IN A RECENT ENTRY IN WHICH I EXPRESSED THE IDEA OF writing a book, re: The Top insert # here Examples of Bad Photography Sayings / Advice, I used the phrase "purpose of making fine art" multiple times in order to clarify that my comments / options were directed to those seeking to make fine-art. In response to that usage, Markus Spring left a comment:
....This "purpose of making fine art" is definitely the most complex and difficult problem to tackle and it is much easier to define what it is not than to find a recipe how to do it.
His point is well taken. That is, if I understand the point to be what is fine art? A question which is a part of a subset to the seemingly never-ending or sufficiently answered question, what is art? Answers to those related questions span the gamut from lucid to lunatic, expressed with an economy of words or, conversely, verbose ramblings. In any event, whatever one's preference, answer wise, it is important to my book writing (still a possibility) that I introduce (in a preface) to my audience my particular art biases and beliefs, which, by association, imply what it is that I consider to be art / fine-art.
The preface would state something based upon the following:
My photography is an attempt to clarify life by illuminating reality, employing explicit description / factuality-without resorting to contrivance or glib formula-in the pursuit of creating a relationship between form and content that induces significant emotional sensations. That is, for my eye and sensibilities, in the making of a photograph I coopt the subjective possibilities of objective things as a metamorphistic device in which the mysteries in the visible can transmute emperical data in such a way that the unconscious seems to reveal itself through the real.
As for a "recipe" for the making of fine-art, Photography Division, iMo, fine-art is defined by the pursuit of character, not caricature; form, rather than adventurous novelty, and, aiding and abetting the collision of the world, the self, and art in the making of photographs. Or, something like that.