Theory: May 2007 Archives

Take a look at this portrait by Timothy Archibald and imagine what sort of man this is. What is the photographer saying about him? What is he trying to say about himself? What does he do for a living? Why is he holding that gun?

Jerry Saltz's review of the new Andreas Gursky show at Matthew Marks is in this week's New York Magazine.

Gursky is still trying to render purring pre-9/11 space, where commerce ticked along without an undercurrent of fear. But his rigor and criticality have been replaced by grandiosity and theatricality; figures feel frozen; compositions are stagy; structure devolves into carpetlike pattern. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform.

I have not yet seen the show. I probably won't. Saltz's review was almost, in my opinion, inevitable. It's hard to keep topping yourself, particularly when you basically defined the current epoch of photography. Reinvention is no picnic. Nor particularly lucrative.

But the increasing prevalence of digital manipulation in photography, beyond digital darkroom techniques (a blurry line, of course), brings photography closer and closer to painting and, consequentially, loses the distinctive qualities that separate photography from other media.

We live in a do it yourself culture. The Internet is crowded with people living the dream of bypassing the middle man and going straight to the customer. Take a gander at the "Art" category on eBay and you'll see what I mean. Plus there are sites like Etsy and Ink2.com that let people sell their own art and craftwork or turn their art into an easy to consume format, such as stationary. You, too, could be the next Marjolein Bastin or Anne Geddes! I ran across a very cool site that combines two of my passions, typography and photography, into one affordable package, lettermade.com. Lettermade is the portfolio of typographic examples captured in photographs (including locomotive lettering from my home town) and offered as as prints through Big Cartel, one print per week (or until the edition of ten sells out.)

In a similar vein, though without the do it yourself bend, Jen Bekman's 20x200 establishes an alternative to the Establishment sales format, ie high cost prints in a restricted edition, typically no more than 10-15. 20x200 offers editions of 200 for $20 a pop, netting the artist something less than the price of a single print with a more traditionally minded gallerist. I have no idea what the sell through typically is on a gallery show, but I suspect the truly affordable price of twenty bucks will likely see most 20x200 editions sell out, eventually. But to what end? That's not a huge haul for the artist - or the dealer!

My question is, if a photographer is serious about making it in the gallery world, does participation in these programs damage their credibility? I suspect it might. In most cases, particularly the eBay examples, these artists seem desperate to "make it" but either too impatient or clueless about what the accepted system is. In others, they have disdain for the system of gallery representation and have either capitalist or anti-capitalist motivations to subvert the sales process. Then again, they could just be seen as clever marketers. Ryan McGinley's discovery through a self-published, self-promotional book is now ensconced in his youthful legend.

UPDATED:
Jen Bekman elaborates on the 20x200 program
Edward Winkleman addresses other alternative outlets and goes into more detail regarding reputational impact