Still image

Here’s a discussion (which usually deteriorates into an argument) I won’t be having with anyone, anytime soon—photography as an art form. Nope. It just isn’t going to happen. I will, however, tell you how I feel about photography as an art form and not because I’m a photographer or LOML is a photographer or because I know oodles of artists who just happen to create their art with a camera.

IN THE BEGINNING
My first encounter with photographic art was the day I first laid eyes on a National Geographic magazine. I wasn’t very old but I knew the images on the pages were far more than a pictorial travelogue or an image documentary. They were so much more than photojournalism.

My uncle Neil was the family photographer, the documenter of the picnics, baptisms, weddings and seasonal celebrations. He introduced me to the word “photojournalism,” telling me how the photographer gets to tell a story in pictures. I was hooked. Not only could a person tell a story with words or paint or charcoal or clay or stone, a story could be told with photographs.

The Weston Public Library was never the same storybook heaven to me after all of that sunk in. From the early 1950s on, I was on the lookout for books with pages of photographs, often checking out more than my limit of two books, done with the help of indulgent older siblings and hapless classmates. I don’t remember the librarian’s name but she introduced me to what could loosely be refered to as “the stacks” and it was there I thumbed through pages and files of images by photographers like Ansel Adams, Camille Silvy, Alfred Stieglitz and Eugene Atget. I didn’t know I was consumed with a love for photographic art. I was in love with the images and how they made me feel and how they made me think.

Oh, the stories I would dream up while looking at photographs. Sometimes I thought about what would have been happening at the instant the image was captured and sometimes I wondered what it would have been like to have stood next to the photographer when they told their world to say “cheese.”

DIVERSIONS
By the time I was a young teenager, I had better things to do than pursue my love of pictures. I didn’t acquire a camera of my own until I was a teen. It wasn’t anything sophisticated, just a little thing with a wrist strap—an Instamatic—a gift from LOML (then BoM). He seemed to understand me and was, himself, the owner of the magical Asahi Pentax SLR. The love affairs, one for photography, ramped up in earnest.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART?
In 2010, the inaugural CLIC Eastern Ontario Photo Show hit The County. It was, by all definitions, a very successful first show. I was fortunate to have been a member of the first CLIC committee. Sitting around that meeting table, some of us wondered if the show would actually happen.

A few of us were “positive” photographers would creep out from behind their cameras and send in their favourite works of art, but among us there were a few who were afraid the jury would be inundated with everything from birthday party pictures to listless pictures of family pets. As a group, we just weren’t sure. Each one of us had our fears and dreams for the show. Each of us had our own definition of “what is art” and a few were worried “could photography be art?”

A jury of talented people was selected and the entries slowly but steadily rolled in. As an Arts Council-sanctioned event it was easy for us to say, “it must be art,” but we all had our concerns. Most of all, we were afraid the viewing public might sum it all up with, “Anyone can take a picture. Everyone has a camera.”

Yet, until the deadline for submission, dozens of people who knew their art and were into the form and content of their medium, emailed, mailed and hand delivered CDs full of beautiful expressions and interpretations of the world around them. Form and content. Clarity of form. Content of beauty. I, personally, did not envy the job of the jurors but, enjoyed the privilege of appreciator of the art of photography.

To say the least, I was overwhelmed by the response and by the quality of the submissions. CLIC Eastern Ontario Photo Show exhibited images of extraordinary quality, insight and passion—photographic art. CLIC opens to the public for its second year on Saturday July 30 and continues until Sunday August 7 in the second floor gallery at Books & Company on Main Street in Picton. Be prepared for photographic art magic.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca