Fine Art photography : History and Current Trends

Fine Art photography is a niche in which a concern is to be expressed by content and their purpose usually is not directly related to commercial exploitation. To explain too much in details from historical nomenclature; the artistic photography is a medium of photography which can be used as a mean of artistic expression or to achieve enlightenment, social commentary or other ideological or political effects. In general, in the artistic photography the photo which are actually intended to be exploited as a business are referred to fine art photography. Although two sentences contradicts, with time the gap between Fine Art photography and Art photography has been eroded.

The Origin of Fine Art photography Species By Means of Natural Selection

As like the biological species, Art with time has been a matter of selling goods. Knowing to draw perfectly to prove the ability to reproduce realistic reproduction, in traditional art is the rule. There is actually lot of difference between art created by Vincent van Gogh and some celebrity monkeys who claims to know to create ‘art’ – there are lot of examples. You can check the works created by Vincent van Gogh from his starting. Van Gogh’s drawing of 87 Hackford Road is possibly one of the best example to prove the fact that,  Vincent van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (‘At Eternity’s Gate’) created in 1890 has some deeper reason to go towards an ill-defined way.

The exact thing is a valid argument for Fine Art Photography – one need to obey the rules first, get the control of all known parts of Photography and then one can approach towards Fine Art Photography or Art Photography. Fortunately, for Photography; the situation is not like Traditional Art. One basically have to show the skill first on the particular Photography itself, because actually its not possible to create something looking like a multicolored cloth meant to clean the brushes dipped in linseed oil. So, the trend of Art Photography is exactly not towards garbage prints.

First art photography emerged in the mid-19th Century with the effort with the camera to mimic the painting, on one hand blurred pictures were taken, for example, other people were displayed in the picturesque surroundings of studios, standing next to a pillar on the carpet. The differentiation between artistic photography and fine art photography has been arisen from 1945. The beginnings of artistic photography had the goal to be an authentic representative of reality. However, the artistic photography of two objectives quickly dissolved and divided into numerous styles and genres – Documentary, Feature, Portrait, Industrial, Architectural, Advertising, Fashion, Nature, landscape, Journalism and experimental photography. Aperture Foundation, Museum of Modern Art is giving efforts continiously to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.

Fine Art photography : The Current Trends

Artistic Photography and social networking is gradually dissolving. Fine art photography is thought to be created primarily to express the vision, but as a fact it has added certain causes. Such photography has also effects in the area of censorship law and free expression, due to its concern with the nude body, most importantly if it is of a child.

Art vandalism in modern form, to be too much critic is mostly done on the web by certain countries and certain search engines. Mahatma Gandhi wanted the temples of Khajuraho destroyed. Vandalism, in modern form is always present as we still could not really deploy the thought of Richard M. Stallman, a software activist behind GNU GPL and FSF.

One genre partially is stripped off. Next genre is mainly the reality observed by the journalists, peoples related to United Nations or social activist in some way. Still it is kind of unofficially illegal to reproduce the underneath poverty in any class of countries. The works of Kevin Carter is possibly the best example of realistic production of the truth – a photograph portraying a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. That same year, Kevin Carter committed suicide. Carter was bombarded with questions about why he did not help the girl, and only used her to take a photograph. The whole thing is nicely written by Cinders and Guruprasad respectively :

In general, Fine Art Photography is getting splitting in to arbitrary divisions. One part involves using various techniques of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop itself has been an icon of manipulating digital photographs. Another part purely is becoming minimalistic. Both brands – Apple and Adobe do have influence on the way we think.

Practical trend can be seen on deviantArt which is possibly the largest community on this Earth for any kind of art and second is Pinterest. Pinterest possibly serves the best for the pure Fine Art Segment – where there are ‘buyers’, deviantArt on the other hand, is too much high dosage for the most. Except being capable of producing any art, deviantArt community really gives no place to just a person. Also, it is a great problem in community like deviantArt to define what is art because a nude female itself can never be an object of art.

The need to take product photographs for high end goods is decreasing because of more detailed reproduction in 3D. The thoughts are becoming towards an open area where the thought of United Nations, Richard M. Stallman somehow getting reflected.