If you haven’t seen “My Kid Could Paint That” yet, you should. It is a movie about a child who paints amazingly well, and it questions whether the father helps her paint (and then charges thousands of dollars for her work). Whether or not you think the father helps the child, the movie raises the age-old question of, “What is art?” In the art and photography worlds, art is given value by the eye of the beholder. That means that whoever looks the art and purchases it is the one who decides its worth. If the little girl’s paintings can sell for thousands of dollars despite the controversy over whether her dad helped her, the art community will argue that the paintings are worth that.
It is similar with photography. If a buyer will pay a certain price for a photograph, it must be worth that amount. Photographs are becoming more and more controversial today, especially within the media. Should newspapers allow photos that show dead people in war zones? Should they be graphic in nature in order to protect people? For example, should a photograph be published that shows what happens when you fall from a bicycle at high speeds when you aren’t wearing a helmet? These questions about what constitutes art and how much reality photos should depict will most likely be debated for the rest of humankind’s existence.