Baldessari

I think the way that Baldessari uses photography to quickly translate an idea into an image is a very practical approach to art. As he states in the article, when most artists paint, they try to make the world around them more beautiful than it actually is. Baldessari’s qualification for which image he chooses to translate an idea into representation seems to be to simply find any image he can of the subject in question, such as a house, for instance. What the image of the house looks like, and where the photograph came from, is not important. The importance is placed on the final result, and the message the image conveys to the viewer.

I woud call Baldessari’s art photography, but what one classifies his artwork as is not important. As Baldessari states in the article, “it wasn’t photography that I was interested in, but what art might be.”

The first artist that came to my mind when I thought of crossing boundaries between photography and painting was Daguerre and his photograph, “Still Life” (1837). Being an early photographer, Daguerre understood that in order to legitimize photography and give it purpose, he had to make his photographs appear similar to a painting in terms of composition. This is why one sees a typical still life scene captured in a photograph, as the still life scene was already an established genre of art at the time. Deguerre crosses the boundaries between painting and photography by merging them into one art form, creating something that was more easily digestible by the contemporary audience he was presenting “Still Life” to.