>>3608676I had a huge reply typed out but it was deleted from my phone because 4chan decided to refresh for no reason.
Basically, photography is subtractive, and the photographer is the one who chooses to subtract or add each thing in the composition. People like Weston lived in a time when photography was mostly pictorialist bullshit with dreamy or soft images, and he took very explicity, very sharp images of sexy peppers. Before that, nobody took pictures of sexy peppers or fruits, or the female body with such clarity and posture. In essence, this is what fine art photography attempts to achieve: the creation of unique trends that have not been done before. For example, here is the famous portrait of Dali by Phillipe Halsman. The surreal scene and suspension of time and space has been duplicated thousands of times since this was created.
The problem with fine art photography today, howver, is that people rely so much on digital mediums to the point that it can no longer be considered photography at all, but rather the application of design and illustration to photographs. Theres also a plethora of really bad examples if you try to google "fine art photography" which has been added to 2-buck shill wedding photographers and people whos definition of "fine art" extends to portraits of beautiful women in nature scenes or, in the extreme post-modern trash that it is, the exploration of culture through photography (usually resulting in high resolution pictures of garbage pasted onto itself, or collages, or other things not truly limited to photography alone)
Its a niche field that, if you can truly present something that is groundbreaking you will likely be ignored amongst the masses and masses of consumerist photography. Maybe when you die, 100 years later someone will unearth your hard drive and find your work. Probably not, though.
