Photography as Art

I must be honest.  I have not always considered photography to be true art.  You take a picture and it's a picture.  Oh, you can fiddle with it in Photoshop.  You can do some interesting focusy stuff.  But Art?? Come on.

 

That is until I spent some time with a cousin of mine at the family reunion.  Kirk Redlin.  Kirk is a well known and renowned photographer of 30 years.  He travels and judges photo exhibitions, makes talks, and has a full time business doing what most photographers make their living at, portrait photography for high school seniors. 

 

I watched him work last weekend.  He did some things that even to this minute I don't know how he did.  I have been impressed with the capacity to capture the spirit of someone that an Annie Lebowitz does or the capacity to challenge our senses in form that a Robert Mapplethorpe does so well.  Kirk is in that league.

 

Kirk can take a mundane setting and create some of the most fascinating images.  I know his camera must have cost a couple grand.  It does everything but dance and sing.  It does puzzle me that the more capable of being manually manipulated it will allow, the more expensive the camera is.

 

So, my hat's off to Kirk.  He's a good one.  He in my humble and relatively unbiased opinion is a genuine artist.

 

You can look at his website here, but his real art resides elsewhere.