sanj said:
I find myself repeating the same thing on this thread so I think I have nothing more to add.
Hoping to end this on a slightly higher note.
Nice. 
If I understand where you are coming from, it sounds as though you have a problem with considering documentary photography to be "high art."
Yes, it is like that.
That's certainly a legitimate question and one I've wrestled with as well. A great many photographs now considered art, were never intended as such. Certainly the FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, etc.) were not intending to make art. Their purpose was propaganda, pure and simple. They were hired to sell Americans on the need for the social welfare programs of the FDR administration and, then later, to show how successful Roosevelt's policies had been.
Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Doisneu, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, etc. etc. didn't take pictures intended to make "art." Instead they were photojournalists.
I think Cartier-Bresson was much much more than a photojournalist.
The question really becomes whether or not images intended to document some aspect of life can transcend that original purpose and achieve a level that we can legitimately call art.
You are a filmmaker. Do you believe that some films can go beyond their original commercial purpose and achieve a
level that is considered art? Is "Citizen Kane" art? Certainly many critics would argue it is. Yes I believe and agree.
Parr is a documentary photographer. I doubt if he would disagree at all with that assessment and I strongly suspect he would prefer that label to "artist." His career has been built on documenting life and publishing his projects as books. Given that magazine photojournalism has been dead for decades, anyone of Parr's generation (and I fit into that category) could only achieve success in documentary photography by publishing books. Given the cost of publishing and limited return on investment, it takes a very special talent and a lot of luck to succeed in that market. Today, even that market is all but gone. But, I'm veering way off message.
To go back to the question of whether or not documentary photography is art: if all the art museums of the world were purged of documentary photographs, there wouldn't be much left on their walls. If galleries and museums wish to purchase Parr's photographs and display them, who is he to argue with them. I certainly wouldn't.
Yes it is art, but not 'high' art. That is a different category altogether.
The pictures you posted as examples of high art are beautiful pictures, but I'd be hard-pressed to consider them art.
Don't get me wrong. I'd be extremely proud to have them in my portfolio. It's just that one standard by which art is often judged is it challenges the viewer to consider or see the world in a new way. While pleasing to the eye, I don't see anything in those pictures that breaks any new ground or forces me to consider the world differently.
Yes yes. They were selected quickly to indicate what I mean by 'high' art.
This opens up a whole new debate about the nature of art. Can art be simply about beauty? Or does it need to offer up more? If the sole criteria for art were beauty and craftsmanship, we would have to have a gallery on every street corner and even then, there would be too many pictures to ever display.
We aren't going to resolve this debate on a Canon Gearhead forum. But maybe by discussing it honestly and respectfully, we can all grow a little in our own feeble attempts to make "art" – whatever that happens to be.
BRILLIANT.
