Analysis of what makes art photography "special" is most usefully carried out by examining the relationship between fine art photography and amateur camera club photography. Photography's roots are embedded in amateur experimentation and camera clubs have historically provided the locus for amateur activity. As commercial and scientific uses of the medium were elaborated (e.g., portraiture, stereography, technical documentation and photojournalism), some camera club amateurs came to promote photography as a fine art medium, disassociating their work from commercial and scientific photography. Later, the development of fine art photography required a separation and distancing from this amateur social world as well.'

In contemporary practice both art and camera club photographers exhibit great skill in manipulating the medium and both produce highly competent pictures. Sometimes amateur pictures look like art photography, and on occasion art pictures resemble camera club work. Yet each group repudiates the other, disavowing their photographic activities, philosophies, and products. In this respect examining these differences highlights the social construction of symbolic practices that distinguish fine art from amateur photography.

In the following discussion, then, I will draw on historical and field research to compare amateur camera club photography with fine art photography, analyzing the formal visual codes of amateur and art pictures as mechanisms producing boundaries between elite and popular activity. But analysis of aesthetics is inseparable from the analysis of production activities: To the extent that art is a social product emerging from the activities of members of specific symbol-sharing groups, visual form is inextricably tied to the social matrix in which production occurs (see Peterson, 1976). Indeed, Becker (1982) uses the term "art world" to refer to people whose collective roles and activities (from the curator, to the painter, to the manufacturer of pigments) together make the production and consumption of art possible.

SETTING AND METHODS

During the data-gathering stage of this research I joined the Miniature Camera Club of Philadelphia (MCC), observing and participating in club activities over a 30 month period. MCC members are devoted amateur photographers, their ages ranging from around 50 to 70 years. Members meet three times a month on Thursday evenings at the Engineer's Club building in downtown Philadelphia. Programs include presentations of meritorious work done by local camera club photographers, demonstrations of special techniques, and photo competitions. The MCC is affiliated with 27 other member clubs of the Delaware Valley Council of Camera Clubs and with the Photographic Society of America, an organization that oversees activities of camera clubs nationwide. in addition to participant observation, I conducted extensive formal interviews with 10 of the most active club members, questioning them about their recruitment to photography, the nature of their photographic activities, their views on photographic aesthetics, their other hobbies, and their arts and media activities. (See Schwartz, 1983, for an extended discussion of these clubs and their activities.)

During the same time I attended all photography show "openings" held at Philadelphia art galleries, observing and conducting informal interviews during these art world events. I conducted formal interviews with a sample of 20 Philadelphia art photographers in order to provide greater comparability of data. I also performed a visual analysis of pictures made by these and other Philadelphia art photographers. The photographers I interviewed were chosen through a referral process. I contacted the publisher of Philadelphia Photo Review (who, like many authors writing about art photography, is an art photographer himself) and an art photographer with whom I had studied, asking for recommendations of "art photographers I might interview for a study of fine art photography." I began by interviewing photographers mentioned by both of these sources, and after each interview I asked for additional referrals. There was considerable overlap in the list of names I compiled, providing evidence of the existence of an art network.

I will begin here by discussing the evolution of fine art photography at the turn of the century, and its progressive movement away from camera club activity, in order to situate current aesthetic codes in historical perspective.

HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ART AND CAMERA CLUB PHOTOGRAPHY

The history of fine art photography in the twentieth century can be viewed as a series of reactions against camera club work, as attempts to formulate and strengthen boundaries between amateur and fine art practice. Art photographers' separation from amateurs began with the Photo-Secession in 1902. In the United States, Alfred Stieglitz, a member of the New York Camera Club, led the movement toward a photographic elite. Stieglitz promoted "pictorialism, a soft focus style of photography that emulated the surface characteristics of paintings or etchings, utilizing conventionalized subjects and techniques of composition borrowed from oil painting. By making photographs that resembled paintings, Stieglitz showed that photography could be a fine art medium.

As editor of his club's newsletter, Camera Notes, Stieglitz also advocated the adoption of strict selection criteria among jurors in order to showcase only work of the "highest quality" at amateur photographic "salons" or exhibitions. But camera clubs, formed to give photography enthusiasts a forum for sharing ideas and showing their pictures to one another, traditionally had accorded members equal opportunity to participate in all activities, including exhibitions. Members of the New York Camera Club opposed the procedures Stieglitz suggested (Doty, 1978). Seeking an alternative to camera club activities and what he and others considered amateur provincialism, Stieglitz organized photographers working in the pictorialist style into a group he called the "Photo-Secession," explicitly modeled after art movements in painting. As he explained in a group manifesto, Stieglitz's aim was to launch a new art movement:

In Europe, in Germany and in Austria, there have been splits in the art circles and the moderns call themselves Secessionists, so Photo-Secession really hitches up with the art world [quoted in Newhall, 1964:105-106].

Stieglitz arranged exhibitions of Photo-Secession work in the United States and Europe to publicize what he considered to be the best American photography.

In addition to drawing together a social network of art photographers, separate from the ranks of organized amateurs, Stieglitz founded Camera Work, a journal that published critical writing on photography along with fine reproductions of the work of art photographers and modern artists. He also opened a gallery devoted to photography and avant-garde visual arts. Through his Photo-Secession movement, his journal, and his gallery, Stieglitz sought to overcome the medium's "institutional inadequacies" (Christopherson, 1974a) and created an institutional and social network that by-passed camera club photography.

Successive art movements sought to maintain and to further this initial separation. By the 1920s, camera club photographers adopted the pictorialist style promoted by Stieglitz, and art photographers found themselves competing with camera club pictorialists for exhibition space. ln 1932, a group of California photographers joined together in reaction to the prevalence of camera club pictorialism and wrote a manifesto promoting a new, distinctive fine art style they referred to as "straight" photography. They called themselves "Group f/64" because the pictures they made rejected the soft focus look of pictorialism.²

Both the Photo-Secession and the Group f/64 movements actively sought to define an appropriate aesthetic code for fine art work. Joining together to write manifestos and exhibit photographs brought visibility to these groups, publicized the distinctions being made between amateur and fine art aesthetics, and proclaimed their special status as artists. The establishment of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department in 1940 and the George Eastman House Museum of Photography in 1949 institutionalized the status of photography as art. A proliferation of fine art codes followed this institutional legitimization. Art photographers no longer needed to promote a dominant identifiable aesthetic code, as divergent styles were more easily accommodated. As Rosenblum (1978:17) argues,

The diversity of imagery is one obstacle to doing a stylistic analysis because, after all, there is more than one style. In fact, the boundaries of fine arts photography are elastic, although the field is internally differentiated with respect to "school" or "tradition." In a sense, fine art photography may be treated as a large residual category which subsumes a good many types of "unclassifiable" photographs.

By the 1950s, its increased diversity and formalism made fine art photography relatively inaccessible to camera club photographers. Camera club photography moved away from soft-focus pictorialism, incorporating influences from commercial photography into its aesthetic. Studio portraiture and nature and travel photography (as represented in periodicals such as National Geographic or on Sierra Club calendars) now serve as models of competent work.

THE RHETORIC OF ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Contemporary aesthetic codes of fine art photography maintain the distinctiveness sought by earlier art photographers, reaffirming the existence of an elite symbol sharing group amid popular and commercial uses of the medium. However, as a range of aesthetic codes are permissible, markers that signal the art status of photographs and photographers are embedded more broadly in the rhetoric of the art world, expressed in the discourse of word and image.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY IS TIED TO OTHER ART MEDIA

To support the assertion that photography is an art medium, photographers link their activities to those of artists working in other media. Pictorialism made a visual comparison between photographs and painting, and Stieglitz's practice of hanging photography with avant garde paintings and drawings situated photography within the broader context of artworks.

Similarly, contemporary art photographers refer to themselves as "artists" and explicitly disavow the identity of "photographer":

I am an artist, not a photographer. I don't know what a photographer thinks like. I don't think of ways to go out and record reality, it's not my way of working. Photograms are a direct view, postage stamp size on murals. I don't think of myself as a photographer. Photography is an aspect of what I'm doing.

The use of photography as a medium of expression is often considered more or less incidental:

I am an artist; photography is secondary. I could do it through writing, letting go of the image altogether. My theoretical background is from poetry and the humanities.

Another photographer said,

I call myself an artist—my art is coming out in photography right now. It depends on what people you're drawn to—I have the most rapport with photographers and even more so with writers. I'm open to the plunge. In Atlanta I was given a credit as a "sceneographer," someone who plots out a scene.

Art photographers often identify their friends as artists who are not photographers:

My closest friends are painters, writers (my closest friend is a writer), and filmmakers. Maybe it's because of jealousy among photographers. My friends are people involved in art, not photographers.

Similarly, many art photographers claim to eschew photography openings: "I attend art openings but not in photography—they're too boring." Another commented: "I go to gallery openings in painting and sculpture. I try to keep up on painting, contemporary architectural design, and also illustration."

Photographers agree that gallery openings provide an informal opportunity to get together with photographers, gallery owners, critics, collectors, and curators. Often, younger photographers use these events to make contacts with art world gatekeepers, tinging openings with an unpleasant instrumentality:

I don't go as often as I did—it's not as important. I only go to support friends now. In the beginning everyone was trying to scratch out his territory. As your work matures and you move into other areas you don't see other people as frequently. It's too repetitive. I'm looking for something nourishing, I want to come away with something.

I hate the environment [at gallery openings], the politics, the class system—it's a social event for upper-class people who aren't really interested. I hate openings. I go when I have to, like when it's my own show. I don't get anything from it. If I want to see work, I don't go to openings; I think they're offensive. I'm more attracted to the medium of books, as an artist.

In contrast, most camera club members neither consider their photographs works of art nor refer to themselves as artists. One remarked, "For me photography is a serious hobby." Another commented,

I don't consider myself in that group [art photographers]. I do decorative photography—they don't consider me art. If William Eggleston is an artist, then I'm not. My son could do what he does. If Ansel Adams is an art photographer, then it's OK. Duane Michals' sequences—I don't like those either. What is fine art photography?

They feel alienated by the photographs they see at galleries (if they visit them at all), and they frequently question why anyone would want to make the kinds of pictures hung there.

With fine art photography I'm left cold. I understand [Ansel] Adams, [W. Eugene] Smith. But [Danny] Lyons [sic]? They're not even good street scenes. I don't know why museum directors hang routine snapshots. There's a tendency to glorify snapshots today—I cut off limbs in pictures when I was young—I threw them out. Today, they publish it.

I can't see the interest in what they're giving space to—a toilet in the back of a room, slums. The subject matter turns me off. It's uninteresting.

Camera club members no longer compete with art photographers for exhibition space. As Christopherson (1974b: 133) has argued,

To the extent that fine art photographers have been granted status in the art world, camera clubbers have been excluded....The social definition of one variety of work as art means the elimination of other groups which might make the same claim.

With the evolution of institutions that legitimize and support art photography, camera club pictures travel a separate route, mapped out by networks of amateurs and camera clubs through the activities of their umbrella organization, the Photographic Society of America. Camera club photographers exhibit their work at their own club meetings and competitions, at regional interclub programs and competitions, or at national and international PSA sponsored salons.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY RESPONDS TO ITS OWN HISTORY AND TRADITIONS

Like other visual arts, photography has a written history and scholars who study it. In recent years, historians of photography have been securing academic appointments at colleges and universities. Many art history departments now offer courses in the "art history of photography" covering important events and individuals contributing to the medium's current privileged status. The commercial, scientific, home-mode, amateur, and journalistic uses of the medium generally receive no attention in these courses.

The art history of photography provides aesthetic boundaries to which contemporary work responds. Evaluations of art photographers' work are staged against the backdrop of a narrowly defined history. "Significant" innovations or improvements upon earlier visual articulations (as judged by art world legitimizers: critics, curators, collectors, and scholars) are extolled. Photographers whose work merely emulates what has already been done may be considered competent practitioners, but not important artists. Often, artists self-consciously elaborate upon an established idiom, introducing some novel element. The tradition of "straight photography" has its contemporary adherents as does the nineteenth-century pictorialist tradition. When art photographers make pictorialist pictures, they are said to "revive" early processes. This excerpt from a catalogue essay (written in conjunction with an exhibition of Philadelphia art photographers' work) refers to a pictorialist style handcolored photograph:

The use of hand applied color exemplifies a recent trend in contemporary photography towards the readoption of early photographic techniques and processes and a revival of the artisanal and hand-made [Marincola,1980].

Discussions of such "revivals" make no note of camera club pictorialism, as twentieth-century amateur work has been omitted from art histories.

For the most part, the historical tradition to which contemporary camera club photographers respond is divorced from the fine art tradition. Amateurs have built and maintained their own distinct "world" of photography. Many camera club members continue working in the pictorialist tradition. Miniature Camera Club members model their photographs after pictures made by earlier camera club pictorialists such as Adolf Fassbender and William Mortensen (known among camera club members nationwide). Members of Miniature and other local clubs, whose photographic work has been legitimized through awards earned at camera club salons and competitions, set standards for excellence. Current camera club photographs are patterned after prior prize-winning work. In addition, camera club members admire and emulate the work of a select group of art photographers from both the pictorialist and postpictorialist eras. Camera club members praise photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Yousuf Karsh, W. Eugene Smith, and especially Ansel Adams. One MCC photographer outlined criteria for pictures she likes, criteria that typify the club aesthetic:

First, it has to be beautiful. Second, it has to interest me— there's a distinction between good pictures and pictures I like. Not all good pictures are beautiful. Three, it has to show good quality—in exposure, composition, detail (when it's appropriate); in black and white it's not washed out, or muddy in color—good exposure; the focus, the subject has to be sharp (but sometimes selective) . As for subject matter, I don't like the "Ashcan school of art"—peeling paint and all that. That's not my idea of a pleasing subject. Wood grain? Yes, that's OK.

Unlike art photographers, camera club members do not expect to improve upon the work of those photographers they admire. Rather, they aspire to the same achievements made by their predecessors. Amateur photographers reaffirm the camera club tradition by reproducing the aesthetic code of their forebearers. Work proven to be good through successful salon and competition exhibiting provides a model for successive generations of camera club photography.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY HAS ITS OWN VOCABULARY

As with other specialized activities, art photography has developed its own distinctive vocabulary. Much of the terminology revolves around sight, reflecting the importance art photographers attribute to seeing. Photographers who know how to select the appropriate moment to press the shutter release have "good eyes." As one photographer told me, "The nicest compliment I've ever received was when I was told I had 'good eyes."' Similarly, "The idea of photography is seeking things of beauty and of interest. I find things that other people would kick aside. That's why I have 'good eyes."

During interview sessions photographers often characterized "good pictures" with phrases such as, "It's well-seen by the photographer." The phrase well-seen was explained to me in this way:

They saw it—photography is about seeing—others might have passed it but this person's sensibility picked it up. It's the right time, the right place; it all fits. It's coming into contact with your own seeing, being aware of what's around you— capturing a moment as well as seeing it.

A photographer whose work is mature and coherent has "vision." Another excerpt from Marincola's (1980:2) catalogue essay shows how this terminology is employed:

This exhibition concentrates on emerging photographers who have been working long enough to have established their own "vision." Their work demonstrates a record of growth and an internal definition of issues and ideas.

In describing her criteria for good pictures, an artist discussed the relevance of having a "vision":

Pictures must be pointing towards some vision—some visionariness—some concern, human values. With [Diane] Arbus you know what the vision was. The issue of vision should be present.

Art photographers describe pictures as documents of processes of "investigation" or "discovery." Photographers "reveal" or "illuminate" hidden insights obscured by surface appearances. These terms proclaim that artists' photographs are not simply there for the taking; their pictures do not record reality, but serve as metaphors for the artist's experience; the richer and more d iverse the experience, the more complex and rigorous the metaphor. As a photographer responded when I asked him about a picture he liked, "It's the best picture of all. It has more levels of experience."

Good photographs herald the artist's involvement in picture making:

I want to learn something, to feel the photographer's involvement—and if it can inspire me, all the better. If the passion's there, he's saying something about life.

There has to be grit, soul, emotion—not the human story— something I can deal with. A sense of mystery, uncertainty, danger. It has to be more than just a rectangular portrait of the world.

Good work requires the viewer's active interpretation or discovery: "The more l look at it the better l like it—it plays tricks on you. It's ambiguous, mysterious."5 The mystery and ambiguity built around art photography contrast with more generally held notions about the immediate accessibility of photographic images. Unlike commonplace uses of photography (such as snapshots, formal portraits, or photojournalism, in which meaning is directly articulated) art photographs are difficult to decode. The ability to interpret art photographs requires competence in symbolic codes exclusively held by members of the art world.

Camera club photographers do not share artists' lexicon. Amateurs model their discussions on the remarks made by judges during club photography competitions. Miniature Club members first say whether they like or dislike a picture. They follow by explaining their response; pictures are evaluated in terms of the technical competence demonstrated. Discussions cover such points as exposure, color saturation, contrast, composition, and subject matter.

It's well done, with good tonal gradation. There's a good S-curve, all grounds for a good pictorial picture. The location of the children is good, their faces aren't distracting . Good technique.

The center of interest is divided—the top third is a picture and the bottom two-thirds is a picture. The gold leaves in the lower right and the upper left make for two centers of interest, and the gap in the center bothers me. It might be better as a horizontal. The exposure is good.

When club members like a photograph they call it "good," "nice," "pleasing," "beautiful," or "lovely." If a picture is particularly admired, the viewer might add, "I'd like to hang it on my wall."

Compared with artists' discussions of photography, amateurs speak straightforwardly. If called upon to prepare a statement about his or her work, a Miniature Camera Club member would talk in nonmetaphoric and less explicitly personal terms. The member would discuss the equipment and techniques used, detail how the pictures had been made, and perhaps mention favorite subjects.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY CONVEYS IDEAS

In contrast to other forms of photography, artists seek to convey ideas. Asked to explain what artists mean when they talk about "ideas," an art photographer responded,

Somebody goes out with the sense of an idea—"because I love the light today." It can be as simple as an interest in light and shadow. It doesn't have to be documenting the plight of the poor—a journalistic idea—it can be a visual idea. That's where consistency and a sense of accumulated visual knowledge comes, from searching for something you understand well. I understand the Greek light. I understand photographing that landscape and that environment. And once the mystery is solved you move on. I didn't understand it the first few years, but I did it in order to finally understand it. For the moment I don't think I've used it up. It still has mystery. You can be enthralled by something as elementary as light, or form. I don't mean a specific kind of architecture, but what about the architecture and the way the light works on it, or the figure relates to the architecture, or something like that.

Artists say they spend as much or more time conceiving a picture as they do executing it. An art photographer is judged on the merit of his or her conceptualization, on whether or not the ideas expressed are in some way significant. Often artists' ideas are funneled into pictures that seek to stimulate, arousing the viewer's emotions and imagination.

Most successful art photographers make pictures that comment upon the medium itself, and by doing so they position themselves within its aesthetic traditions. Photographs are created as elaborations of or as challenges to conventional aesthetic traditions. A Philadelphia artist's published catalogue statement reads:

When I began photographing nude women, l defined them classically as pure form. Subsequent work moved from the nude to depicting women without clothes in their own environments [Marincola,1980: 28].

Whereas most photographic communication relies heavily on the content of the subjects portrayed, in art photography concern with form supercedes concern with subject matter. The following catalogue description is typical, making no mention of content:

Carnell is seeking forms which can contain and structure the emotional energy of color while utilizing its particular capability to render reality as descriptively as possible [Marincola,1980].

Camera club photographers do not attempt to articulate ideas through photography. Instead, camera club pictures demonstrate the photographer's competence and skill in articulating the visual tradition of camera club pictorialism. The camera club aesthetic is narrowly defined and amateur pictures are highly repetitive. The conformity of camera club pictures reaffirms a consistent symbolic code and the social group that honors it. Camera club pictures may comment upon the medium. But whereas artists attempt to stake out a recognizable position by contributing novel approaches to the traditions of the medium, camera club photographers declare their unity with history, upholding and extending the pictorialist tradition.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY IS INNOVATIVE

When art photographers discuss pictures they don't like they often say "I've seen it before." In drawing upon the work of predecessors, art photographers risk being termed "imitators" if they fail to update or alter the conventions they borrow. Artists experience strong pressure, then, to invent entirely new techniques,6 or to innovate by adapting methods used outside the art world. The "snapshot aesthetic" borrows from conventions of family or "home-mode" photography (e.g., haphazard compositions and commonplace subjects); photographers working in this style may employ technically unsophisticated equipment (e.g., cameras like the Polaroid and the dime-store Diana). In addition, art photographers borrow from other media, incorporating drawing, painting, and other materials to make mixed media collages or photomontages.

Camera club photographers maintain a keen interest in and awareness of technological innovation—new equipment, devices, or processes that improve their pictures or make picture taking easier. Yet such innovations are employed to produce "better" photographs within the boundaries of camera club conventions.7 Amateur photographers can anticipate the reactions of other club members to their pictures, and they know what judges like to see. When camera club photographers emulate others it is not considered "faddism"—judges and club members consciously attempt to reproduce the conventions of camera club work, maintaining a shared aesthetic tradition.

In art photography the continual introduction of revived techniques and novel approaches keeps aesthetic codes in flux. In order to make interpretations viewers must stay abreast of these innovations. This requirement limits the audience for art photography and tends to make it an elite symbol system (Glassie, 1972). Art photography is not readily accessible to the general public. Even camera club members, who are themselves skilled photographers, find artists' work inaccessible and feel alienated by its mystery and ambiguity.

It's hard to understand why certain contemporary things are so outstanding. Neighborhood scenes—telephone poles, phone booths, cars—it's not attractive. I like to see what's being exhibited, maybe I'll learn something. Contemporary people think pictorialism is old hat. To me it's beautiful, pleasing. I read about ICA exhibits [like the one curated for the Institute of Contemporary Art by Marincola] and they're enthusiastic reviews. I go see it and I don't like it. To be successful in contemporary art it has to be different, new— then it's accepted—like hand colored black and white photographs— they're flat with no good shadow detail. It looks like painting by numbers.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY IS PERSONAL

Criticizing camera club photography, an artist said, "Those people don't put themselves into their pictures." Artists see their photography as an expression of their personalities and individual life experiences. Through photographs, artists attempt to share their visual experience of the world with sophisticated viewers. However, they do not expect viewers' interpretations to be isomorphic with their own, as they assume that the meanings viewers derive from art photographs will draw upon their own experiences.

My reactions are intuitive, emotional. You just sort of know. At this time I respond to this, at another time to something else. My criteria change with the picture.

Whether or not the artist's and viewer's responses coincide is less important than the work's success at stimulating thought, raising issues, and provoking ideas. Art photographers seek to produce pictures that will serve as visual stimuli in eliciting emotional responses from viewers.

Artists say they feel compelled to express themselves through photography. They feel enriched and gratified in doing photography, as one of the photographers I interviewed emphasized in her catalogue statement:

I derive enormous pleasure from the process of creating these hand colored images, by extending the photographic process in a tactile, sensual way. Everything in the photograph comes alive and I experience a sense of immediacy and discovery which I do not feel when working with standard color photography. All these pleasures are greatly enhanced in the large scale photographs because the image seems to surround me [Marincola, 1980:22].

These gratifications make the contingencies attendant upon the artistic lifestyle—uncertain fortune, frustration and hard work—seem worthwhile.

The photographers I interviewed were reluctant to discuss the photographs I had intended to use to elicit elements of their aesthetic, emphasizing this link between art photography and the personality and life experience of the artist. Viewed singly, abstracted from the context of the artist's oeuvre and presented without the maker's identity, these photographs resisted interpretation as art. Deprived of some knowledge of the maker's identity, artists are uncertain which of the many possible fine art codes is being employed. Some attempted in response to identify the picture maker and then discussed the picture presented in terms of the stylistic conventions associated with the supposed artist: "I know her work—it's confrontational, violates your personal space—l like it." Others responded to the formal construction of an image, or attributed meanings to the picture by drawing upon their own life histories. But acquaintance with a photographer's stated intentions and with additional examples of his or her work yielded more elaborated interpretations.⁸

In sum, art photographers demonstrate membership in their symbol-sharing group by making personal pictures that are often ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation.  Complex pictures give evidence of sophisticated conceptualization and matured vision. In contrast, camera club photographers demonstrate group membership by making pictures that reflect a stable aesthetic. Their photographs demonstrate technically competent, skillful reproduction of the camera club code. Fu rthermore, camera cl u b pictures are judged anonymously. Prizes at club competitions and salons are awarded on the basis of correspondence to the aesthetic code. Individuals are rewarded for achievement within known and established limits rather than for innovation. Neither the complexity of intellectual processes contributing to the picture's final form nor knowledge of the photographer's identity and work are relevant to judgment.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY IS A LIFESTYLE

The personal ethos of art photography extends to a general style of living that compels and sometimes controls the artist. The process of picture making may consume the artist's emotional and physical being, as indicated by this account written by Aaron Siskind (1980:305):

I worked very systematically: every morning I would take twelve sheets of film and shoot six pictures. I found a very interesting thing: it was an exhausting way of working. I would take those six pictures in perhaps two to three hours. I moved very, very little and sometimes would take all six pictures within the area of a block. And it was fantastic— when I got through I was worn out. And I did nothing!

Something was going on. The important thing was that although these were pictures of objects, these were pictures with terrific emotional involvement. What evidence did I have of that? I had the evidence of being tired. Of being glad I was through.

Artists get lost in their work; they give up control to the process itself, which leads them through to the creation of an artwork.

Photographers I interviewed said the artist's lifestyle is set apart from that of other people. Whereas most people seek the security of a steady job with a steady income, artists face a career filled with uncertainties and no promise of success or comfort. As artists frequently profess,

You don't go into it because you dream about getting famous. It has to be what you believe i n—you need to have to make photographs. If you do it to become famous it's not going to be real.

In order to experience satisfaction and gratification from their work, artists must be willing to sacrifice the comforts of living in an affluent society. A nationally prominent Philadelphia photographer offered this lengthy characterization of the artist's lifestyle:

The creative act is quite different from most of our other acts; maybe this is why we sometimes talk about the artist as being antisocial or alienated. In so many of our social institutions we want order, responsibility, dependability. To do that demands one kind of organization, and the great thing in the arts is, one, the play of chance, and the breaking away from the routine....

When a creative person finds out—that's what they are, they can't be anything else—and you learn to live with it. You find a way. Callahan and Siskind used to say "You can't plan it out," and I didn't understand it then. Each moment tests you, tests your intentions.... When I saw Siskind and Callahan in Chicago they were scraping. Their kids didn't go to private schools. Siskind had no running water in his darkroom. Aaron was driving an old beat-up car and they were always working ... you learn to live with a lot of intangibles....

You don't get recognized overnight. There're no easy returns. Anytime you're trying to go for any insight or fine quality it's a long, long struggle. It may take you four years to make a book and somebody comes along and reads it in three hours; someone else pages through it in fifteen minutes.... If you really want to do something that has some value to it, you're going to have to set other things aside. If this is really what you want to do, if you think working in photographs is terrific and there's a communication that when you go out and start handing cups or start looking down the streets and things happen and you get excited by them and you see that excitement developing and going on and on and on and you can be critical and you can doubt and you can be high, all of those things mixed together, then it's a living thing and then you should be damn thankful that you can do it.

Despite such testimonies, none of the artists' homes or studios I visited demonstrated the sacrifice of a middleclass lifestyle.⁹ The image of the artist-in-the-garret may be more a part of art world lore than reality. The artist's lifestyle may be somewhat unconventional, but, among my interviewees, it never appeared to be uncomfortable. As few artists sell enough work or command high enough prices to support themselves without any other source of income, most make their living by teaching art at a college or university, at an art school or a community art center. Of the 20 art photographers I interviewed, only one had achieved enough prominence to be able to choose whether or not he wanted to teach (when I interviewed him he had just sold a major "composite piece" for somewhere near $15,000). Other photographers do commercial work to support their art careers, although often with the sense that they are prostituting their art by so doing. Most of the artists I interviewed complained that teaching or commercial photography interfered with their "real" work. Many photographers only get a chance to shoot new work during their summer breaks. Photographers who reiterated the sacrifices demanded of artists were, simultaneously, the most financially secure and artistically successful. These photographers had obtained academic appointments at prestigious institutions, and regularly exhibited their photographs both locally and nationally. In a few cases, these artists had professional spouses, and two had relatives who owned and ran art galleries. The artists I interviewed whose finances were more volatile saw little romance or integrity in their situations. They spoke matter of factly about career strategies that would elevate their positions, while their more well-heeled colleagues considered such discussions unseemly.

Camera club photographers have less emotional engagement in their picture making. For them, photography is not a career—amateurs work at other jobs and see no need to sacrifice their standard of living in order to take pictures." Camera club members get involved in photography to fill their leisure time. Often photography heightens the enjoyment of vacation travel, bird watching, or naturalist pursuits. Some camera club photographers simply enjoy collecting and manipulating photographic equipment. Camera club photographers make no mention of the struggle, frustration, or sense of alienation discussed by artists. If they thought photography was not pleasurable, amateurs would find another avocation to pursue. As a Miniature photographer once asserted, "We do photography for the love of it! No one pays us to do it. We're the real artists—they just do it for the money!"

ART PHOTOGRAPHY PARTICIPATES IN THE WORLD OF COMMERCE

Although art photography is highly individualized and personally motivated, it simultaneously occupies a position in the public arena. Art photographs are made to be exhibited in art museums and galleries, to be bought, sold, and collected for their monetary as well as aesthetic value. Maquet (n.d.: 4) writes that in Western societies art objects are identified, in part, by virtue of their access to the marketplace:

Art objects circulate along a special commercial network;

they are commodities bought and sold on an organized

market. In our society a first criterion, crude but fairly accurate, of art, is access to the art market. Objects belonging to that network are art objects.

Art photographers' reputations are determined, to some degree, by the prices their pictures fetch on the art market. Photographers whose work has been repeatedly exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums price their pictures higher than their less celebrated colleagues. Only these few photographers can earn their living through picture sales.

Since art photography has become collectible, viewed as a good capital investment, several noteworthy developments have occurred. Trends and styles proliferate: The "snapshot aesthetic," serial images, photomontages, composite photographs, abstraction, studio still-lifes, and various stylistic revivals have all received attention from gallery directors, critics, and collectors. Rosenblum (1978) argues persuasively that the marketplace bounds and constrains artists' aesthetic choices. Yet art photographers deny that market concerns limit their work. Although adopting a particular style while it is in vogue might increase one's visibility and fortunes, the artists I interviewed all denied responding directly to current trends:

It's not a real expression of the person's ideas. It's not art, not growth-producing. Very few people can see something new, innovative and pure. Those who can aren't affected by trends in photography—the rest reflect trends.

I avoid it; I don't pay any attention. Current ideas are vital, but I avoid faddism—that's death. There's no penetration. "The look" doesn't encourage anything new or innovative. You can tell when someone's done this. Art doesn't lie when you can read it.

Artists who cater to others' tastes are said to violate all notions about the artist's role and the nature of his or her work. Even though art operates in the public domain, it should remain personal. 

When asked about their career paths and "making it" in the art world, artists became evasive, preferring to talk, instead, about their artistic philosophies. Many hesitated or refused to discuss financial matters and maintained a cloak of secrecy around their own routes to success. Most contended that they could not advise others pragmatically, beyond such maxims as "do good work and it will be seen." They expressed commitment to the idea that you "have to pay the dues" to achieve success, producing a mature body of work in order to receive recognition. Most art photographers scorned self promotion and reacted negatively to stories of young photographers fresh out of graduate school, heading, portfolios under their arms, for the offices of museum curators:

There's too much promotion going on without paying the dues in terms of work. That's part of the problem with the photography market—a lot of bad work has been institutionalized.¹²

Perhaps artists' unwillingness to share their expertise publicly stems, in part, from the competitive nature of the art market: Many photographers compete for scarce exhibition space and for critical attention. Photographers protect their position in the art world by insulating themselves from an inquisitive public.

Camera club photographers, excluded from the art market and unaffected by contemporary trends, willingly share their expertise with other club members and photography enthusiasts, discussing techniques they use, their equipment, or anything else at which they excel. Photographers join camera clubs in order to learn from fellow members; guarding techniques would be viewed as an affront to the group. Camera club pictures are made to be shown in club competitions and interclub salons. They are made for a cohesive, identifiable audience, and are infrequently shown outside club-sponsored activities.

CONCLUSION

Photography is a unique medium because of its widespread accessibility and popularity. Because so many camera owners have some experience making and viewing pictures, art photography has a broad potential audience. In contrast, painting, sculpture, and drawing, media that do not proceed from camera-made images of reality, require representational skills involving sophisticated hand-eye coordination. Public perceptions of the difficult acquisition of these skills discourage popular participation . The transformation of photography from a medium accessible to a mass audience into an exclusive symbolic code linked it with painting, sculpture, and drawing (as Alfred Stieglitz had intended), limiting widespread participation through the creation and maintenance of social and aesthetic boundaries.

Few people other than artists and students know the increasingly variable, abstruse, and inaccessible symbolic codes of modern art photography. Knowledge about modern art codes has become a scarce commodity, limiting widespread appreciative competence (Gross, 1973, 1975).

The emergence of an exclusive communicational code provides a symbolic mechanism for identifying and delimiting an elite social world. As Warner (1953: 61-62) has written,

The reciprocal exchange of symbols which have a common significance for each member involved in the exchange holds the group together; but the fact that they share the symbols only among themselves and cannot do so with others creates an exclusiveness and inclusiveness that strengthens the solidarity of the group. Since these characteristics are present in each symbol-sharing group, they clearly contribute both to each group's solidarity and to the maintenance of society's heterogeneity.

DiMaggio and Hirsch go further, arguing that membership in elite symbol-sharing groups provides a mechanism for upward social mobility. Drawing upon surveys that consistently demonstrate that fine arts audiences are "dominated by the wealthy and well-educated, most of whom are professionals and managers" (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978: 156), DiMaggio and Hirsch (1976: 154) suggest that people with insufficient economic capital "will accumulate cultural capital as an alternative strategy for maintaining and advancing their position in the class structure.''¹³

In becoming a marker of elite status, fine art photography has created aesthetic boundaries that separate it from popular forms of symbolic communication. The rhetoric of the art world is self-consciously tailored to distinguish its photographic practice and products from those that are publicly accessible. In contrast to commercial, amateur, and family photography, art photography is not easily produced; it requires total commitment; its photographs cannot be comprehended without knowledge of its history and contemporary trends; and art photography assigns monetary value to photographs as art objects.

Art photographers have responded to a close historical relationship to camera club amateurs by fashioning art activity in contradistinction to amateur activity. Although art and camera club photography emerged from the same historical locus, and photographers from each social world approach their work with seriousness and dedication, art photography has managed to attain special status as an elite aesthetic form. In contrast, camera club photography, despite high levels of competence in photographic articulation, has been marginalized by members of the art world.'¹⁴ Aware of the derision aimed at them and uncomfortable with the forms of photographic work that receive institutional legitimization, camera club members have built their own insulating boundaries. Amateur photographic activity, which once represented the most advanced work in the field, is now rigidly separated from the elite social world constructed around fine art photography. The distinctions between art and amateur activities do not reside simply in image aesthetics. Rather, they are embedded in matrices of social behavior, constituted diachronically and synchronically. The construction of an elite code of photographic practice and its maintenance by contemporary artists elaborate the symbolic mechanisms of social differentiation, allowing photography to be, simultaneously, "easier than ever" and a complex process of visual discovery.

NOTES

1. See Rosenblum (1978) for a valuable discussion of the contemporary relationship between the work routines of art, photojournalism, and advertising photography and the distinctive visual aesthetics of each activity.

2. Like art photographers, historians of art photography have treated camera club pictorialists with less sympathy than their Photo-Secession predecessors. Beaumont Newhall (1982: 251) writes,

"Pure photography" was a reaction to the latter-day pictorialism that followed the demise of the Photographic Salon of London and the Photo-Secession in America; it was a time when the weakest of soft-focus pictures of the most banal subject matter and obvious composition were being widely exhibited and published.

3. The revised edition of Beaumont Newhall's influential and widely used historytextswhichappearedin1982, finally included a new chapter on photojournalism.

4. Harry Callahan (1981 ), an esteemed artist, made this statement about his work:

I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see. Wanting to see more makes you grow as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you.

5. One of the photographers whose work Marincola (1980) included in the Philadelphia exhibition wrote this catalogue statement:

These photographs are still-lifes found in a sea of sand. Walking along another beach, I am aware of the relentless sun and how it animates and defines every grain of sand. Within the emptiness of the moment, I fall over an elaborate table set for one, a feast in this desert. It is archeological, historical and dreamed. Further on, I glimpse a tower, a half-empty water glass, baroque chairs, a beautifully wrapped package of unknown contents, and a solitary friend sunbathing. I quietly pass in expectation of more but find nothing. Retracing my steps for a closer examination of the past, I am acutely aware of a remarkable change. All of the remembered markings are gone. Only a maze of rocks remain, each individually etched and splendidly luminous, as if each grain of sand had grown into a towering boulder in place of the object I discovered earlier. The rocks are placed in a sea of sand and continually ripple and echo. They possess an order, an exactness and tranquility, which is startling and inhuman. Each rock is unearthed, examined, recorded, wrapped and saved. Another glance and it all disappears. I continue walking.

6. One such recent technique, "light drawing," is described as follows:

These images are made in a darkened room; the camera shutter is held open, and as if it were a pen holding a cartridge of light instead of ink, a flashlight is utilized to trace the outlines of the figures as well as other objects in the room. The tracing shows up as lines of light on the printed images [Marincola, 1980:3].

7. Glassie's (1972: 259) discussion of "elite art" and "folk art" illuminates the distinction made here:

While the elite artist may be willing to risk his standing to appear ahead of his time, it is only a rare folk artist who strives for innovation; his replication is an affirmation of a tradition.

8. This may explain the profusion of published "statements" by art photographers.

9. Arnold Hauser (1981) argues that artists themselves have no "class commitment" but, rather, "class affinity." As the creators of objects and events valued and consumed by members of upper-class strata, artists lay claim to elite status with or without the level of wealth or educational attainment that generally accompanies upperclass membership.

10. Conflicts between making a living and pursuing photography are also experienced by amateurs; kept from their avocation by busy work schedules, club members do most of their shooting during vacations.

11. See Stebbins (1979) for a discussion of the concept of the amateur in relation to professional activity.

12. One photographer I interviewed, the chair of an art school's photography department, diverged from the prevalent stance and even taught a seminar on self promotion. He advised his students:

You must believe you can be personally responsible for your destiny—that you can make a difference in people's perceptions of you, and act on this basis. Determine the upper limits of the profession—this is where you center your energy. The mileage you get from MOMA is greater than, say, Albright-Knox in Buffalo. You have to establish going to New York and get upper-end credentials that will influence everything below.

Most of the photographers I interviewed who knew about his approach reacted negatively.

13. This argument is also advanced by Bourdieu (1980), Berger (1973), and Veblen (1899).

14. Art photographers distinguish between unorganized photo enthusiasts, who may move beyond publicly accessible picture taking to "art," and camera club amateurs:

I think it's [popular involvement] great—photography can be a stepping stone into art. It's not intimidating like going to museums. Students are too inhibited to take sculpture, but not photography. [What about camera club photography?] I don't want to have anything to do with them, l don't like having them in my classes.... I'm dangerous for them—I hate sunsets, l have trouble getting aroused by family albums and travel pictures. I'm not on their side. l have an intense interest in fine art—their pictures aren't art. If they are, they're primitive art.

REFERENCES

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BERGER, J. (1973) Ways of Seeing. New York: Viking Press.

BOURDIEU, P. (1980) Media Culture and Society (Special issue devoted to Bourdieu's sociology of culture) N. Garnham (issue editor). Vol. 2 (July).

CALLAHAN, H. (1981) "Statement," in V. Goldberg (ed.) Photography in Print. New York: Simon & Schuster.

CHRISTOPHERSON, R. W. (1974a) "Making art with machines: photography's institutional inadequacies." Urban Life and Culture 3,1: 3-34.

-------- (1974b) "From folk art to fine art: a transformation in the meaning of photographic work." Urban Life and Culture 3, 2: 123-157.

DiMAGGIO, P. and P. HIRSCH (1976) "Production organizations in the arts," in R. A. Peterson (ed.) The Production of Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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