Abstract Photography- Has Photography Come Of Age

“ noway have I set up the limitations of the photographic eventuality. Every firmament, upon existing transferred, reveals another waving in the distance. Always, I’m on the threshold. ”-W. Eugene Smith

The creation of the camera delivered oil from its reportage part. Gone was the need to produce a likeness and detail the events of the story, oil was free to express feelings. True what had gone ahead contained an emotional content. But now painting could experiment and through imaginative interpretation allow the emotional content to predominate. Freed from this constraint the painter was able to produce a new language and explore the provocations of their art.

As the 19th century evolved and throughout the 20th century painters from the imitators through the cubists and expressionists to the minimalists. Could use colour, line, and form to go straight to the emotional content of their work. The emblematic aspect of the work came coincidental and was pushed to the point that it came akin. To lie on the lawn making shapes out of shadows. Pleasurable as it may be it’s secondary to the nature of shadows.

The preface of the digital darkroom has given this freedom to shutterbugs. The range of tools to fix and enhance the camera’s prisoner when pushed to its axes produces a range of fascinating goods. When added to the pollutants erected into the better software. Images can be produced that any comparison to the original snap is purely coincidental. As shutterbugs explore these tools and incorporate them into their photos so their visual language will grow. The revolution of the medium with the development from black and white into colour is taking its next step. Now with the digital darkroom’s ever-growing range of tools, the only limitation is the shooter’s imagination.

With the use of these tools, the professed photographic artist can take the pop song and produce, in visual terms, the lyric beauty of a baroque symphony or the down city vocabulary of a jazz variation without a tree or a high rise in sight. Just the light captured by the camera and fine-tuned into commodity fully different, commodity new that comes from the shooter.

The shooter has been liberated like the painter before them by technology. Now photos can explore the full range of mortal experiences including those they’ve no words to express. Large statements will be affordable by the shooter not only in physical terms. Although like their painter counterparts, through a fresh point of technology, the large oil is getting the order of the day. That this oil can express passions rather than just demonstrate them. Denotes that photography has become a grown-up in the crafts.