Week 1 - Is there really no sentiment in artistic photography?

After closely reading and attempting to empathize with at least some of Siegfried Kracauer’s points in “Photography”, I have found myself somewhat bitter about the statements he makes about “artistic photography” on page 53. Kracauer argues that artistic photography has lost its justification due to the “increasing independence of the technology and the simultaneous evacuation of meaning from the objects”. He goes on to say that while modern painters aim to “highlight the side-by-side existence of reified appearances as they manifest themselves in spatial relations” by composing their images out of photographic parts, artistic photographers aim to “hide the technological essence by means of style.” In short, Kracauer accuses artistic photographers to be entirely devoid of substance, thus reducing them to somewhat pathetic, hopeless impersonators.

My first and most blatantly obvious problem with such bold statements is the fact that Kracauer is generalizing an entire field of art and consequently reducing artistic photography to a secondary form of expression. I fail to see how an artist who takes photographs that are in one way or another inspiring and meaningful to him/her is in any way less talented or less important than an artist who, for example, splatters different colors of paint blindly upon an empty canvas. While the artistic photographer and the Jackson Pollock-esque painter are members of two dramatically different fields of art, they are nonetheless creating something that has meaning and sentiment – even if few realize this meaning and sentiment.

My last point has to do with the subjectivity that inevitably comes into play when labeling a piece of work as substantial. Kracauer has no reservations about labeling artistic photographers as “dilettante artist[s] who [ape] an artistic manner minus its substance, instead of capturing the very lack of substance.” What is it exactly about the work of the aforementioned Jackson Pollock-esque painter that legitimizes his form of expression as opposed to the artistic photographer’s photographs? Kracauer seems to be making these vague statements without giving much reason to justify the claims. To be perfectly honest, I am more likely to find meaning and substance in a photograph (whether it depicts a landscape or a human face, or whatever it may be) before I find an equivalent amount of meaning/substance in a painting of a flower. My point is that whether or not one finds meaning in anything is entirely subjective, and we should therefore stop ourselves from labeling some arts as more effective than others.