Landscape Photography Magazine

“Should we consider photography art or craft? Can we put our precious photographs on the same lever as paintings? David Hay shares his thoughts on this controversial subject”

Are Photographers Artists or Craftsmen?

We all like to think we have some artistic skills. At art class I was hopeless at painting anything 3-dimensional; my paintings of wine bottles and apples looked like cardboard cut-outs. I believe a lot of photographers are failed artists who turn to photography as an outlet for their vision. Paintings can command high prices because each one is unique. Photographs, on the other hand, can be reproduced mechanically and this has limited their value. To raise the cost of prints, artificial limits can be placed on the number of prints produced by creating limited editions and sometimes even destroying the original negative after the print run.

The most expensive photograph was sold recently. It is a landscape photograph of the banks of the Rhine by Andreas Gursky. It sold for £2.7 million pounds. To me it looked like a simple (albeit very large) photograph of green horizontal patches with some sky and water. It is tempting to say that he should…