Throughout most of the 21^st century, photography was one of, if not the most, ground breaking new form of art.  With the help of companies like Eastman-Kodak, the art form was taken from the skilled masters of the art to that of the mass, general public.  However, there was always a fine line between the “masters of photography” and those who did home photos of their child’s birthday parties.  People from Adams to Arbus, Warhol to LaChapelle dominated the photography art scene throughout the past century.  Yet there has been over the past ten years, a new spoke in the wheel.

With the digital age in hand, with computers and digital cameras, it seems that anyone who has mastered the computer photo editing programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop and the freeware GIMP can go and take a very mediocre photograph and by using one of these programs, turn that image into one of breath taking proportions.   Such was to do it have been published in magazines like Digital Photography as well as in whole books.  So, with this technology at anyone’s hand (and I’m not saying “to anyone who can afford it” do to the simple fact that people can download these programs for free [and illegally] via the means and others) the masses of “professional” photographs have grown astronomically over the past ten years.  Even so much that even the profession of Wedding Photography has gone down in sales price from on average of $1500/wedding to a simple $400-$500/wedding (at least locally do to a poll that I took of 20 local wedding photographers for this blog).  I’ve talked with the local newspaper, the Lawrence Journal-World and yes they still have staff photographers for their print editions and for mostly online, yet they do use a lot of “amateur” photographers to certain segments of their website with the very good chance of using more and more of them as it saves them money in the long run. 

With this knowledge, it leads one to ponder the question, can, with all of the digital means of today’s world, photography remain a form of art or will it be washed out by the new digital age?  I myself have stopped submitting the collections that I have done with my Nikon D60 in gallery proposals and focused on a little nitch that I have started to carve out for myself, an older, more obscure form of photography that most of the younger photographers that are my age (I am 27 year old) have never heard of or ventured to experiment in, Pinhole photography from a camera obscura. 

My personal camera that I shoot with now is one that I made in my father’s heating and air conditioning metal shop, out of sheet metal and gaffer’s tape, with a 4x5 film back.  Film, as I can see it shot with whatever kind of camera one can shoot with, maybe be the way to go to make sure that photography remains true as an actual art from.  With this, and only this, one can be sure that it is the photographer, not a computer nerd, has created the image, spent time in a darkroom, not behind a computer monitor, to create the image. 

Yet, this also brings up the question, does a computer enhanced image cross the line and start to fall into the realm of Graphic Design or other Graphic, Computer based art work or can it still remain in the photographic world?