I can buy the notion of photography as performance art, especially if one is doing wet-plate collodion or such, where you can make the act of photographing into a performance. What gets me though, are the idiots who are performance artists who claim that their performance is photography - those who make photographs of their performances and insist that they are not photographers, and that what they are doing is not photography - they are 'artists who use cameras'. Where's the difference? To cite an extreme example, that Mapplethorpe photo of himself with a bullwhip up his ass... that's certainly an act of performance art, but it's also a photograph. |