This is something I’ve been thinking about and trying to wrap my head around, but it’s in no way a concrete philosophy.

The point of art is not to make something beautiful. The point of art is to make the viewer think.

Jon Wilkening quoting an unknown artist on Jeffery Saddoris’ Everything podcast

The purpose of Art is to evoke feelings so that we experience truth. My hypothesis is that Art ought to point to something other than itself.

James Sinclair

If everything is art then nothing is art.

Jeffery Saddoris

As a photographer, probably the most important question I can ask myself is, “Why am I taking this photograph?”

For most of my early photography, the answer would have been that I was documenting a situation or event. I was creating a photocopy of whatever was unfolding in front of me: family events, daily family life, my grandson growing up, my dogs, etc.

When I became more serious about improving my craft, the most common subject was dogs because I was surrounded by them. Again, the purpose was utilitarian: shooting dog shows for my boss, documenting my own dogs, portraits for local rescue groups or for the occasional client.

I eventually moved into street, landscape, and phone photography (the latter thanks to Chase Jarvis’s book “The Best Camera” and his app of the same name).

This is where I started to think of photography as art, focusing on how things are placed in the frame and what their relationship is to each other. That’s not to say that the things themselves are not important. What you put in front of your camera can make or break the photo but what you do with what’s there is the art.

For the first time in my life (or at least in my memory), I started thinking of myself as “artistic” or “creative”. It was a wonderful feeling.

But the question remained: why was I taking these photos?

If you had asked me during this “creative” phase, I would have answered, “because it’s interesting” or “because it’s cute” or “because it’s beautiful”. And there are many people, both inside and outside the art world, who would have labeled what I did as “art”.

But then I stumbled upon a YouTube channel belonging to Justin Jones, a gentleman from the UK. His channel is called “Still Life – Art and the photographic image “. You can watch it here.

As of the writing of this post, Justin has only made twenty-four videos, fourteen of which are about other photographers. The remaining ten deal with his philosophy surrounding photography, art, and particularly landscape photography.

Justin is blunt and makes it clear that, when it comes to art, he has no time (or very little) for “service providers” such as commercial photographers, wedding photographers, portrait photographers (most), and anyone else who is providing a client with a product. He has what could even be called disdain for the “orange and blue” photos that overwhelm any web search for “landscape”, for the long exposure waterfalls, and the mountains reflected in a lake. He calls them “calendar photos”.

In one case, he laments about a photographer who gets up before dawn, spends hours hiking up a mountain, stands at the top with a camera on a tripod, takes a photo of the sunrise, and then packs up and hikes back down. His opinion is that the skill in taking that photo was the ability to get up early and hike, rather than the photography itself, because once you are at the top of that mountain, all you have to do is wait for the sun and press the shutter button.

I’m not sure that he ever says these exact words, but it’s quite apparent that he believes that photography, and landscape photography in particular, should have a purpose beyond being pleasing to the eye. It should make a statement. One such statement that seems to resonate with him is the intrusion of human society into nature.

I’m not sure I agree with Justin. I suspect there are many cases where art is art for art’s sake. I think that, contrary to some of the quotes above, something beautiful can be art simply because it’s beautiful.

The problem is, I watched all of Justin’s videos and I listened carefully to what he said and I started thinking, perhaps even overthinking. And now I’m in the position of “what has been seen cannot be unseen”.

Every time I look at a typical landscape photo, one that may have a very high rating on a photo sharing site or thousands of likes on Instagram, all I can think is “another orange and blue sunset”, “another long-exposure waterfall”, “another mountain reflected in a lake”.

As an experiment, after watching Justin’s videos, I went on to 500px.com and chose “Popular Photos”. I also looked at the “Editors’ Choice” photos. Almost every photo was beautiful. The landscape photos could all have been in calendars or in books or on hotel walls or even in galleries. But I couldn’t find any that, to me, meant anything. They just seemed to be well-executed photos of beautiful places.

I also did the same with my own photos and, although I did find some that seem to be saying something, I found that those that had previously been my favourites now fell into this category of “just another one of those”.

It’s a disturbing endeavour to question every photo I’ve ever taken and ask why I took it.

I have the least problem with the documentary photos. Those serve a purpose and, when I look back at them years later (as I’ve been doing recently), they bring back memories of people and places, of particular times in my life. Those are good to keep. Very few of them, if any, are art.

The ones that are giving me difficulty are where I set out to make a good photo, where I concentrated on making a good photo, where my composition and subject choice and lighting and timing were all designed to make a good photo, and I produced a good photo.

But was it art?

And why did I make it?

I don’t have the answer…yet.