Baldessari

I have found myself asking myself the same thing Baldessari asked early on: Do I have to translate photography into painting to make it art?  Even though I have recently gotten into photography as an art form threes past 2 years, it still somehow feels like the more personal creation that goes into a piece, the more like art it is.   I thought it was really interesting when Baldessari says, “I’ve just always thought that art should be more than painting.  My goal has always been to attack conventions of seeing”.  With this goal, photography seems like an obvious choice of medium for Baldessari since photography, more than painting in my opinion, does question our conventions of seeing.  Baldessari also mentions making his photographs like a guessing game in order to keep your attention just a little longer.  This is something I tried to do in my photographs last year and I think was very successful in my work.  I would call Baldessari’s work, at least his later work in which he was focused on the camera, as photography or mixed media as photography and painting.  I think the medium choice definitely matters, if for no other reason than to just make it clear to others how you created what you created.  I think that the medium choice can sometimes, not always, add to the meaning behind the work. 

One of the first artists we discussed in class was Daguerre who tried to bridge the gap between photography and painting because photography was such a new medium at the time that he had to take it slow with what images he chose to present and not jump too far away from what the public is used to seeing in paintings, like his “Still Life”.