of others). I don't know anyone who stayed in poetry of my friends from the early 1970s who didn't end up in academia. <br /><br />The folks who didn't want to become academics and who didn't have trust funds ended up leaving poetry -- one friend is now an environmental activist and a paid private archivist. I ended up in tech writing for a while before I could collect SS and move to Nicaragua. Another friend has to work a day job to support teaching at Naropa and her own poetry.</p>

<p>So, poetry, the queen of the literary arts, as one professor told me when I was in graduate school the last time, has no audience compared to hip hop, but being recognized enough will make a poet more money than actually being a decently published s.f. writer. Whole field is completely detached from the idea of any kind of non-specialist audiences.</p>

<p>I did know one poet who was a translator in NYC, about the only one.</p>

<p>My suggestion for young writers or photographers isn't to stay in journalism forever, just knock the edge off the art school/MFA program elitism.</p>

<p>Photojournalism is what people who don't have trust funds or MFAs do to be photographers and get paid for it. I suspect things are now worse than they were when I was in the 20s and 30s, and that the kind of job I had is even rarer. But to try to drive a wedge between what people who don't have money can do to be artists and what people with money or cultural capital can do seems to be unhealthy for the art that gets so divided.</p>

<p>Most of the pro photographers I met in Philadelphia were black -- it was an opportunity for them to do something that was creative, at least at times. Most of the academics who taught photography weren't making a living at it other than by teaching it. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>"But to try to drive a wedge between what people who don't have money can do to be artists and what people with money or cultural capital can do seems to be unhealthy for the art that gets so divided."</p>

<p>Well spoken The" them and us" is the unhealthy part of society which creates the cancers of humanity.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I would agree that what is considered fine art is subjective, but if you consider photography an art at all, there is an argument that photojournalism can be considered fine art. Journalism can also be considered an art when done correctly as a form of writing. </p>

<p>As stated before, it's such a subjective topic that there really is no clear cut answer. I think anything can be considered art with the proper content. The grit and realism that photojournalism can capture to me makes it art, but as stated earlier there is no right answer. </p>

<p>Okay, so that was…interesting…but it’s July 1^stand 5 days since the last comment, so perhaps it’s time to ask Phil Jones who started all this what he thinks now. </p>

<p>Phil, what say you, man? Did it help, or are you thinking about dropping out of school and abandoning<br />civilization as we know it…or at least believe to be? </p>

<p>This is also a good question. As mentioned before photojournalism is a niche area of photography and something that can feasibly be pursued, but I wouldn't abandon everything else in order to do so. Honestly, many art forms are better served as a hobby until you build up a large enough portfolio to stand out in a crowded and competitive market. </p>

<p>I'll be short. I think photojournalism can be in a category of <strong>conceptual art</strong>. I'm pretty sure of it. Recently I visited London Festival of Photography and one of the photojournalistic exhibitions was conceptual:<br>

http://lfph.org/diary/behind-closed-doors </p>

 

<p>If you think about the true meaning of art, you might say, something that is eye catching, pleasing to the eye, something that is stunning, something that takes talent to produce, or, showing or evoking emotion. Art is dealing with the way that things come together. </p>

<p>"A desolute little room destroyed. In the corner was a dirty little broken doll."<br>

Not Art. Truth, Allen.<br>

_________________<br>

The thing about "Art" is it's often either purely decorative, testament to another's ego or banal. There's no doubt Art exists, at times profound, but I feel that often The Art in a photograph is the blessed by-product of a number of factors which don't concern themselves with the definition.</p>

 

<p>If you have to ask.....</p>