Does idea that photography is not art survive only as straw man now? In Susan Sontag’s book ‘On Photography’ she reveals a debate as old as the medium; there were not years of received wisdom that it wasn’t art before someone began the effort to raise its profile, as you might intuit if you ever listened to the debate as it rumbled on throughout the 20th century.

Here comes the wolf: I think it is due to the mechanisation and ease with which a photographer can produce a representative image; it is easy to reduce the act of art making to ‘an effort to arrive at a representation’ and judge its validity by the arduousness or singular achievement of the effort. I am reminded of Damien Hirst’s riposte when the ease with which he merely ordered the building of ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ was considered so facile that anyone could have done it; 'But you didn't, did you?' This glib reply belies the real act of art, on purpose I’m sure; it takes invisible stuff – creative will. Any art, no matter how straightforward the job of the midwife, must be willed before it can exist. And if you didn’t do it, just like Hirst called you on, then you didn’t have the will to do it; for only having done it is proof of the will; and if you didn’t have the will, well, then you really didn’t have anything, did you?

Reading:

‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag

Bleeding art Art and design The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/apr/20/thesaatchigallery.art6