I am fascinated with Second Life images appearing on Flickr. Many are strictly artistic, others erotic, many pornographic, and most just pictures. I’ve noticed some of the fashion blogs have very talented people doing the art, but how to categorize those images is debatable. While commercial art is still an art form there are the elitists that look down on anything that cannot be classed as fine art. Some going so far is to eliminate photography from the field. My thinking is there is nothing that says people have to be sane or even rational, especially when it comes to taste.
Some like to use what I’ll call mood images in their promotional/commercial art that I think really increase the visual impact. I find it as artistic as any fine art and debatably more challenging to create as one must achieve multiple goals. I am impressed when I see people creating, basically, ads that I would class as art. Others are making promotional material that shows their products in purely functional ways with beauty is barely a consideration. That doesn’t mean that work isn’t artistic, at least for me, I just see other art as more.
The older definitions of photography and the word itself require that light be captured to create an image. Phos (φῶς) is Greek for light and photos (φωτός) is the genitive form of the word that indicates ‘source’. Graphé (γραφή) means to represent by drawing, loosely translated. So, the idea is to draw with light. A digital camera meets that criteria as we are capturing light.
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