Fine Art Photography can be translated as Art Photography. An image of this kind is conceived as a work of art: you must imagine it printed, framed, and hanging in a gallery. It brings to mind the motto of Aestheticism, "Art for Art's sake," which saw in the artistic product the representation of itself, whose purpose was to be beautiful and to be admired.

Fine Art Photography is not properly a genre in itself, as it can be a portrait, a macro, an architectural photo... Rather, it's a category that differs from commercial photography, whose ultimate goal is creating photographic services for clients, to be included in catalogs, brochures, descriptive or promotional prints. It's an artistic work that reflects the complete taste and imagination of the photographer, in which through post-production or composition or Black and White, effects and chromatisms are added, and the photograph is "transformed" from its vision.

​

Limited edition fine art prints are more prestigious and have more value than unlimited editions - open edition - (IKEA posters, to be clear) while maintaining credibility on the given and perceived value of the work and the photographer, on whom the focus remains, the interest in understanding why they wanted to create a photograph, wanted to conceive it, or capture it.

It could be from the need to witness world events like photojournalists do, perhaps unknown or difficult-to-render stories in images. Or the need to create an icon from one's imagination, just as painters and sculptors do, only photographers use light, real matter, and paper to print on instead of canvas. In any case, the photographer chooses the style most congenial to them: photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, or still life.

​

Each style can be chosen to tell any story, each offers a different look at the same object, an original point of view, an immediate or subtly revealed key to interpretation. Trivially but for easy understanding, I'll use the example of a flowered field in the middle of a valley: a photographer could choose to create wide-angle images, landscape photographs that immediately describe the subject (the flowered field) and contextualize it because it's surrounded by mountains. Another could get closer and be attracted by the flowers that compose it and thus create micro-photographs of just the flowers, doing so in the field or collecting them and shooting in the studio creating alternative and creative compositions. Another might tell the story of the life of the flower field, with macro-photographs of insects, flowers, animals that come to feed, etc. Yet another might choose the metaphysical and use creative techniques to create abstract, colorful, blurred, or motion-blurred images of the flowers and the flower field as a whole. Everything therefore depends on the photographer/author, their ideas, tastes, intellectual and artistic approach. And naturally the viewer also plays their part in making photographic art alive because some like landscapes, others like to lose themselves in abstract photographs imagining in turn other forms within forms. Many appreciate the description of nature, others rejoice in looking at the composite and chromatic perfection of a still life. The photographer chooses, interprets, decides their personal vision and shares it with the public. The public is interested in the work as much as in its author, wants to know more: what drove them to shoot and why those choices... this makes a photograph unique!