This is a bit odd but it’s mine and I like it so I’m going to share it anyway. It raises two good questions. I will deal with the simpler one first.
What is it?
The image is a photo – a very bad photo, technically – straight off my camera. Late in the evening, when there was just enough light to see it, something hopped into the ashes of a long-cold fire pit at the Alligator Creek Falls camping ground. Shooting first and checking camera settings later, this is what I got.
The camera (DSLR) happened to be set on aperture priority (f3.5) and ISO 400, so its exposure time automatically stretched to half a second because of the dim light. The camera moved in that time, of course. The loose ash may have contributed to that nice soft effect, too, but I’m not sure. The pinks and browns were mostly invented by the camera, its automatic colour balance trying too hard to make something out of a background which was nearly all greys (there were a few pinkish fallen gumleaves in the ashes). The fact that the composition was satisfactory was mostly luck, too, since I could barely see my subject.
Really, I’m surprised that anything at all was visible in the image, let alone that it was attractive.
But is it Art?
Purely as an image, it’s almost abstract and vaguely organic. The colours and textures have reminded some people of a chalk sketch. I would be quite happy to print it and put it on my wall, but is it art?
A ‘work of art’ is firstly a work, something made, and this is something found (on my camera, that is). Not that photographs can’t be art, but art also has an intentional aspect and this image was fortuitous from start to finish. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,” according to Degas, and that doesn’t apply here either.
If it is art, then, my image can only be art in the same sense that Duchamp’s urinal or, more recently, the banana duct-taped to a wall are art: “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” as Duchamp said.
But if it isn’t art, what is it?
As a found object, however, perhaps my image is most akin to the pretty pebbles or seed-pods we pick up on our excursions and display on a window-sill when we get home. So yes, it’s okay to frame it and hang it on the wall (which automatically and in this case misleadingly makes it look like art) even if it isn’t art.
All of which says something about how we think about art.
But what is it? Really?
Oh, you would like to know what the subject is? That’s less interesting, but okay. Here’s a more documentary, less sketchy, photo of it a minute or two later after it had hopped out of the fire-pit and I had organised my camera.
Yes, it’s a cane toad.
If that makes us respond more negatively to my top photo than we did before, that says something about how we think about depictions of the natural world.
