What is photo art?

What is photo art?

Without doing a search or reading a wiki, I will describe what it means to me as it is a type of art I do, and I wouldn't know what it might mean to someone else. Photo art is taking a photograph, almost always one I have taken with my camera, and changing it into something else. It sounds almost too simple of a concept. And if that was all, it would just be called photo-manipulation and not have the art component. continued below...

A Natural Thing Suburbia Nature Photo Art and Wall Canvas Prints by Rybird

A word on art. Art is subjective, and what is art to one person may not be to another. But art is anything in visual form that contains a human influenced or created element that can be interpreted to tell a story, convey an emotion or stimulate thought. That is my definition. It can be as simple as cropping the photograph as perhaps I would crop most of a face out and just have part of it in the picture. It is no longer a raw image, “graph” as in photograph, but art. Why do I call it art? It now has a outside human influence, and as such the artist has created something that did not exist before, in this example, a cropped image, that gives the effect of someone peeking in, or leaving part of the picture out to stimulate the imagination.

Why not just call it photography? Perhaps many do, but I do not, simply because the end result might not appear anything like a photograph. I could call it a photo-manipulation and many people use that term, but it leaves out the artistic element. That term is just too dry for me and if I was just flipping it upside-down for fun and it had no artistic qualities by doing so, yes, that would be OK. Sometimes something simple like flipping a photograph upside-down is very artistic and the viewer can see it totally different as something very stimulating and fresh.

Many times the end work, as in artwork, doesn't resemble anything like the original photograph, but most often there is at least one major element that stay original, if it is just the shape of a flower or of an airplane. But now the story behind the photograph has changed and is now a new work. Regardless of the intent of the artist or how effective this method is in any given piece. The work now has the artist's human element as part of it now.

] A Grand Design Digital Abstract and Ultra Modern Art by Rybird Making the World Beautiful

“But photo art isn't nearly as difficult so cannot be as valuable or appreciated as much as regular hand drawn, or painted art.” I do not know the answer to that, except to say that quite a bit of effort is usually spent on a work of photo art, and can vary greatly from 15 minutes to many hours spread out over days or weeks.  Perhaps it's the lack of scarcity, in that being digital, it is always a copy that can be reproduced endless times. However,the end result can be as pleasing as any other art form, so I cannot see how it as a general rule would be worth any less.

Art forms can be hybrid, or cross genre, “media?” , for lack of better terms, in that a finished work, could have many techniques. An artist could use a photograph and paint. And that could fit into the mixed-media category, however I would prefer to called it mashed media? Semantics, nomenclature and jargon aside, photo art is an accepted and appreciated form of art and can express feelings and ideas as well as other forms.

the bird is the word. Rybird.

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