On the Web: December 2005 Archives

Jerry Saltz takes contemporary critics to task for being all rationality and no soul. An eye is more essential to being a critic than a bag of theoretical tricks. I noticed as I read through Classic Essays on Photography that the writers began to separate into two camps as I approached the mid-Twentieth Century. In one group was the doers - photographers who also wrote about their craft. The other camp was the thinkers - critics and philosophers who approached photography from a theoretical perspective. The writing quality of the first camp was approachable, straightforward and heart felt. The second camp left me cold, if I could understand what the heck they were talking about at all.

A while back, I talked about my reluctance to write negative reviews. Saltz thinks it's essential.

There's nothing wrong with writing about weak art as long as you acknowledge the work's shortcomings. Seeing as much art as you can is how you learn to see. Listening very carefully to how you see, gauging the levels of perception, perplexity, conjecture, emotional and intellectual response, and psychic effect, is how you learn to see better.

I hadn't thought about it that way. I tend to scope out shows on the Web first and then only go see stuff that catches my attention, so I don't really see a lot of photography up close that I'm not already predisposed to like. Sometimes I am in a gallery building and see something through a doorway and stop in to check it out, but the times that's led to something interesting have been few. Perhaps I should write more about those oddball shows, anyway.

(via Arts Journal)

UPDATE: Despite some trolling, there is terrific commentary on this article over at Edward Winkleman's blog.

Edward Winkleman's excellent blog has an open thread regarding the trend in photography towards digitally manipulated imagery. Gursky's work appears to be the progenitor, but recent upstarts such as Loretta Lux, Beate Gutschow and Anthony Goicolea have been proving its more than a fad.

...there's a strong parallel I've noticed between pure of digitally altered photography and oil versus acrylic paint. I've witnessed also painters who winced at the idea of giving up their oils make all kinds of excuses later for making the switch. Perhaps it's all about efficiency, but I suspect it's also being repeatedly told the general public can't tell the difference anyway, so why make your life that much harder.

My own thoughts are in the comments over there. Guess where I fall on the issue?

Subway reading, "The Image Culture" from The New Atlantis. (via Design Observer)

Americans love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies—such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint—that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind’s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images. In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is “better than print,” as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies—perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)—and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?