Photography as an art.

I know it's been a while since I've posted, and I apologize. I've been focusing my time into finding a job, blah, blah, blah.

I felt like I lost a lot of drive to be creative since I graduated and I went to get some ideas from the magazine rack at Barnes and Nobles. I don't really consider photography to be an art, becuase you don't create anything you just capture something. I understand the "art" comes in appetures, doing touch ups, exposing negatives, photoshop and all that good stuff. But photo still half-assing a creation or screwing up something so it looks cool. I'm not saying avoid photography it's garbage, but as far are as an "art" I was skeptical.

Digging through magazines like CMYK I started getting frustrated with the lack of design oriented stuff and looking through some of the less "high end" photography. By high end I just mean the magazines geared toward "the buyers and sellers of today's art world". I'm in no position to be buying art right now. I started browsing through B&W Photography, a magazine that's for black and white only photography. I was moved. I pulled over a little bench and sat looking through it for a solid hour. The first real note of photography that to this day I regret not owning was at the LSU Museam of Art (MOA). It was an underwater shot of a naked woman swimming. It took me 30 minutes to figure out it was a woman. It was under choppy water so the light refracted in crazy ways all over the woman's body. It was phenomenal.

Looking through this magazine, I wasn't as enthralled in it as I was that photo at the LSU MOA but I started to realize that the content had a lot to do with it. Photography is creating emotion, a sense of longing, a desire to be there. I took a photography course in college, my teacher sucked, the class sucked, it was a joke. I attribute some of my distaste of photography to that class.

I'm not even saying "good photography is art". Artist photography is something hard to pursue and only 1 out of your entire portfolio may be "art" and it comes down to capturing an image rather than creating it. It also has to do with the basic fundamentals of photography and the lighting, angle, emphasis, etc. But it is, in my opinion, that hard to find good artist photography.