Is photography an art form?

Yes it is. It is because anything can be an art form, an expression of aesthetics and emotion affecting the individuals who interact with it.  Creatively used everything can be a vehicle of an artistic expression. A garbage can, a stone placed on the concrete, mixed media and so many other combinations and possibilities. If not anything else, in that sense alone, photography is an art form.

Like any other forms, painting, music and so on photography also has it unique properties. A photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does. A common argument given against photograph as compared to painting is that ‘A photograph captures a moment in time in its actuality, whereas something like a painting or drawing, however accurate is essentially a rendering of whatever the artist chooses to see.’  I would agree that a photograph do capture a moment in time, after all it is a snap shot but not in its actuality. Reality is multidimensional; it captures what the photographer sees and wants to be captured. Every piece of photograph is subjective , as Rahgu Rai one of India’s leading photographer puts it "A good photograph is that which combines mind, body and spirit. It's a darshan in the most profound sense".

Like any form of art, photography also has its limitation. For a painter, his inability to capture a three dimensional world or even to perfectly trace the reality (in spite of the Dutch Masters of yester years) , for a sculptor to capture two dimensional world or a moving time frame, for a musician inability to promote the visualization of a scene. As photographers, it’s not easy to see anything other than what is in front of our lenses – can only photograph what physically exists, or what can be made to physically exist.

Then again photography is painting with light, be it the shadows or color. It is the light that you can control either via correct timing or through post production process. The color photographer has many means of bringing expression into a scene; the selection of camera position, lens focal length, use of filters, depth of field, film type, exposure, composition, and shutter speed all figure into the image that is produced. During printing, the color photographer has control of contrast, density, color balance, and saturation to convey personal expression. Photographs, can be made, with deliberate conscious effort to get the correct lighting, whereby possibly hours have been spent getting the set up right; a relationship with the subject has been established and is evident in the final result. However there are also moments, where you are lucky and one can snap the photo of a instance that has light and everything related is perfect to what the photographer vision, and art is created in an instant. That is the magic.

It is because of this, and, as such, it’s not hard to see why some people can be very dismissive of photography as an art form. What people forget is that even to recognize the right moment one needs considerable technical, artistic skill and inspiration.

The beauty about photography is that anyone can be artist provided he or she has the vision and the urge within himself/herself to express it. Unlike many other forms like Music or painting, one will not need years of training to actually manipulate the instruments of the expression. As photography’s primary base is technology which like any technology, by its nature, will always evolve to make its usage easier.  In fact, with today’s auto-focusing, auto-metering, easy-to-use cameras, I have no doubt that anybody, with some practice, could take beautiful photos.

The creative process may or may not take time, the creation can be reproduced (making multiple copies) easily, a photograph can never be a one-off like a painting (unless of course you print one copy and then delete all traces of its existence!).So it is hard for people to see and artistic value in this form when it’s possible to make nearly identical copies of the same image, simple laws of supply and demand dictate that the more objects there are to go around, the less fighting over them ensues — and consequently, value falls. The magic of a photograph is somewhat lost when it’s posted on Twitter or Facebook five seconds after it was taken. However is the creation itself not unique in terms of individual vision and timing? It is, it is always unique as God created every photographer is distinctive human being, and that is what makes it an art, particularly if the vision and the choice of timing is truly artistic, emanating a true aesthetic appeal.

Photography has made creation of art accessible to everybody, so that the concept of an ‘artist’ as an inimitable individual gets diluted. Everyone has an art within him and is an artist. It is just a matter of will, and inspiration to express the inventive vision that one hold within itself. In fact it is no easier or harder, simply because some artists may execute their vision more naturally with a camera, some with words, or some with paint; to each his own. Proliferation of digital photography is a good thing, it brought many new photographers in the fold and made photography accessible to the poor. Talented people who wouldn’t have given photography a try will do so and all of us, the society at large, will benefit from general rising of visual standards. Probably a lot of people today would much appreciate as to how difficult it is to make a true work of art. Every literate person can write but not all can write poetry or fiction similarly everybody can make an image, but given the same gear everybody cannot take the same photo like a talented artist.

The idea of continuous economic growth…

No prominent politicians or economists are challenge this axiom. This is because; the idea of economic growth satisfies the two fundamental sections of the human society, the rich and the poor. For the rich it is all about getting richer and more powerful and for the poor it is the existence of the ‘hope’ of someday getting out of poverty.

This is the idea that will "lift all boats" in the current jargon, meaning that even the poor will get to be better off in the future, if we only have faith in "growth". Given a particular size of economic pie , if the rich continually chip away from it ,so that which will be left for the poor will be miniscule, thus in order to accommodate the poor, the pie itself will have to grow.

However, if we think globally, the economic pie is constant; we have only one earth with all its resources. So can we accommodate an ever increasing pie, the need for constant growth?  The answer is to divide humanity into multiple societies enabling some societies to increase their pie and reducing that for the others.  Thus in the age of industrialization, prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the preindustrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological profusion of the past two hundred years—have succeeded in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced there.

So the ideas of constant growth associated with industrialization have reduced income inequalities within some societies but have definitely increased between societies.

Factor One: Innovation in work by definition may lead to improved productivity which allows more to be created using the same amount of input as before. Efficiencies in the use of raw materials can also allow for growth with a fixed rate of consumption. For example, our cellphones have more computing power than a computer in 1970’s which could easily have been the size of a building.

If we look at the modern industrial society we see a similar pattern, the wealthy devising means to protect their wealth but with a twist, that is with the mantra ‘do not keep the majority of the population, the poor, and permanently discontented’. In a democracy, which is the presently the chosen organization structure to implement modern political will, this can be disastrous for the rich, leading to total annihilation. In a democracy the majority rule and the majority are the poor. Thus in order to keep the non-wealthy from complete despair, it is necessary to postulate growth,  and sell hope as ‘economic  growth’, the ‘hope’ of achieving high economic status in life. This ensured that the majority (i.e. the poor) in order to achieve this will become more efficient and innovative in their respective profession, thus ensuring the implementation of the great economic mantra ‘productivity through innovation’.

Factor Two: We can increase the size of our economy by taking from others

The hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, material consumption varied little across the members, whereas agrarian societies had pervasive inequality. This because agrarian society is more capital intensive giving enormous opportunity for consumption by the rich and promising ‘hope to become rich’ for the poor. It changed the nature of the political institution of the people and if we follow history of mankind we can see how it evolved over time.

Fast forward to modern western societies and the societies which are implementing western economic thought, the idea of controlling capital for oneself and one’s progeny is employed through the modern financial structure. There is strong pressure by the wealthy class to limit taxation of wealth, so income is taxed instead. This is because inherited wealth is generally quite unequally distributed: it is nearly as unequally distributed as wealth (generally considered) and a great deal more unequally distributed than income. Inheritance is the main factor of wealth concentration among the richest part of the population, and of its intergenerational reproduction. In the United States, inheritance is primarily responsible for the fortunes of no less than sixty-seven percent of individuals who qualifies as “super-rich”. In countries like France, inherited wealth accounts for a large part of all wealth possessed (generally estimated at around 40%). Thus to serve the dual purpose of keeping and growing this wealth, we have a variety of income taxes.

Although pro-wealthy policies increase capital gains, dividends, and profits in the short-term, they ultimately destroy broad-based purchasing power, which will in the long-term, lower growth for everyone else within a society. To resolve this paradox, the society needs to grab from other societies, this was done explicitly and blatantly in the days of colonialism, even before that, through direct conquests of nations looting the riches and enslaving the population, but today it is more subtle, being obscured in "free trade" programs and the like.

Factor Three:  The rise in population. Each new person requires the basics of existence and production must expand to satisfy this demand.

In the stagnant economies of Middle Age in Europe, the external pressures on the population due to disease and food limitations have also meant that the population tends to remain stable as well. With the introduction of mechanized agriculture it became possible to produce an excess of food and this allowed the population to increase as well. The result was internal pressures on the community which led to emigration, predatory warfare and the removal of people from the land. In Europe the population excess was absorbed for some time by the simultaneous rise of towns with the opportunities for local manufacturing. When this avenue became less available, migration, especially to the new world, became an important factor. As the societies changed in response to these factors the underlying philosophy of life changed as well.

In terms of population growth, similar to what happened in Europe is happening today at underdeveloped countries, the population is expanding tremendously demanding more resources. There are barriers for these demands to be met, largely for cultural reasons. As these societies, even if they manage to generate wealth they are unable to keep them because they do not have institutions with appropriate political will. Moreover, the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution could easily be transferred to most of the world, and the inputs for production obtained cheaply across the globe. But the one thing that could not be replicated so easily or so widely was the social environment that underpinned the cooperation of people in production in those countries where the technologies were first developed.

This is the major problem of the underdeveloped societies, they will need to learn and evolve and scale up the social transformations within themselves, if they want to absorb new technology and create and retain wealth.

So what will happen…then…..the pressure to grow will continue…

Factor Two: taking from others

The division of humanity into a global economic pie and grabbing bigger chunks at the expense of others will have to end. When everybody, every society will demand and grab an equal share of the pie, there will be war, has to be a war leading to destruction and creation of new space for economic growth. The great cycle of Brahma-Vishnu and Shiva (creation-preservation and destruction).

Factor Three: increasing Population

The world cannot continue to support an ever increasing population; the access to specialty natural resources will become limited and there may be constraints on the sources of energy as well. To look at it another way compound growth, the common measure of expanding resources, is an exponential function and is mathematically unsustainable. Even a modest 2% growth rate implies a doubling of size in just 35 years.

Factor One: Innovation- Productivity

At first it was innovate to produce products, then services. Our consumption and finer senses demand even more ‘stuff’.

The difficult issue that arises is what is every one going to do if we stop acquiring so much "stuff" (over productivity)? The usual answer of: "we will become a service economy" does not work. Even services require raw materials, a trip to a nail salon, for example, means transportation for the customers and the staff, running the business (heat and light) and the supplies of the trade. There are no services that don't use resources. The question is do we need so much ‘stuff’, or services. The eternal question of what we ‘want’ to live a fulfilling life vs what we ‘need’ ? Without the need to produce that which could not be consumed the amount of work was modest.  I understand the case of underdeveloped economies where people need to work more to survive but in a developed economies also we have  people working 80 hours a week so they can afford a second home, but not having any time to visit it.

To Conclude…

The growth model must fail at some point. There will always be some limiting factor that will inhibit growth, it may be energy or water or arable land, but there will eventually be a choke point. We can start taking steps now to plan for such a day otherwise if we continue to pursue pointless growth until we hit the brick wall of shortage. Think differently? A new economic model is needed, where the idea of growth as we know it, will not be the central principle of this economy.

Nation State……Cycle of human civilization

‘A nation state is a type of state that conjoins the political entity of a state to the cultural entity of a nation, from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule and potentially its status as a sovereign state. A state is specifically a political and geopolitical entity, whilst a nation is a cultural and ethnic one. The term "nation state" implies that the two coincide, in that a state has chosen to adopt and endorse a specific cultural group as associated with it. "Nation state" formation can take place at different times in different parts of the world.’  There goes the definition, does it exists in modern times, no, and increasingly human society is diverging away from its path. Yet, from the historical perspective, the concept, at least as in a limit, was a step towards change from earlier ideas of sovereign state governed by monarchies or theocracy. The new organization structure to implement nation state was either through democracy or republic or communism. All better than the previous structures in the sense that power and in turn economic benefits was spread between even more greater sections of the society. The efficiency of the allocation of resources far exceeded than what was achieved previously by the system of Monarchies or Theocracies. While nation state was better, but it also had severe drawbacks in emphasizing sharp demarcation of the borders in terms of cultural ethnicity, this led to the extreme examples of Hitler’s Germany, Imperial Japan and Colonial Governments of Various European Countries. We, together as human society learnt our lessons through the three centuries of 18^th,19^th and 20^th and in the process giving birth to the new ideas of everything ‘transnational’.

Today globalization has already reduced the cultural diversity to the point of almost obliterating the ethno-cultural argument of the nation state. All that stands in the way of total homogenization is Religion, Language and human genome evolved body shape and size. Language barrier will break through technological evolution (as we figure out ways to effectively translate various languages) and simultaneous promotion for a need of a global language, religion through the acceptance of a common human rights concept, spread of the secular ideas and with the acknowledgement that there are multiple ways to God. Human physical form, via intermarriage as economic and political immigration in an increasingly physically interconnected (technological evolution in transportation) world increases. Today this (physical immigration) what is being resisted most , particularly by the rich nations , citing the ideas of nation state, in particular the cultural ethnicity , in reality to hang on to the global political power. However this very resistance is an obstacle to the efficient allocation of the resources (the ideal of our economic and financial system), look at the ageing population of the developed nations. Like nature that abhors vacuum, money abhors unproductive provision, so the barriers will break, people will immigrate as immigration, a human right; is same as the right to survive. More significantly, it is because of this settlement, there will be a change in the demographic structure of every country. The Global nature of this migration will result in mixing of genes, slowly diluting away the purity of the existing pools, resulting in a new physical form of the human being, leading to global standard of one class of genes. There will be no more Caucasian, Mongoloids, Dravidian or Negroid races as separated by their typical physical characteristics.

With people of the world all leaving under the vast commonality of humanity, there will be a need for governance, if not for anything but just to keep up and manage the efficient allocation of the earth’s resources. Economic ideas of growth through exploitation will be replaced by the concepts of sustainability and balance. What will be the organization structure that will govern I do not know but I do know that democracy or republic or communism will not be able to handle the multiple forces of such a large scale endeavor. Maybe new concepts will emerge as we, as human beings, muddle through this vast project of globalization.

Pluralistic states, like those in the United States, European Union and India are step towards it. While the concept of absolutely global, once again might be an ideal in the limit, till then national cultural groups will not disappear, the natural place of these groups will not be attaining power at the expense of other minorities. As immigration happens, people from different minority backgrounds continue to relocate and live in states that are not their ancestral home, pluralism will have to be accommodated, if not for anything at the least for the sake of peace, productivity and access to significant human talents. As of today, in every country, minorities need resources to survive but they produce more human talent and ingenuity per person than the majority of that country.

There will be very little basis of large scale conflicts between human being as the differences between civilizations will be non-existent, over that, variations arising out of residing in the earths diverse geography will be smoothed down by technology. As we see around the world, in today’s clothing fashion trends and so on. Maybe in such a world, there will not be a need for a world government, no organization of higher authority to manage us. We as a human being will be able to manage ourselves; a possibility is a societal collapse and move into communal anarchy (or harmony, depends on which way you look at it) or zero world government, in which governance is done on the local level based on a global ethic of human rights.

If that happens, a real possibility, I think we as a evolution of human beings will complete a full cycle. While there may be a complete destruction by the annihilation of mankind on earth , clearing the way for a fresh new start  I do not know. Nonetheless, if it does not , if human society survives, diversity will once again start increasing as the each local governance gets institutionalized, if not for anything else but for just local individual interest. Then the cultures, ways of living life, subsequently followed by religion, civilization and others forms of structures to hold mass consciousness. They will get sharpened , evolve and grow in another great cycle of human life on earth till , once again, like the pervious cycle,  human necessity will force them in reduction of diversity though globalization or something else.