Fine Art Photography:
Fine art is visual art considered to be something created for aesthetic or intellectual value rather than practical purpose. According to the Oxford dictionary, fine art is:
1. “Creative art, especially visual art whose products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content
2. An activity requiring great skill or accomplishment”
Fine art is essentially an art form practiced for its beauty. It’s all about why it was created and comes from a concept or idea derived from the artist. There is a difference between commercial and fine art. The purpose of fine art is to simply exist. Historically, fine art encompassed painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, but now includes photography, too.
Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering American Fine art photographer instrumental over his fifty-year career in promoting photography as an accepted art form.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1864, Stieglitz studied engineering in Germany before returning to New York in 1890, determined to prove that photography was as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture.
Stieglitz became the editors of Camera Notes, the journal for the amateur Camera Club of New York. Stieglitz approached Camera Notes as a means of expressing his aesthetic vision for photography. When members became dissatisfied by Steiglitz's rigorous editorial control of the magazine, he and other like-minded photographers left the organisation and formed the Photo-Secessionist movement. The Photo-Secessionists sought to promote photography as a fine art and did so by connecting the medium to older established artistic practices by mimicking the aesthetics of drawing, lithographs and watercolours. They emphasised the craftsmanship of photography and utilised time and labour-intensive printing techniques and processes in order to bring the artist's touch to photography.
In 1902, Stieglitz founded and edited Camera Work and organised exhibitions with the aid of Edward Steichen. He established the first photography gallery, which was called 291 Gallery.
As early as 1907, Stieglitz's approach to his own photographic practices began to change. In 1907, Stieglitz captured his most famous image, The Steerage, which depicted third class passengers on a transatlantic journey to Europe. For Stieglitz, this photograph captured his new vision for photography. Inspired by cubist paintings, The Steerage represented a new kind of art which privileged the arrangements of colour, shapes and tones rather than subject matter.
He wrote in his journal “I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”
In 1917, Stieglitz exhibited Marcel Duchamp's radical Fountain at his Gallery. It was also around this time that Stieglitz's approach to photography shifted. In the final edition of Camera Work Stieglitz devoted the issue to the modern compositions of Paul Strand's photographs, marking the end of pictorialism for Stieglitz and he welcomed in the modern era of photography, where the camera's ability to capture, abstract and reproduce became a celebrated part of the medium.
Between 1917-1925, Stieglitz's main photographic project was photographing celebrated artist and later his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. It was through this series that Stieglitz applied his ideals of modernist photography to portraiture. The series is simultaneously intimate yet detached. No singular image represents O'Keeffe's whole person marking the continually changing fragmented self of the modern world. It was through this series that Stieglitz explored the camera as a subjective medium and despite its ability to record, for Stieglitz, photographs are more reflective of photographer's feelings towards the subject rather than an truthful representation. Stieglitz explored this idea in his project, Equivalents, in which un-manipulated cloud images that he thought embodied his emotional state as he photographed. In the final decades of Stieglitz's career, he devoted much of his time to promoting other artist's works at his galleries. Stieglitz as a photographer heralded in a new age of photographic practices and has influenced generations of artist, writers and critics.
Oleg Oprisco is a Ukrainian fine art photographer who shoots on film and uses little to no photoshop in his work. Oprisco has been working in the realm of photography since he was 16 years old and is now based in Kiev. In an interview with 500px, he reveals that he shoots only with “medium format film” and spends a lot of time at flea markets searching for props.
In an interview, Oprisco explained that he draws inspiration from the world around him, he says that he always has inspiration for new ideas as there is so much beauty in the world around him.
In comparison to Alfred Stieglitz’s work, Oleg Oprisco’s work is a lot more abstract and staged. Both the photographers works contrast each other and this is due to art having a different meaning for each of them as fine arts is about expressing the way you personally see and approach the word.
Fine Art Photography Industry
The income for fine arts photographers can vary depending on their level of success in the gallery and museum market, commercial retail successes and style and intentions of their work.
Career Path
Fine art photography is one medium that an artist can choose to go into for the creative work. Some artists are self-taught, but many artists choose to go after a bachelor's or master's degree in fine arts to develop their technical skills, work with established artists as teachers and enhance their critical thinking. After school, most fine arts photographers work in their home or studio and support themselves financially with other positions until their work becomes recognized to the point of being sold in galleries to collectors or museums. It is a tough route for most, but highly creative and exciting.
Pricing Fine Art
Pricing fine art is complicated, involving supply and demand, reputation, auction records, if appropriate, and the economic situation of the artist and economy as a whole. If an artist has a gallery, she often consults the gallery when choosing a price. It is common for a gallery to get 50 percent of the final sale. Most galleries have the goal of providing a show to their artist yearly and an exhibition can have one major work or a grouping. Emerging artists who are just beginning to exhibit often charge less than $2,000 a work, depending on a number of factors and if it is an original or a special edition print. Major artists, such as Cindy Sherman, charge upwards of $40,000 for a work. To calculate your potential income from an exhibition requires estimating the number of sales you expect. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, fine artists made a mean income of $43,370 in 2010.
Non-Gallery Commercial Sector
In addition to selling your fine art work at a gallery, or instead of it, some photographers use their skills in the commercial sector with their non-fine art work. Positions that photographer's skills translate to include event and portrait photography, teaching in fine art photography departments and fashion photography. As an event photographer, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, mean wages as of 2010 were $36,800.
Further research:
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Forensic photography:
Wedding photography:
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