Are Photographer trying to mimic Painters?

[mdmullen]

Sometimes you take a fuzzy iPhone photo in low light and it ends up looking like a painting…

 

[smoke665]

Art is something that pleases the soul. It matters little how it's created, the materials used, or the manner of presentation.

 

[bchalifour]

"Looking like a painting." Nothing like a cell-phone that does not know what to do with artificial light (orange cast) and a window that provides light from the left side of the frame and we are back in Antwerp I suppose in the 16th or 17th century I suppose (since then painting has somewhat evolved). But does that make this image really look like a painting? Possibly for some, for some time.
This type of photography/goal in photography/(even naive comment on some photographs) have been going on since the end of the 19th century with its ebb and flow. Then it was called "Pictorialism" it is now pictorialism, people who are dissatisfied with photography's relationship with the real (and its challenges), will not learn how to paint, and for whom a photograph from the camera is just raw material (in the case of images whose appearance has more to do with filters, plug-ins, image-processing software). The result then falls under the category of graphic arts (more time being spent, more being done with accessories and computer/software) and should be treated for what it is... this is graphic/computer art using photography. Some do like the sometimes spectacular results but where we should draw the line before calling them photographs, is, I think, the real question.
In other words (to sound a little more "serious" ;o) we are back to the ontological question: what is a photograph? ;o)

Another interesting question is: what was the original intention? Does the result match it? If not we are either in the in the "accident" or pictorialist category where the initial photograph is just fodder.
And so what? If it makes you happy, it can't be that back is the chorus, isn't it? "Everything is relative" is another one...
Then it is more a question of how you position yourself and whether any coherence has some any importance to you (two questions that can also be answered with the first three lines of this paragraph but that not everybody shares).