These are two photos are from Baldovino Barani's recent shoot (entitled The Evangelist) for Prive Asia magazine. These two photographs, for me, epitomize two crucial things about photography as an art form. For one, the pictures are indeed aesthetically pleasing and artistically satisfying – they exhibit a deliberate perceptive and achieve a particular mood. That is, they’re pretty, and I like looking at them. However, I think these photographs do something more than try and sell a garment. Barani is using this medium to deliver a message about the intrusive and hyperbolic nature of fashion in relation to non-western cultures. Look at these photos! A thin, white woman in couture outfit is lady-posing while the Chinese (I know for a fact it was shot in Hong Kong) citizens look on with terror as they awkwardly avoid interaction.
This, I think, is the point that Cotton is trying to make in the first chapter of The Photograph as Contemporary Art – images, and more importantly photographs, are art (or a more legitimate form of art) because they say something about the society in which we live. Pictures, like film or books or paintings, can be a serious tool for social change and progress. Just because one image is presented deliberately doesn’t mean that that one image can’t mean a million different things to a billion different people. Photography is art because it challenges humanity’s perception of what it means to live in a world with other humans.
