[LargeFormat] Photography as art?

[mark blackman]

Andrew,

As many, more eloquent than me, have said one cannot answer your question
without understanding 'What Is Art?'

Many people have striven to answer this but, as yet, there is no one
universal answer. Art for me is an infinite list of things, but here are
some more important than others:

The birth of my children.
The death of my father.
A goal by Steve Bull (I support an English football team Wolverhampton
Wanderers)
First love.
First heartbreak.
The view from the Black Mountains.
The view from my back garden.
The beauty of a sea shell.
The Atlantic at dawn.
A thunder storm.
A sunset.
The moon on a star-lit night.
Road kill.

And so on. All of these could be captured by photography. Or verse. Or
prose. A bawdy ballad, or a towering symphony.

Photography doesn't have to be beautiful, nor does it have to be hateful, so
long as it invokes an emotional response - but remember that cultural icons
can be meaningless outside of their home. Picture, for example, a
middle-aged dentist living in some dusty town in Australia, and compare
their idea of art to street photographer in Kabul or a Inuit grandmother.

We in the west have been 'educated' as to what art consists of by mass media
but I still believe art, and hence photography, can still produce a strong
response when it invokes an personal response to an image.