Stephan G

I can appreciate the sentiment. It can be a black hole as long as there is an attempt to pigeonhole it to something concrete. (Concrete in a pigeonhole?!) Art, like love, is indefinable when we try to pin it down. Oddly enough, it is zen in its nature. The moment you define it, it ceases to be. Is Art defined by masters of the craft? They will be the first to say "No!"

The best any of us can say is "I think...." about it. I would say that many of us who have studied Art in its many forms arrived at the point of "I think".

The answer to your query is that the "art" of the photograph is not dependent nor defined by the contemporaneous aspects for the shot. It stands apart. It is art from the start and continues past the loss of the ambient context for it. An example would be the statues from Ancient Greece. We see the art of the piece without knowledge of the reference or purpose at the time it was created. We can archeologically determine some of the information eventually, but it does not change the art of the sculpture.

Now, La Brea tar pits. That is a black hole!

DaveC1 Loc: South East US

Thank you Stephen for your thoughtful comments. You are quite correct.

What I'm trying to do here (with apparently very little success) is treat the art aspect as a black box i.e. we know it's here and its part of most every photograph. But at what point does the photograph move from being predominantly documentary to predominantly art.

So to, hopefully, further this discussion here is the original image I started with and the final image next to each other.

This is a tile roof, twigs & leaves with a bit of moisture from rain the prior evening shot early morning. If this were shot by a roof inspector on his first job this would almost certainly be considered documentary in its purpose. I however am not a roof inspector and the image was not shot for that purpose. But still its documentary of a particular time and space.

My finished image has been altered to still be able to be identified as part of the original image but not readily identifiable as a photo of a roof with the original attributes. It was altered to function as "art."

I'm also not looking for comments on which image the members prefer here, to be clear.

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Stephan G

You are the one who decided to present an art by modifying the initial shot. If we were to see the first, that is the original shot, we would presume it as a recording of an event. We may not see the art in it until we view your interpretation (manipulation) of the original shot. You converted the view into an image of art. I say that the art was created with the second image and that image is not for the purpose of recording a result of an event.

As for the observing public, in all likelihood we do have someone who may be a roof inspector.