An email arrived this morning with the breathless heading "These are actually paintings not photographs - INCREDIBLE!" Attached I saw that some Eastern European photographer had digitized her photos of pretty places and run them through what is deceptively called a "painting program software" and then had them giclee-printed onto canvas.

It's popular these days among a certain class of photographers. Often they have priced themselves so far into the stratosphere that they can justify no further increase in price in a saturated market so they try to re-brand their product with the cachet of the word "painting." Painting is often perceived, albiet wrongly, by the gross market to be more important than a mere photograph. That is the intellectual equivalent of claiming nitrogen far superior to beryllium. There is no correlative value relationship.

With apologies to real artists of photography everywhere, these things some are calling paintings are no more paintings than a kleenex with holes in it is a piece of Belgian lace. There is a reason the work of an Adams or Leibovitz has real and tangible, intrensic value and worth as art. A photographer here in Fort Worth, Luther Smith, makes images that are simultaneously uniquely American and universal. Some capture the complexity of urban living and the monolythic mass of a city while isolating and surrounding it in a context of open spaces, fields and rivers. The juxtaposition implies an active struggle, a battle for primacy between the creeping hulk of urban mass versus the relentless grinding down and swallowing up by nature of all things structured. His works are rich, varied and complex, dense and vibrant with thought, wit and intricate subtext. They need no justification by semantic association with anything other than what they are - important works of art in photography by a highly gifted and articulate artist.

Like any true master, any brilliant artist in any media, artist-photographers at their best transcend their medium and create works of intricate intellectual density and importance. Photography, like all art forms, is moved from its petty mechanics, composition, scale and execution into the realm of brilliance and sometimes genius because of an artist's mastery and vision. As surely as a weak crayon scribble or a thoughtless daub of paint is meaningless when compared to an authentic work of art by a Picasso, de Kooning or daVinci, a simple photo is an easy nothing compared to its potential in the hands of a master.

And so comes the sly marketeering of mediocrity. A modestly attractive photograph of portrait or place or thing can be magically made "high art" - and higher priced - by running it through a digital program. Email the file to the giclee printer and it will efficiently spit a dot matrix of oil-based pigments onto a strip of genuine canvas. Less than 20.00 dollars worth of effort and materials and you've begun to stock up an inventory of actual stretched canvases. How lovely. The process is virtually identical to any common color copier. The primary differences being that the basic color copier on your computer or at the store creates a dot matrix of polymer based pigments sprayed onto a piece of paper and the giclee "painting" printer sprays a dot matrix of color onto a piece of canvas.

They can certainly be pretty, some can even be beautiful. But they are not paintings. To call them paintings cheapens both painting and serious photographic art. It degrades the integrity of the artist. It misleads and abuses the trust of the uninformed buyer. Give it a clever name, "Matrix Art" or something snazzy like that for the market to embrace. But calling a digitized, computer manipulated photo a painting is simply a means to mislead, manipulate and milk a trusting market.

Incredible, indeed.