WHAT IS FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY? "Fine Art Photography" The term still creates confusion for many people. Sometimes when I tell people that I am a fine art photographer, they assume that means that I photograph other artists' paintings. As recently as 50 years ago, combining the term "fine art" with the term "photography" was generally considered to be oxymoronic. It was often believed that creating an image with a machine (camera) simply could not qualify as "fine art." That bias has been changing in recent years, in part because of the regular use of photo editing techniques. One definition of fine art is "a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness." In other words, it is art produced primarily for beauty rather than for utility. The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question as it does the purity of the discipline. Fine art photography refers to photographs that are...