William Collen asked an interesting question after looking at this article. What do you think about photography? Can this be Christian art, or is it just mechanically created photorealism?

He asks this becauseI use the example of photography to illustrate the point that an image can be produced mechanically and fail to communicate anything beyond. However, I am aware some photography can do this.

So, photography can be art if it is partially abstracted so that it communicates invisible realities, as well-painted images do. Skilled photographers use great artifice to imbue the photograph with meaning. Photographers today can manipulate the image using Photoshop techniques, and even traditional photography used an ordinary camera and the development process of printing the photo so that what they produced was more than a simple flat visual record. However, this can be done well or poorly.

Ansell Adams, for example, created beautiful photographs of the natural world through careful composition and control of contrast in developing the print. He also used monochrome, which ironically created a numinous beauty in his landscapes.

The rule of thumb here is that when we look at the image, does it communicate a sense of human artifice, which has given the image the capacity to communicate invisible truths through visible means?