Genre Concept in the Art of Reportage Photography
In the field of the art of reportage photography, there is no clear genre division, its own special genre system, because it is fundamentally outside of genre, like life itself is outside of genre. The art of reportage photography is focused on the artistic display of life as it is, without the active intervention of a creative subject in it. All the art of reportage photography is a certain type of artistic photographic creativity, which arose from the depths of photographic technology, making the most of its natural artistic and aesthetic possibilities. It is characterized by the use of a reportage method of shooting based on the display of real life situations, which leads to the formation of photographic typified images of a timeless nature, which do not always have a clear geographical reference and have a special aesthetic expressiveness of visual forms. The art of reportage photography cannot be divided into separate components, into stable structural units for displaying visible reality, which are used by the photographer and the viewer to carry out photographic communication. In his work, the photographer does not follow any established canons in this type of artistic creativity, and the viewer does not look for these established forms in works of photographic art. This conventional setting determines the absence of a genre structure in the art of reportage photography. This attitude is most clearly manifested in the creative heritage of one of the founders of the art of reportage photography, A. Cartier-Bresson. In the art of reportage photography, substantive, creative-methodological and functional approaches to genre differentiation merge together. Accordingly, it is very difficult, and most often simply impossible, to draw a clear genre line between certain photographic works. The presented situation creates, on the one hand, for the creative subject of the art of reportage photography an unusual degree of freedom for creative self-expression, and on the other hand, it provides exactly the same degree of freedom for the subject perceiving photographic art. Moreover, both, the structure of the so-called open work and the general culture of the audience are equally important here.