What makes photography an art?

Nankai train at Tezukayama station

 A few years ago, if you'd told me I'd have such a burning passion for photography, I'd have scoffed. It was always something I viewed as too 'easy' - just click a button and you're done! That's not any special, that's not art!

But I've come to realize that to photograph is to capture a fleeting moment in time, to preserve its feeling in a mix of color and shape, to make the intangible tangible. Our memory fades, and warps and twists the situations we've experienced, but a photograph preserves a precise instant forever. Every moment we live is instantly transient. Nothing in life can ever happen 'twice', not in the same way. A day can be repeated in the same meticulous way a hundred times over, and yet it will never ever be the same. The weather above, the interactions we have, our emotions - us. As a person, you are not the same as you were 5 minutes before. A photograph clips an instant, a 1/200th of a second and creates an illusion using shapes and light to fashion an imprint of time, like putting your hand in fresh snow or watching a shadow cast on a wall. An impression of a moment, but never the moment itself, for that will always be gone.

Suntory Hall plaza, Tokyo

Garry Winogrand has a wonderful quote - "When I'm photographing I see life, that's all there is! In my viewfinder it's not a picture - you're not a picture." 
That resonates with me. You're capturing life in all its forms when you photograph, finding something interesting, tucking away a part of that scene of life forever. When I look at the greats of photography whom I draw my inspiration from - Saul Leiter, Greg Girard, even contemporary rising artists like Hugo Lee (hugestagefive on social media), what they do is capture life. Their work explores a city, a people, a culture, and what impacts them the most, all through the lens of a camera. Unlike painting, a photographer has to capture something they see, that exists around them. It's not so easy to conjure something from the mind and create a scene - one must find it.

Life is strange. And I believe it's the job of a photogr
apher to capture the oddness, the surrealness of life in passing.

Perhaps it's why I love cameras so much. I like to collect them. Wonderful little machines which can grab and record memories and emotions. Delicate, complex and pristine, even in their most basic of states. It's so fantastic to use them and experiment, to explore both sides of a spectrum - to measure your light settings, painstakingly prepare and focus on a scene you want using a state-of-the-art camera. It's also fun to fragment that, and use an old shitty camera with expired film, make blurry images, and imperfect compositions. 

We all know the avant-garde movement in art circles was created in disobedience against the bourgeois idea of what art should be. Photography is the same. Mess things up and break them, piece them together, use it to show emotion, thought, allegory, whatever you want. There are an uncountable number of fascinating and bizarre, beautiful and gut-wrenching things happening everywhere, all the time. To preserve just a moment of it is beautiful.