© James May • All Rights Reserved
I consider my own documentary photography to be a counterpoint to Robert Frank's casual stereotypes of a country I know 1000 times better than Frank ever did. While I greatly admire Frank's work in his book, "The Americans", I don't for one second see it as being anything other than a reflection of Frank himself and so in a certain sense having nothing to do with Americans. One can always be certain that when a person states with certainty something they couldn't possibly know the truth of that they are only showing what they wish to believe or portray and not the truth of the matter. Only in the mind of an artist can it be perceptually gloomy and overcast every day; this has nothing to do with we Americans because we are not anything all the time. I must admit that as a photographer I look with a weather eye at a book of 83 photographs that took some 28,000 photos to comprise; not exactly going for the jugular when it comes to a personal vision in taking the photos but very much so in the process of editing.
However, what I can say about Robert Frank's book, "The Americans" is that it is not guilty of attempting to either subvert nor circumvent the particular skill set and strengths endemic to photography. As I write this, you have far too many photographers in the fine arts attempting to build a Parthenon out of wood just because they can't work in stone or because it's too hard and worse, they would have you believe that working in stone in this sense is discredited. Many of the new breed of fine art photographers, failing to pull themselves up have set about to pull photography down and it has all been done in the name of and hidden under a cloak of progress and in intellectualizing photography.
In the arena of more intellectualized fine art photography, middle class politically correct orthodoxy passed off as iconoclastic intellectualism so prevalent in American fine art photography for the last half century reminds me more of propaganda or a con game than any genuine insights into the nature of American culture. Naive stereotypes still abound in fine art photography, the cowboys and indians have just exchanged places; there is nothing new about the new mythology.
An echo of this is a film that buys into the childish stereotypes and bias of the new mythology is "This Revolution", a 2005 film directed by Stephen Marshall and starring Rosario Dawson. "This Revolution" is a virtual smorgasboard of trite and casual bigotry where successful people who just happen to be white are evil, ignorant and spiritually bankrupt and "the great unwashed" as they are at one time called in the film are the "real" people with the "real" insight into what is "really" going on on this earth; this attitude is wholly and increasingly reflected in fine art photography in America in the last 50 years.
In it's own way, "This Revolution" is arguably as full of racism, bigotry and shallow stereotypes as some of the worst types of films from the 1930's or 1940's and yet because this bias comes from a "good" place it is not only utterly excused but swallowed whole as "truth" by eager American youths and fine art photographers who consider rap music as the default cool and John Wayne a symbol of brutal idiocy. Oil, Che Gueverra, Bush, imperialism, colonialism and much much more imagery are trundled out as reflecting a truly sophisticated and compassionate view of the world when in fact such thinking represents a hopelessly biased and puerile belief system in a world much more complex and even innocent than this type of thinking is able to perceive. In this stereotype successful people are some kind of self sustaining aristocracy with immorality as their default mode when in point of fact most successful and rich people are self-made and come from middle or lower middle class backgrounds and are not demonstrably more unethical than a convenience store owner or taxi driver or college student; it is simply a convenient stereotype.
I laugh at fine art photography in the vein of "This Revolution" that can at once depict earnest Catholics in Latin America as soulful and spiritual people while depicting Catholics within the United States as fringe lunatics whose priests are prone to pedophilia. I laugh at photographers who consistently caption portraits of native Americans as having an innate grace, pride and spirituality while at the same time depicting a driver at an Ohio truck stop as an endemically spriritually bankrupt, decadent and generally clueless human being; provincialism passed off as compassionate and global insight. If you want to talk about a perceptual trap of unflinching hypocrisy, a fllm like "This Revolution" and much of what is found in fine art photography in America today is almost the very definition of the idea. It's easy to make me laugh.
An obssession among American photographer's working in the fine arts to show how cool and hep and with it and intellectual they truly are has set back the arts many years and it will be at least a generation before fine art photography has a chance to recover from it's own unquestioned trendiness, lack of content and mindless stereotypes; no eager viewer of the Wayang Kulit of Plato's Cave was ever more ensorceled than are many of the present generation of fine art photographers. Photos of close-ups of paintings or wainscoting over-powered with an 8x10 view camera,boring touristic landscapes brutally twisted and transformed to become fine art, branches and pebbles no better than that to be found on Flickr are arranged in triptychs and declared fine art, misty filters are put over lenses and the resultant photos promoted by and sold to those who are in fact "the great unwashed", all accompanied by empty literary declarations full of imagined insight and metaphysical gibberish. One could easily come to the conclusion that such photographers have nothing to say with a camera and may never really have had anything to say. Some photographers feel photographs alone are limited and so greatly benefit from text; this is called a magazine. In fact the truth may be that the people who feel this way are simply limited as photographers. Panoramic photos are split into sections so to emulate movement or the editing of a movie while Joe Kubert was doing the same thing with comic panels in Sgt. Rock comic books in the late 60's to far less fanfare. Nor should there have been any fanfare as it would have emulated fine art photography's penchant for elevating a trivial passing idea to the sublime, worthy of contemplation and meditation.
Photography certainly has it's strengths and weaknesses but I have never understood people who gravitate to photography and then marginalize it's strengths in order to maximize their own weakness as photographers in a way that is eminently cynical; you can put catsup in your car's gas tank if you want to but why would you want to; just to show you can do it, out of contrariness? My own understanding of people who wish to transform photography into something it's not is more about knowingly covering up their own lack of talent in photography than of promoting demonstrably trite attempts to think outside the box; it's like becoming involved in creating comic books and then deciding that the drawings make the whole concept lack credibility from an intellectual point of view and so the comic books should become entirely text; yes, let's turn The Hulk into a Cartesian. I have no problem with people who want to combine text and pictures but it's certainly not photography or at least it doesn't go to the strength of photography, more like a poor man's magazine yet it's promoted as ground breaking multimedia. By this definition People magazine is a multimedia presentation. Semantics plays a great role in the fraud that comprises much of fine art photography in the United States in the last 50 years and is used in a way that would have Orwell spinning in his grave, the purveyors of truth and clarity being in truth, the purveyors of semantic nonsense. No coincidence and extemely convenient that the word "mere" is tacked onto the front of the word "craftsmanship" since that craftsmanship largely doesn't exist in fine art photography to any great extent in the first place and if it did would find a hard road being recognized as such.
Subverting language in the name of exalting trivial photography is the norm in overly intellectualized fine art photography; statements used as adjuncts to the work are riddled with words like explorer, mystical, imposing, wisdom, and quintessential, pitiful attempts to imbue the work with qualities not at all evident in the photography itself; there is nothing moderate or shy here when it comes to misusing language, defining the work in a way that the work itself cannot do. The relationship between the work and it's attendant semantics couldn't be more pointedly ridiculous if these photographers dressed in khaki and a pith helmet such is their vaunted exploratory zeal. The vapid nature of much of the work is such that words like explore and wisdom are hijacked to the extent that their relative meaning becomes wholly unrecognizable, trivialized in the name of failed attempts at expanding what wasn't inherent in the work in the first place. Words are inappropriately used as bandages and crutches for what is indeed a very sick patient. Orwell wrote an entire book dedicated to avoiding such semantic foolishness which has fallen on deaf ears in the case of the so-called photographers working at what they see as the cutting edge of high-minded intellectualism. I for my part, cannot imagine using photography in a more close-minded and cynical fashion. The word creative has changed from a verb to a noun, a faded t-shirt worn like an escutcheon. The teenage yearnings for coolness on the part of the photographers have no problem successfully translating the gibberish wherein a rock group may bill itself as a "dangerous band", the type of semantics of forever unrealized hopes of edginess so close to the hearts of mullet wearing, lighter holding fans dedicated to the parallel universe of dangerous photography. Unfortunately a fine art photographer's groupies probably wear alpaca sweaters and sport those short, square haircuts so dear to the hearts of 30 and 40-something women in my home state of Minnesota; the kind of a haircut that reminds you of the scene in "The Empire Strikes Back" where Darth Vader has a machine lowering a helmet onto his head only in this case I envision the same thing being done in a salon in a Minneapolis suburb.
There is an entire history among the so-called avante-garde during the 2nd half of the last century which demonstrates a type of shame of "bourgeois" literature and art but their attempts to transform genres perhaps reveals more about their own fears of being bourgeois, of being mistaken for white trash, than revealing how ignorant their predecessors were; and of course their predecessors are regarded as overly commonplace and rigid, a shameful embarrassment. Those echoes of embarrassment of a different kind resound throughout elements of fine art photos as their proponents have become everybit as rigid and commonplace as the culture they pretend to react to. The question is why such people would become so attracted to certain forms of the arts and then try and transform them into something they're not. During the latter part of the last century there were science fiction authors who so transformed the genre in their writing that their stories were no longer even science fiction; again, one is left to wonder why in the world they were attracted to the genre in the first place - Captain Future was transformed into a Cartesian.
Some few science-fiction writers kept writing avante-garde SF until they had succeeded in writing a story that was everything but science-fiction. Good job putting that embarrassing plebian genre behind them. Similarly there are new-wave photographers who have made careers for themselves doing everything but taking a good photograph. I imagine they would tell you that their new-wave sensibility precludes an interest in something as tawdry and obvious as taking a good photograph - after all, anyone can do that, right? Right. Well, one must not be confused with the masses must one. The photographer who eschews the idea of taking a solid photograph, or cannot take a good photograph - well, it's only worthwhile if it's cerebral and then so much the better, isn't it. Taking a good photo - that just seems so, well, common.
Curators and gallery owners are overwhelmed by photographer's who are taken seriously merely because they use 8x10 view cameras, little minding that many of these photographers have no understanding of light or print quality because the curator's themselves are not photographers and have not put in hundreds and hundreds of hours in the field and in the darkroom. Middle class curators and photographers with hopelessly provincial views are brought in to judge other middle class photographers with hopelessly provincial views and, recognizing a kindred spirit, award tens of thousands of dollars in grants to photographers who would be better off being plumbers.
In such an environment, honest and straighforward photographer's are instantly dismissed as lacking insight and intellectualism by default, unfairly portrayed as a type of stupid cowboy movie, talent and competence taking a backseat to kowtowing the politically artistic line. Straightforward becomes a synonym for lack of sophistication and so anything that is simple is made complex just for the sake of complexity itself. Meanwhile a flood of empty swimming pools by the sea taken with a 4x5 view camera is hailed as art and decisions made by the wives of curator's with no experience in photography other than their own infallible belief in their power to overcome all shortcomings of experience with sheer intellectual power and insight as they are in turn buried in Visa cards, 401K's, PTA meetings and classically bad Minnesota haircuts, the unwitting subjects of their own version of an Arbus or Frank photograph. Cleverness is taken for insight and politically correct stereotypes are trundled about as uncovering the "true" nature of reality, slightly disturbed photographer's are taken for visionaries. My area has become a giant closeout bin full of silver gelatin closeups of hands and leaves and out of focus porches and "meditations on place", all done with large format cameras towards no purpose whatsoever that I can see; you could make such images on a $59 scanner and they'd be just as bad and/or "good". How these people even dare to call themselves photographers is something for Solomon to chew over.
You would think that it is the manifesto of fine art photographers to be a type of physicist who's goal is to penetrate the event horizon of our own culture and view that holy grail where the laws of reality itself break down, delivering up the ultimate vision of truth; all they have really succeeded in doing is elevating the trivial to a monumental level, a twisted take on the uncertainty principle where close scrutiny reveals something other than intended, in these cases metaphysical and visual hyperbole. These vaunted explorers explore and find nothing but the boring lack of creativity they possess in a too good measure. What is often offered up for our visual contemplation is far too ambitious for the photographers talent and they would do better to try and stay within themselves but then they wouldn't be thought of as special and that is a crime to these individuals egos.
Once many fine art photographers figure out what is required for success, a new swath of self-aware dishonest stereotypes is brought about and the con game feeds on itself in a closed and sometimes incestuous system that pretends to worship the very concept of challenge and exploration yet bitterly resents being itself challenged or explored. People in the fine arts become hypnotized by famous names like Mapplethorpe without looking at the photographs in front of them as if, once established, the name can do no wrong and so their worst photographs get carried along an iconic and unchallenging breeze of unthinking hero-worship. Unthinking stereotypes about "spaces", the suburbs, of the sprirituality of the East or of any culture that has ever been downtrodden is taken for granted without a blink. Success as subject matter is automatically linked to a type of sterility of spirit, with the exception of the successful photographers and curators who deliver such insight of course. In this context they needn't worry that power corrupts since the artists of which I speak and their mentors bring their own type of corrupt behaviour from the very start.
With the glowing certainty that they are the firmly in the court of Winston Smith in Orwell's "1984", and are only renting a studio in "The Ministry Of Love", the self-styled iconoclasts of contemporary fine art photography are victims of their own lack of perception while setting about to oh so closely monitor ours, the guardians of perception watching to see that we can never go perceptually astray while they're on the job serving up triptychs of large format out of focus leaves to our eye opening delight. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." A quote from George Orwell that seems particularly appropriate when it comes to the insincerity of the present generation of "non-traditional" fine art photographers who attempt "to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.", another quote from Orwell.
While deriding the desire for middle class success, the very photographers who celebrate their distance from such vulgar goals unashamedly tout their least success in terms of magazine covers, exhibitions or celebreties they met. Names like Kerouac and David Byrne are their unquestioned idols and are shared among themselves with a dog-like devotion, especially if they had the least contact with such greatness. Like middle class autograph hounds many fine art photographers little realize that they themselves are the characters in the background of Robert Frank's 1955 photo titled, "Movie Premiere - Hollywood". For all their bluster about perception and "seeing" they cannot "see" themselves" and so fine art photographers eagerly nibble on the cheese of the exact countless perceptual traps they berate others for, the guarding against such traps the very Bizarro-like basis of the jelly-like ground upon which their photography is based.
Fine art photography at the beginning of the 21st century is arguably as sterile, rigid, fraudulent and spiritless as the very entities it seeks to depict as such or shy away from. Much of what is passed off as fine art photography in America today is made by people who resemble Robert Frank's "Americans" more than they do the cognoscenti they strut themselves out as. In the world of performance art that closely parallel's the world of fine art photography a person like Laurie Anderson is regarded as the ultimate iconoclast all the while having the same spiked haircut for the past 40 years, a rigid uniform that is emphatically not a rigid uniform; even Anderson's ostensible philosophical opposite, Doris Day, didn't have the same haircut for 40 years. Having a fear of being middle class and becoming a grifter is not the same thing as being an artist.
It is by no means unusual to see entire group shows that are utterly disgraceful although comprised of photographers with a great deal of accomplishment in their area. One such show at a notable gallery in my area as I write this is composed of just the worst group of photos, made by photographers notable both locally and nationally. The photos in the show are embarrassing in the lack of creativity of vision they possess, entirely succumbing to the very banality into which they unsuccessfully attempt to infuse new life. One would think this group show's theme was to see how badly one could put the usual suspects of stereotypes to work. How in the world breathing, thinking photographers can consciously put out such trash is entirely beyond my ability to understand. You can be sure of one thing though, there will be no lack of grant money among this assembled crew or verbiage on the part of the photographer's and their gallery when it comes to propping up a show which I found to be nothing more than an utter disgrace to the whole tradition of photography in the fine arts.
At the same time there is an exhibition at a local, very notable art center featuring a one-person show which is similarly disgraceful. At the risk of making this essay murky by not citing examples and not wanting to sharpen my knives any further by indulging in character assassination, these 2 shows and their artists will remain nameless. Fine art photography has long since reached a crisis point in the quality of talent which it has attracted. I can well imagine that others such as myself are similarly disgusted by the lack of proper mentorship and reward that has occurred within the photography community. Why fine art photography would suffer such a crisis of talent at this point in history is a partial mystery, I say partial because one reason it has come on such hard times is the mindless reactionary work that has attained the status of an entrenched worship. Graphic design, cinematography, animation, literature, the general sciences and more are going through a type of golden age, at the height of their competence while artistic photography has reached the nadir of it's history, executed and managed by yokels who have no more idea of what constitutes an interesting photograph than a 3 year old. Success breeds success and so exhibitions and grant money continue to follow the same individuals because so few people have the faintest clue as to what's happening. Curators and gallery owners only have resumes to go by when it comes to measuring success in fine art photography because they are utterly incapable of looking at the work and bringing any authority whatsoever to the table much less integrity. Gallery owners neither know nor care if negatives are sandwiched together or misty filters utilized or the issues involved in such acts or whether photographers shit on a brick and slide it under a door as long as a nice resume is in evidence. It's like a proverbial 3rd world bureaucracy where only paper matters and people don't exist without that paper. Is this or is this not the exact opposite of what our "ground-breaking iconoclasts" promote? Where is the perception in such a bankrupt circle of blindness?
How many more times and for how many more decades will we have to be woken up, made aware, made self-aware, by these reactionary self acclaimed psychologists who must wake up in the night with cold sweats and imagine it's 1958 and the great unwashed must be given a bath and a "found object" to hug close to their breast? When is the next phase going to follow this dictatorship of the proletartiat, how many more exhibitions must we see where intellectual pedigrees are trotted out in wheelbarrows of glib semantics like the unfurling of an intellectual flag proclaiming to one and all how these photographers continue to successfully react to and pillory the closed minded American zeitgeist of the 1950's?
At the other spectrum, where nothing is ventured and nothing is gained, why are cheap "diffusion techniques" and there cousins finding fertile ground and grant money in the fine arts; yes they're beautiful images and yes they're evocotive and yes they are completely interchangable with ads for Nike or green tea. Cheap photographic tricks disgredited decades ago with quick reward and with no thought or risk behind them are not to be celebrated in the circles of the fine arts but should be properly relegated to airport gift shops next to the quilts or risk putting fine art photography in a wheel chair right next to those ultimate risk takers, the psuedo intellectuals. Crass commericialism surrounds fine art photography and the fine arts is meant to be a refuge from such and not a celebration. Once you admit there are no issues of integrity involved then the fine arts becomes indistinguishible from mere commerce. The masses meet cheap tricks right in the middle and issues of integrity are squeezed right out. At this more visual end of the fine art photography spectrum, you know you have a problem when fine art images are completely interchangable with images from an ad agency or stock photo agency. There is as little thought behind such work as there is too much thought behind the trivial intellectualism which are their phony cousins. I myself do commercial photography but have no problem confusing the shallow anything goes nature of photographs made for consumerism and photos made with some eye towards integrity and some slightly higher purpose meant to be a refuge from the marketplace that sells cars and milk and travel dreams. Photography is a skill and when one circumvents that subtle, skillful and difficult to achieve process whereby a genuine personal vision is elicited by resorting to misty filters and semantics then you are a liar in the arena of the fine arts. In another arena, it's fine, but let's maintain a sanctuary where fine art photography at least pretends to some kind of personal integrity rather than entirely giving in to those who would subvert it's very nature by dragging it into a mental gift shop. If you feel you don't have the skills so very particular to photography then instead of seeking ways to circumvent those skills and subvert their value then think about being a plumber instead. Let's not confuse misty filters with a genuine personal photographic vision. It may be worthwhile in the same way a painting or a design is worthwhile but it's not photography in any but the shallowest and most commercial sense of the term and that is not the fine arts.
To put it bluntly, on the whole you have a situation where midddle class rednecks obssessed with phony and shallow elite intellectualism are photographing middle class rednecks and their ephemera and much of what is passed off as fine art photography in America today has all the shallowness and intent of a tattoo while at the same time consciously attempting to convey an air of condescending superiority from a very great height from self-declared "artists" that is hard to swallow. Blantant disregard for truth and an outright embracing of dishonesty pervades American fine art photography. While positioning themselves as anti-establishment, fine art photographers in America in the 21st century show many signs of in fact being the very establishment they seek to distance themselves from. This new establishment brooks no dissent and perhaps an entire new generation of photographers needs to take up an opposite stance and make the stereotypes of the current crop of fine art photographers the subject of a book like Robert Frank's, "The Americans".
In the world of fine art photography there is no such thing as a bad photographer as long as the requisite buzz-words are used in the absurdly long-winded explanations used to prop up the work; a strange fate in such a visual medium. Arcane and entirely unnecessary methods of producing prints of worthless photographs are frequently used alongside bombastic artist's statements to futher prop up what would otherwise be ordinary with a capital "O"; this is one of my favorite explanations of how a photographer created his prints: "...created with Type 55 Polaroid film in a 4x5 view camera. The Polaroid negative is saved and washed, then drum scanned, and the final image is archival piezo printed on watercolor paper. The remaining prints are dual toned archival silver gelatin prints, created from 120mm negatives." Overly hyped artistic statements combined with byzantine print methods are necessary in an arena where the work is in desperate need of such co-stars since there is no question of the work standing on it's own merits. If as much work were put into the simple initial execution of a body of work there would be no need for such defensive/offensive weaponry. It's like the old Monty Python joke about a man crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a tricycle - the "tricycle, specially adapted for the crossing, was ninety feet long, with a protective steel hull, three funnels, seventeen first-class cabins and a radar scanner."
I love and understand the concept of print quality but it is meant to compliment the work, not to supplant it or become a "steel hull" or to bestow credibility on photos sorely in need of credibility. These photographers lay a false trail of craftsmanship while decrying it's very existence as a credible idea. The reality is that, like a promoter, they simply say whatever makes them look good. The ideas, if ever they existed in the first place, are long gone, replaced by ego-centric artists entirely unprepared to ply their trade. They should have been sent back to the drawing board at the very beginning but there is no one with the resolve and competence to do so and so that's not in the cards as long as you hold the buzz-words and wear the non-traditional though no less rigid uniform that are in fact the keys to the city.
It goes without saying that these photographers would have benefitted from a rigid apprenticeship or mentor were not the mentors themselves so utterly dishonest, in a hurry to promote themselves without any concept of the word "ready" in the equation. The whole point of having an apprenticeship is to ensure that sloppy and unprepared people don't go out into the world and disgrace their area of expertise. Colleges are the place of apprenticeship and their laissez-faire anything goes approach has been an utter failure. Put photos of a light bulb and bee next to each other: BAM! - you got yer dialecticism, your got yer art, yessiree bob! Here's yer diploma - make way world - NEXT! It is in the nature of many people to not resist the quick and easy path and it is to be guarded against. This has not been guarded against in the case of fine art photography and so it should come as no surprise that so much wrong-headed work has so corrupted an entire genre of photography. In this equation good photography is not valued or respected or even recognized, instead it is bombast, name recognition, resumes, incestuous relationships and success and that definition of success has little to do with competence.
When one looks at respected names from the past it is easily recognized that it is the power of the imagery that has brought such names as Cartier-Bresson, Atget, Evans, Weegee, Leibovitz, Frank, Arbus, W. Eugene Smith and so many, many others, regardless of formats, print quality or artistic statements into the forefront. The sideshow that has evolved into non-traditional photography shows how much has been lost in the name of phony intellectualism and what a disgrace to it's own origins modern fine art photography has become. While it assuredly thinks of itself as group evolution to a finer and higher place, fine art photography has in my opinion devolved and decayed into a sorry amalgam of amateur artists and 3rd rate minds with no light of reasoning behind their eyes when it comes to their own craft. Their is a vacuum of incompetence just waiting to be filled but the cultural politics surrounding the intellectualization of fine art photography will not have it.
In an arena where there is so much confusion between the terms "well-known", "famous" and "competent", there has perhaps never been a more apt invocation of the phrase, "the world is not a fair place" as in American fine art photography. The utter lack of a critical eye in this realm shows that there is no happy balance where each is awarded their just rewards, rather it is one's ability to network, use social skills, drink coffee and above all bring out the expected while emphatically stating otherwise that is the true expression of talent; another strange fate in a medium that touts itself as celebrating the unexpected. Drinking coffee is important because so many of these people of which I speak fancy themselves neo-beatniks in an intellectual coffee shop with the smell of an outhouse and with the manly drums of Robert Bly doing the congo in their empty heads while they write essays on their 6 year old son's Dell laptop about how stupid people who use rosaries are and multi-tasking an order for a native American dreamcatcher on Amazon.com at the same time. The next day they see a mandala in their son's tricycle wheel that inspires them to buy a third helmet for their son just in case of the untimely meteor shower and take an 8x10 view camera self-portrait of themselves re-enacting their decision to do so; in triptych format, natch.
Susan Sontag's 1977 collection of essays on photography appropriately titled, "On Photography", found great credence among fine artists when it whisked us away on a whirlwind tour all about the complex, cascading juggernaut and wacky hi-jinx released on the world everytime we snap a pix. No surprise it is a tedious belaboring of the obvious on the one hand and on the other a dismal attempt to force awkward metaphors onto photography in a way meant to be insightful but which to me had less insight into human nature than did an average episode of The Flintstones. When I was in art school in 1977 and our teacher forced us to read "On Photography" and write something about it, I actually included a quote from the episode of The Flintstones where Fred and Barney decide to become photographers. On the whole, "On Photography" adds up to verbose and overliterate trivia trumped up to the level of intellectualism which succeeds only in a sorry bathos. Sontag is typical of people in fine art photography who, far from being the iconoclasts they perceive themselves as, merely share a belief system every bit riddled with stereotypes and disengenuousness as are the imagined forces of ignorance from which they flee but they have not run nearly smart enough to hide the fact that they are simply more credible middle class versions of a street corner intellectual fakir like Ward Churchill, that lovable comrade who never saw an anti-establishment stereotype he didn't like. Where in the hell is Baron von Raschke when you need him?
In the course of pursuing an area of interest it is entirely normal for a person to pass from a period of uncertainty and exploration to a certain measure of competence in one's chosen field. The problem in the area of fine art photography, namely, impatience, incompetence, dishonesty and semantic frosting, have combined to highjack the field. Semantics ostensibly used to clarify have instead been used to confuse issues and have thus marginalized talent and competence. In the same way that hip hop music has now lost 2 generations in favor of a fast track to fame, fine art photography in the United States is paralysed by incompetence and disengenuousness that at times rises to the level of an outright lie, stripped bare of content in favor of fast food intellectualism which is an empty cup served up by boring people with boring ideas, eager to share the least little thing that divests them of any association with the middle class. Being card carrying members and adherents of the middle class comprises the real challenge for many fine art photographers. Partaking in all the things that suck the fun out of life like 2nd mortgages, driver's insurance or packed date books while trying to convey in one's work a sense of the uncompromising individuality of a true rebel is a skill that would tax a magician. The true rebel's weapons of tact and flattery have given the realm of fine art photography all the flair and sophistication of a sewing circle or bridge club with the attendant odor of Ben-Gay suffusing all in a cogent coda with it's attendant airs of lapis lazuli and ancient cinnabar, and the just-in-case helmets that comprise the personality of these daring individualist's are permanent.
Fine art photography does in fact possess the potential for competence every bit as real as the skills a concert pianist displays, though certainly less obvious. Lacking obviousness is not the same thing as confusion. No one would think of jumping up on a stage while a concert pianist performs and say, "Hey, no problem, I can do that". Yet everybody and their sister have no problem jumping onto the stage of fine art photography and declaring themselves experts in the name of the crassness of craftsmanship and the easy virtues of psuedo-intellectualism. Semantic props are not only encouraged but rewarded and many people who, in the normal course of events would be relegated to the level of suburban hobbyists have made careers in the fine arts; the line between the amateur and professional has become entirely blurred and the field itself thus entirely compromised; museums across the country have photos in their collections that are embarrassing. Fine art photography has become one big trailer park, entirely hijacked by people who's real passion is not photography but a fear of being mistaken for an ordinary human being, devoid of any real quality of being special or unique or talented. Fine art photography's own subtlety has been ruthlessly exploited to hide weakness and so become a playing field where the last thing to be judged good or bad is the work itself. Socialism in this sense works well for these non-traditional artists as representational photography has been relegated to the intellectual sidelines by some as a cute, but outdated and puerile method for expressing oneself as an artist by those shopping cart iconoclasts who have helped shape and transform photography into a metaphysical Wal-Mart.
The very nature of the iconoclastic shell game being played in non-traditional photography makes it an unlevel playing field in which to argue against; one is simply accused of not being sophisticated enough to understand what they are talking about or perhaps told to be satisfied with watching "Gilligan's Island" or maybe even that worst of all fates, accused of being ordinary which of course is what the game is all about; photography takes a back seat to demonstrably showing how intellectual and creative they are - there is no requirement or ability to have a nuanced debate.
Great care is taken among the elite intellectual photographer to never stray far from literature as this is a certain measure of the ultimate credibility of one's photography. Higher learning is not meant to be used as a fast-food weapon to promote yourself and fend off others with quote-dropping to prove you're with it, but to be enjoyed for it's own sake. I don't need to have Proust blown in my face like a vapid puff of smoke merely to show one knows Proust even exists but to authentically support a stream of thought. Meanwhile we are meant to believe that intellectually minded fine art photographers are the easiest people to amuse who ever lived as they churn out endless streams of large format images on a bewildering array of politically correct print stock that have no more weight to them than saying, "I photographed it because it was shiny".
I think I'll someday actually scream out loud if I see thick, shiny lipstick put on one more pig of a photograph of some woman stretching her arms out on a windswept plain or what is really just distinctly average stock travel photography elevated to the level of fine art by putting a triptych matte over it or by bad poetry, all just because an artist is embarrassed by their own work or because they don't wish to seem mundane because straight photography is tabu if you're to have any "real" credibility. It's a situation where more work and thought is put into not coming off as ordinary than into the work itself which is, suprise, ordinary if not downright incompetent and amateurish. And then to think that these same people hold yearly workshops and are teachers; it is downright discouraging if not frightening. The other fun part is that the great majority of these "iconoclasts" have their own websites, carefully crafted to give that maximum hep and tasteful spiritual feeling which, of course, the photographer's didn't do themselves because, despite their great talent, they can't write simple XHTML; that is to be left to "mere craftsman".
Museum galleries and auditoriums have become a meek version of an old style carnival side show where artist and curator, minus tattoos but not necessarily the mullets, mawkishly combine to shill an eager public with snake oil and cures guaranteed to give meaning to the mundane and enrich the banal, to bestow complexity where none is called for, to overthink the most trite and trivial ideas in a forum resembling the Home Shopping Network in it's incessant bullshit if not it's compassionate verve and elan. It is not unusual to attend a 100 minute lecture by the artist and curator that accompanies an exhibition and listen to 100 minutes of exactly nothing about an exhibit that is exactly nothing, but empatically done with large format cameras to add credibility and give weight to meaningless work, as much overkill and inappropriateness as fishing with hand grenades.
In the end nothing is ever conveyed but bathos, no useful ideas, merely the illusion of such, the illusion that an idea has been conveyed that will open one's eye, prove useful in life when in fact you have elaborately and with great flourish been given an empty plate, courtesy of the artist's overblown ideas about their own cleverness, the covert rationalization of a fugue state. The work becomes merely an imcompetent conveyence for the smug self-assurrance that they do not have ordinary minds when in fact the entire scene has as much gravitas and sophisitication as an episode of Survivor. There is a difference between wanting to share discoveries and having a passion for demonstrating how stupid and middle class you're not, trotting out a seemingly endless stream of fine art stereotypes to prop up a structure that fell while still on the drawing board. Meanwhile, fine art photography in the United States is taking a severe beating.
When people talk about the dumbing down of American it's done in the context of an event happening to somebody else, somewhere else. In the case of fine art photography in the United States, you don't have to look afield for answers; that dumbing is happening now, it's we, us, here, now. Vietnam-era reactionary photography is alive and well and acts as if the average American are 2 naive contestants being interviewed by Groucho Marx on "You Bet Your Life" in the mid-1950's. Those people don't exist anymore and the average American is far more image savvy now then they were then. It wouldn't be wrong to say that the average American is more sophisticated when it comes to imagery than the average photographer who works in the arena of the fine arts - certainly one could make an argument that America has moved on and fine art photographers continue to ply the same tired stereotypical photographs with the requisite clever titles as has been the case for decades now. Fine art photographers still seem to be entranced by Duchamp's pre-World War I "found objects" as if they were unveiled only yesterday. A famous quotation by George Orwell goes: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Anyone who stood up and tried to say anything about the current state of fine art photography would not only be a voice in the wilderness but probably see any hopes of a career in the fine arts cut short. The revolutionary protesters of the 60's are now trite hacks who don't enjoy having their assumptions challenged any more than their parents did and that makes them the worst sort of hypocrites.
The greater part of the group of non-traditional fine art photographers in the United States today have themselves become not only the victims, but the very purveyors of the shallowness, rigidity, fakery, phoniness and hypocrisy they set out to unveil in the late 60's and early 70's.
As more and more museums became involved with fine art photography, revenue streams became an issue, and understandably so; what worth is it to display what you believe is good work if your gallery has to close it's doors. This being so, museums and gallerys have gone from being teachers to the general public about what is good and worthwhile in fine art photography to having to increasingly pander to the tastes of the general public who have no education whatsoever in fine art photography although much more image conscious and savvy than 5 decades ago. This has resulted in a hopeless and hapless muddying of the waters of what started out as a great tradition. Name recognition is the order of the day and photographers who become famous in the media start selling prints like crazy. You might as well have Nielsen ratings as who knew who and who hung out with who become factors in the fine arts.
I don't have such a problem with this as it is merely the nature of the world we live in; that doesn't mean that musuems and galleries should entirely give up their important role as educators. The problem is that galleries and museums have become so polluted with this obssession with intellectualizing photography and the hook set so deep that I don't see an end to it anytime soon. It is obvious that many of us want to improve our scope and understanding of the world around us, it is a part of human nature. What you will get from the current trend in non-traditional photography is the exact opposite of a deepening of perception. All you will get is a crass upgunning of tired, rigid and played out stereotypes that are just as trite and shallow as re-runs of sitcoms. True evolution if needed will come in it's own time and in a natural progression and not as a result of running pell-mell and in a reactionary fashion from your parents world and arrogantly and judgementally throwing away wholesale all that has gone before in favor of a value system that is utterly corrupt. Looking at an endless parade of work geared to prove to the world how eccentric and outside the box a stream of middle class photographers with middle class values are is not entertaining but merely boring and somewhat sad. They clearly don't have a truly eccentric bone in their bodies and are just as clearly uncomfortable in their own skin. Today's rebellious photographer's seem to have a desperate need to be thought of as cool well as sharing that American penchant for wanting to be thought of as better than everybody else but have not the faintest idea of how to go about it; perhaps a nice tattoo would be in order. In their dreams they are counter-culture hippies with mod, polka dot shirts and belt buckles as big as your head but in their staid and prim hearts they are straight-laced rednecks, a Devil's Island of middle class soberness from which they cannot escape.
Why an entire genre of photography should have to suffer for this is something I do not understand. If you want to be a rebel or cool or "on the road" or eccentric then I have a clue for you: it's not something you can put on like a suit of clothes and the obvious yearning for fine art photographers to be all these things they are not reveals more about how ordinary and hopelessly middle class they are than their metaphysical ramblings passed off as zen art can hide. The unfortunate aspect of these erstwhile iconoclasts is that they cannot aspire to their goal of coolness without knocking out the props from photographers who are comfortable in their own skin and have nothing to prove to anybody. Many photographers would just like to do some nice work that is personal and non-commericial without having their feet held to the endless litanny of bullshit emanating from the fires of the shadow play in Plato's Cave, without having to act as if a body of work they create is some headline event of perception and self-awareness, without having to write crap to go along with their photographs to ensure their dimensionality and acceptance.
Most of all it would be nice not to have to compete with an entire genre of photography that is simply bad and made to look not so only by camouflaging streams of nonsensical accoutrements that have nothing to do with photography per se. I mean bad in the sense of bad, bad, bad, not good, incompetent, not merely different. Because this is not at all an issue of conservative vs. liberal but rather one of character, forthrightness and competence vs. corrupt and glib side-stepping and long ago played out stereotypes that are entirely conservative, just not in a traditionally recognizable way; who in the hell locked those almighty doors of perception when it comes to seeing this? Do you have to put on a bowling shirt and wear horn rimmed glasses to see that you've arrived right back at your parents drive-in? You like photography, fine, honor it, honor it's strengths and particular character. If you want to use bottles to hammer nails, that's fine, but you're gonna need an awful lot of goddam bottles. And if you're not out there breaking idols then you are exactly nowhere in the eyes of many gallery owners and museum curators.
The fact is that the reason such indefensible trash as the intellectual genre of photography exists is because each photographer is literally surrounded by other bad photographers because the genre is so prevalent. They circle the wagons and don't critcize each other because they have a vested interest in the status quo. Far from challenging the intellect as they would have you believe their work is all about, what it's really all about is not rocking the boat, not getting fired from teaching posititons because of politics and curators not alienating photographers with resumes of shows and grant money. And anyway, who's left? They've already alienated and discredited dumbo photographers who enjoy the power of representational images. Those still in college better learn to toe the line or go commericial because you will be assoaciated with people who take photos of weather beaten barns, although that would be okay if it were out of focus, taken with a view camera, made into a silver gelatin print and had a lengthy literary essay to go along with it. There are literally no venues in the fine arts photography community to challenge or debate the merits of such work. You can pillory representational photography til you're blue in the face to great applause but it doesn't fly in the other direction. You are left with voting with your feet and finding another career.
The reason why there is no open debate and critical forums that allow one to take a negative view of the more intellectual brand of fine art photography is that it is so easy to beat down and ridicule. Once they stop trying to show you're nothing more than an intellectual hobo, winning such a debate would be child's play but it is simply not in the interests of the fine art photographic community to do so. They like to give lip service to opening the doors of perception in the glib statements that accompany their work but it doesn't really work that way in real life; in real life they might as well be wearing uniforms and marching in lockstep. There's no need on the part of our iconoclast's to criticize representational photography since at this stage of the game it is taken for granted among the cognoscenti that it is entirely too commonplace to even debate. In any event, the disdain for mainstream photography is evident and implied in every line of the ridiculous captions that accompany intellectually minded photography. Some of them are so funny that you'd think they were written tongue and cheek but nope, they're dead serious.
Check out some of these pretentious gems: "...is the most haunting, perhaps the most spiritually potent. Less cerebral than many of her subjects, the sacred trees provide an associative, mystical counterpoint for her perspicacious 5 x 7 camera. The sacred trees, themselves, are imposing gnarly beasts that embody the wisdom of a philosopher and the moves of an escape artist. It is impossible not to be mesmerized by their elegant eccentric posture, anthropomorphic roots and soaring canopy,"
Purple prose worthy of "Weird Tales" pulp magazines at their height in the 1930's or an evocation of dancing azure fountains in a lost jungle city in H. Rider Haggard's "She".
Here's another: "Drawing is often at the heart of these photographs, though the materials are not usual. Single lines are drawn across space through bamboo stalks suspended in water, or dirt stacked in vases, or a tower of roses, or hammers stacked in a tool shed. The SPILLS pictures use milk to draw their own vessels, humorously exploring ideas about the container and the contained."
Yeah, that's pretty goddam humorous all right, just not in the way they meant it to be. Nevertheless, I could have easily split a gut on that one. "The container and the contained" - I bet these people wake themselves up at night laughing hysterically not to mention what great fun they probably are at parties. Probably really easy to pick up chicks with that kind of repartee too.
Here's more from the first one - it's so rich I couldn't resist: "...vision sensitizes us to a certain kind of beauty, a way of seeing, that is inextricably linked to the notion of time. It is a vision that informs us that our sense of beauty, of seeing, is not immobile. In À la Recherché du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Marcel Proust wrote 'true beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering expectations of an over romantic imagination.'”
Yeah, well, that all seems to be pretty much correct. I also have great love for the next one:
"I use my hands and the tools and materials of domesticity - threads, fabrics, beads, needles - to assert the validity of "women's work" and the feminine view. The ritual of a repetitive handwork process is meditative and honors my connections to female ancestors and to the divine feminine."
That one makes me blush. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful - but not as wonderful as this next one:
"The creation of peace and healing on both global and personal dimensions have been central concerns in my work..."
Man, did that last one ever feel good; it's great to know that there are people creating art to fend off the Four Horseman of the Apocalyse - I wonder if this art looks anything like an edible, anti-biotic portable grenade launcher.
You can easily find a thousand examples of this type of awful writing accompanying the most awkwardly pretentious and uncreative photographs which means that even the combined powers of the Justice League of America and the Avengers together couldn't take these people in hand. It's simply mind-boggling and quite an industry too. The one thing I can say with certainty that at least The 3 Stooges knew they were being fools. How in the world one can claim to be an intellectual who consistently thinks outside the box and at the same time be involved with the creation of such dull and lifeless art is simply and quite honestly completely beyond my poor ability to comprehend. I think it could literally drive one to drink if you had to compete in an arena where such nonsense is considered worthwhile. The sad thing is that I didn't even have to look hard for these literary diamonds - they pervade the arts community. In fact, it would be much more challenging to not find such literary delights they are so all pervasive. Certainly it would be more of a challenge than creating such an insipid combination of image and writing. It is impossible for me to hold the thought in my head that these people care for or treasure in any way, creativity or the idea of the fine arts their output is so disgraceful. And was that person writing about a triptych - you betcha. And that brings us to the last lovable trait of some of our iconoclastic geniuses: they want to paint and draw as well, a skill they have even less talent at than photography if such a thing is possible because with some of these people one is already scratching the very bottom of the Jungian heap in terms of creativity.
I don't want to have to prove what an iconoclast I am in order to have a career in the fine arts; and anyway, if everyone is an iconoclast then by definition no one is an iconoclast; that means every photographer pushing the envelope thinks all the other photographers are shadowy cardboard cutouts, with no real life or depth of their own - the entire concept is corrupt foolishness; a movie where everyone in the cast in the star. This onward and upwards idea means an awful lot of idols busted not to say bottles; and it won't be the Hulk going on a rampage who did it because he is now a Cartesian Dualist, new and improved and squeaky clean. And what do you have when the Hulk is no longer green and huge and angry and super-strong: an ordinary middle class guy with delusions of grandeur. Who does that remind you of? And what kind of smoke and mirrors, large format cameras and misty filters and triptych mattes and cuttlefish ink will he have to resort to to convince everyone he's still green and huge and angry and superstrong? I kinda liked him the way he was.
Intellectual dishonesty is the order of the day in contemporary fine arts photography. It is no surprise that as I write this in 2009 that the Democratic Party is giving out National Endowment For the Arts grants to politically left groups and organization; why not politicize fine art photography, it certainly has nothing to do with mere talent which has been consistently ostracized for some decades now so the arts might as well be political since as propaganda it can at least strive towards a goal no matter how distasteful since the goal of promoting talent in the arts has been an utter failure since the green, politically correct intelligentsia has come to the fore.
James May
Addendum: The body of work which I have designated as "Urbanscapes" for convience were intended from their very inception to directly address the issues I have written about above and are meant to be a perceptual trap. Have fun looking at them. Reference my site: http://www.jamesmaystock.com and go to Documentary.