Julia Fullerton-Batten

Julia Fullerton-Batten

I was leafing through the free videos that one website offers, and had a look at a short piece about JFB, who I’d not heard of before. The site describes her as a fine art photographer, which, for present purposes, let’s define as ‘does own projects and sells the results as artworks through galleries’. I wish I’d thought of that definition before! It simplifies things a bit. You can find more about Julia Fullerton-Batten through her own website.
‘Is it art?’ is a question that seems to obsess some photographers, in a rather unhealthy way. Why bother about it, when it makes no difference to taking a picture – or selling it, come to that. It’s like the desire to assign a skin colour to a model, when the most important thing is that the colour is beautiful. The only time it’s worth naming a skin colour is when we need to do so out of respect for someone’s identity politics – and identity politics only arises when others are not willing to let someone be who they are. Otherwise, let the colour be beautiful.

Watching the Fullerton-Batten video makes me wonder if the size of the crew involved, and the painstaking attention to detail (which remind me of Annie Leibowitz more than anything) has anything to do with the definition – or whether they are either necessary to deliver the result (probably so, in purely practical terms), or capable of hindering it. At one time, it seemed necessary to me that a photographer should at least be on nodding terms with the range of technical issues and processes involved. It’s definitely a craft, even when it’s not an art.

Some artists make a point of learning a new craft for certain projects, and that often involves photography. A bit of a flavour of ‘whatever it takes’ does smack of pursuing a goal in the sort of way that I feel artists should. But what do I know? I don’t even have a firm definition of what art is…