Why Should I Care – Take 2
Jörg Colberg asked for responses to FotoFest and I supplied him with a link to a review I’d posted here. This review was written as part of a student program I participated in where I sat with FotoFest reviewers. Jörg later posted a blog where-in he provided the responses by 3 other photographers including Kevin O’Connell who took some issue with my review of FotoFest. This blog is a response to Kevin’s writing on Jörg’s website.
My blog post reviewing my time at FotoFest is located here: http://www.anonymousvernacular.com/2010/03/24/the-who-what-when-where-why-and-how-of-portfolio-reviews/
Jörg’s blog post pointing at my review is located here: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2010/04/why_should_i_care_about_your_body_of_work/
Jörg’s blog post with the 3 photographers’ responses is located here: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2010/04/three_takes_on_portfolio_reviews/
“So the fallback (read – easy) position may be for a reviewer to ask questions that are ultimately rhetorical. In fact, the first question posed in Moore’s post is the kind of questions one might expect if going into an interview at IBM and is in danger of sounding snarky, or even condescending or pompous, depending on the tone of voice. My gratuitous advice to any reviewer asking this type of question would be: look at the pictures. If you care about them, great; talk about why. If you don’t care about them then it would be incumbent on you as a reviewer to articulate that position. But, Socratic Method aside, it is odd to expect a photographer try to talk you into liking them. This seems contrary to the intent of a review.”
The above is a section of what Kevin O’Connell wrote in response to his time in FotoFest, but also partially to my blog post.
O’Connell misconstrued my post because the three questions I list are not in any fashion or form rhetorical in nature. Question #1 he refers to from my post:
- “Why should I care about your body of work?”
This may or may not be the kind of question one might expect at an IBM interview and yes, it may even come across as snarky or condescending, but it is still a valid question. From the photographer’s side of the table where you’re showing your work for 20 minutes at a time then doing it again and again and again it may even seem silly. From the reviewer’s side seeing upwards of 20 photographers in one day (showing 12-40 images each–and then repeating this for 4 days) it helps provide a foundation from which to begin. It’s not an easy question to ask and it’s definitely not an easy question to answer, but it’s never rhetorical in nature. When the reviewers ask this question they are expecting an answer. If you cannot answer this question then the review will probably consist of the reviewer trying to tease an answer out.
O’Connell offers some advice he labels gratuitous: reviewers should “look at the pictures. If [they] care about them, great; talk about why. If [they] don’t care about them then it would be incumbent on [the] reviewer to articulate that position.” My response is he is correct and this is a gratuitous suggestion. Barthes has often been repeated and I’ll paraphrase him here that the photograph is a message without a code. The photographer does not need to decode this message, but he does need to contextually frame it, to illuminate the conceptual and/or aesthetic path he’s trying to bring his viewers along. This attempt to explain one’s own art is something rather new, though, as many of the established masters of photography did NOT write about their own work. Instead someone else discovered their work and wrote about it for us–look at Atget and Szarkowski.
There were a number of photographers who wanted to ‘let their work speak for itself’ at FotoFest and, without fail, after seeing the work the reviewers had to ask what it was about.
It seems to me there are many photographers who don’t want to deal with their own work at a conceptual level. I don’t know why other than maybe they think that intellectually engaging their work will demean the creative process–maybe? Honestly, I think it’s either lack of dedication to do something that is incredibly difficult to do or it’s a matter of the Emperor’s New Clothes whereby they are afraid if they demystify the ‘creative process’ there won’t be any substance to the work. Concept does not necessarily mean a message in a persuasive sense (though it can), but something that has intellectual depth. Can you engage with the photograph in an intellectual fashion–does it make the viewer think or does he/she just look at the work and move on to the next piece?
If the only engagement you expect from the viewer is to look at the work and move on to the next great image I will say that’s not enough anymore. Photography is now too easy and photographers too good for process to be the end-all-be-all of photograph as art. I am talking about a photograph that you could show to a random assortment of 100 people and they would think it was a “good picture”. This brings me back to O’Connell’s post as I never suggested the photographer try to talk someone into liking the work—that’s a matter of taste. Taste is a personal preference, which is often excluded in contemporary art discussion as (evidenced by Bourdieu) taste statistically follows social/economic/cultural class lines.
With the advent of digital, Kodak’s push to bring photography to the masses from the Brownie era has finally come to fruition*. The problem now is there is so little photographic history in comparison to the greater art history that self-labeling as a “photographer” is nearly pointless. You can buy paints, brushes, and paper at Wal-Mart now, but how many people self-label as “painters”? The reason for this is the history and level of scholarship invested in painting going back thousands and thousands of years. Photography is still in its infancy, we’ve only been around since 1839 (give or take)–that’s LESS than 200 years, less than 1/5 of a 1000 years and painting has been around for thousands and thousands! What we’re experiencing now is a period of growing pain in photography as it matures both as a democratized craft and as a fine art.
As a professional artist it is incumbent on the artist to articulate why their work matters. That’s at the core of question 1: why should someone care about your photographs, why do they matter, with all of the images readily available at my fingertips to look through why is your work important enough for me to even look at it? O’Connell wants reviewers to look at his work, which is easily accomplished as he paid the entrance fee for the Meeting Place—he is paying them to look at the work–but the reviewers want to know why anyone else should. The importance of your work also can’t be simple syllogistic reasoning where, for example, “my work is about my memories and everyone has memories so the work is universally important.” This reasoning does universalize the work, but it does so in a trivial fashion as it only puts you on equal footing with every other photographer making work inspired by or about ‘memory’. A Flickr search for ‘memory’ currently pulls up 862,699 results and a Google search for “artist statement photography memory” pulls up 162,000 results. If even 5 of these other photographers who are on the web and dealing with memory have shows up at the same time as you why should I go see your work instead of theirs? Why should I buy one of your photographs for $1500 instead of one of theirs?
This is why “Why should I care about your body of work?” is not only a valid, non-rhetorical question, but a question everyone who considers themselves an emerging artist must tackle.
* Jörg has a conversation up right now between himself and Michael Itkoff located here:
http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/ping-pong_chatting_with_michael_itkoff/
where his stance on this differs from my own. He says Kodak’s marketing campaign helped to democratize the technology and the image, which it did but I say it still required the mediation of a lab to go from taking the picture to having negatives/prints. With digital technology one only needs a cellphone with camera—the technology itself allows the mediation of photography without the need for another individual and also utilizes skills that are now second-nature in the majority of Western civilization. The number of individuals with boxes of slides under their bed was rather few and far between, I would argue, in light of the numbers of people actively making photographs and uploading them to the web today. Additionally, there might have been people with collections of tintypes, but were they themselves the photographer? Photography in the 21st century is now different because the craft itself has been truly democratized—hand a 10-12 year old in the US an iPhone and they can make photographs and upload them online, most without any instruction at all even if they’ve never used an iPhone before.
