Define art and/or photography based on your personal life experience.
Art is anything that is not required for human survival. For example, pottery can be seen as an art form if the creator intends to communicate his or her thoughts through the medium of clay. Pottery would not be seen as an art form if it is industrially manufactured to be used as a household item.
This means that there is a large range of things in life that can be considered as art: juggling, dealing cards, cooking, etc. The reason why there is such a divide between what people call "art" and "not art" is because they are mistaken. The real divide is what is "good art" and "bad art". This, of course, breaches into the trite (but true) fact that calling something good and bad relies on the subjective opinions of the beholder. I would make the point, however, that art does have some objective criteria that would allow it to be considered good or bad. Sometimes people ignore the technicalities behind art and do not realize the full extent of the structure that allows it to be so highly regarded.
The purpose of art is to communicate and manipulate the perception of reality (either their own perception or the viewer's perception). This kind of perception that is manipulated is perhaps to portray an ideal, to portray the "truth" (however subjective that may be), to portray raw emotion, etc.
The reason why art is so popular is because it is easy to digest. Not that art must be didactic (that is a debate that stands on its own and cannot be discussed in this post), but it is a general observation that artists are trying to communicate or teach something about reality. Suddenly, there is an intangible filter that speaks of reality but is only a reflection of reality. As viewers, we can learn of and create an understanding of this reflection of reality, and then build our knowledge around it.
Photography is a subcategory of art. I feel like its power lies in its ability to take things out of context. Quite literally, it is a snapshot of a moment. Reality, however, has nothing to do with freezing moments since it is instead a constant stream of moments. Photography grabs a single moment and removes it from the reality flow that humans experience. I realized this power of photography when I viewed a blog of a photographer, where there was a collection of similar objects in different compositions. I saw one of the pictures of the collection and appreciated its artistic qualities individually, but when I began scrolling through the collection of the pictures, I experienced a different perspective of the picture: it suddenly became clearer to understand the artist's holistic vision, which was different from my original interpretation when I only viewed one photo.
I would say more about art and photography, but it is hard for me to structure a response around a subject that is so unspecific. I would love to continue this discussion around a more specific area of art.
to make the ordinary extraordinary
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