What I’m getting at in my roundabout fashion is that the relationship between any given body of work, critic, critical vehicle, and audience can be thought of as an equation.

In theoretical mathematics, equations do not always balance; since theory is a process of questioning, unresolved and even unresolvable equations are means for provoking the mind into new understandings. But in practical or applied math, it’s the function of equations to balance. And in what I propose we think of as practical or applied criticism, the same holds true.

It’s been my observation over the years that very few photography critics have ever thought through and balanced their own personal/professional equations. The specific consequences of this failure can be disastrous. I know of people who’ve lost forums because they failed to match the level of their discourse to the publication and its audience. I’ve also watched critics who disdain their audience snobbishly talk down to and alienate their readers for years. On a more general level, I continually observe what I think of as the “ships that pass in the night” syndrome: valid, useful and even excellent essays whose impact is nullified or whose energy is blunted by presentation in inappropriate forums to the wrong audiences. (Let me note here, too briefly, that some of the burden of responsibility for this surely devolves upon editors.)

In the abstract, of course, there may be no such thing as an absolutely inappropriate forum; one never knows when fortuitous coincidence will marry the right writer and the right reader on the altar of a printed page. Sometimes, as I’ll indicate shortly, deliberate inappropriateness can even be used as a tactic. And, in the last analysis, any attempt at controlled communication is a gamble of sorts. But one can play the percentages in different ways. What I will try to offer here are some specific strategies that may help to swing the odds in the critic’s favor.

The four key elements of the critical equation, as I suggested earlier, are (1) the work, (2) the critic, (3) the vehicle or forum, and (4) the audience. Each of these represents a wide range of options; furthermore, each individual case is in a state of continual change.

(a) The Work. The work does not exist to serve the critic; nor does the critic exist simply to serve -- i.e., to promote, approve, and market -- the work. The critical equation I’ve proposed functions to serve all its components. But the work comes first.

And the critic’s first task in relation to it is to select those aspects or segments of the work on which he or she will concentrate. Some may be more eclectic than others in the span of work they discuss over a period of time. Some may range more widely through the medium’s entire history. Some may concentrate on only a few facets of image-making. The permutations and combinations may not be infinite, but they are not in short supply.

Locating one’s own areas of interest and concern, pinpointing these territories within the larger corpus of photography in general, is the critic’s beginning task. Some of us know from the outset what we want to write about; others, like the sculptor from India queried about his stone rendition of an elephant, have to “chip away everything that’s not an elephant” to locate our true subject -- that is, to write something about almost everything in order to watch our own predilections emerge.

(b) The Critic. Once the critic has named the task, he or she must proceed to become the right tool for the job. Let us assume a basic articulacy and ability to write functional prose. These are prerequisite to any resolution of the critic’s first dilemma, getting heard, which will necessitate the evolution of some combination of lung power (or its equivalent in print), eloquence, style, and substance. Beyond that, the critic must develop a coherent set of understandings and working definitions, along with an adequate vocabulary. Some people come to their critical work full-fledged in this regard; others, as I’ve suggested, may work it out piecemeal.

Self-education or even formal training in specific areas of individual critical emphasis may be called for, especially if the critic wishes to be thought of as authoritative in discussing the relationship of photography to another discipline. But the eclectic generalist also has a significant role to play in any critical dialogue.
Whether it takes place before one’s entry into the field of criticism or during one’s public practice of the craft, this shaping of oneself into an instrument appropriate to one’s purpose is a central act of self-definition. It is that shape to which I am applying the term “voice,” and it will have a pervasive influence on the critic’s individual role within the larger critical dialogue.

(c) The Vehicle or Forum. Publications (and such other occasional forums for serious criticism as TV shows and radio programs) are rarely created or controlled by individual critics. Infrequently, a publication’s staff -- sometimes including its regular critics -- formulate editorial policy. More commonly, the nature of a given forum is determined through a system of checks and balances involving the editor-in-chief, the publisher, the readership, and even the advertisers (if any).

In that sense, any forum tends to be a fait accompli insofar as the critic is concerned. The critic rarely has any control over such crucial matters as frequency of publication, size and nature of readership, length of articles, editorial:advertising ratio, orientation of advertising, design and layout, pricing and distribution. Yet each of these factors will have a strong effect on the way the critic’s writing is perceived, and may in fact serve to shape it in the making.

(d) The Readership. Of all three elements outside of him/herself, the readership or audience is the one over which the critic has least control, and which in fact is most difficult to define.
It is only after the critic has established a public presence and identity over a period of years that he or she can assume the existence of a personal constituency -- i.e., a group of readers specifically interested in what that particular critic has to say and willing to seek out his or her writing in whatever vehicle(s) the critic chooses. Prior to achieving such a relationship with the audience, the critic must assume that the reader’s allegiance is to the periodical (or other forum), to the particular work being written about, or to the medium within which the work is created, and not necessarily to the critic’s own viewpoint.

With those as the essential elements, we can now approach the process of determining the givens, the variables, and the unknowns in any particular critical equation.

It is safe to assume that at any point in time in any critical equation at least one element will be in a state of change. Readerships are not constant: they shrink and grow, their interests shift, and their levels of knowledgeability fluctuate. Publications change -- sometimes with their readership, sometimes with their editorship, sometimes for economic reasons, and continuously in terms of their longevity and stature in the field. The thrust of contemporary work in any medium changes regularly, and shifts in the hermeneutics require adaptations in the exegetics. Finally, critics change.

Thus any critic at the outset of his or her critical activity would be well advised to ask a specific set of questions of him/herself, and to re-ask those questions periodically, especially when changing vehicles in mid-stream, as critics are so often forced to do.

The crucial question is, To whom is my work addressed? To put it another way, who do you think you’re talking to? By this I mean, quite specifically, what audience do you as a critic desire and direct your work towards conceptually?

There are many alternatives, after all. One can write to the artists, to other critics, to the hard-core art audience, to the general public, and to teachers and students. One can address those within a particular geographic territory, correspond with those outside that region, or ignore physical location altogether. One can parlay such factors in many ways.

The only option one does not have is pretending that the question is irrelevant. Brecht once cautioned writers who allowed themselves to be “relieved of concern for the destination of what [they have] written” with these words:

I . . . want to emphasize that “writing for someone” has been transformed into merely “writing.” But the truth cannot merely be written; it must be written for someone, someone who can do something with it.¹ (Emphasis his.)

The answer to that question, then, taken in tandem with the answer to the question of what the critic wishes to write about, forms in effect a statement of intent. This gives the critic a stable jumping-off point. The answers need not be forever fixed and immutable, but lack of clarity in these decisions leads to internal conflict and will increase the difficulty of writing effective criticism on a long-term basis.

Conversely, clarity in answering these questions makes it possible to answer other questions more easily. The next one would be, What work is addressed to the same audience the critic has chosen, and what work beyond that is pertinent also? Going back to the story with which I began, we could say that the work of the photographer I called P was not addressed to the audience of the Northwest Sunday Times’s critics. P has created a body of work whose appreciation requires an extensive knowledge of photography’s history, visual communications and linguistic theory, and other reference points not commonly held. Consciously or not, P has chosen to direct his work to a very small segment of the audience. Not coincidentally, it’s a segment to which L’s criticism is also directed, and a segment reached fairly effectively by the primary vehicle for L’s work. A balanced equation, in short. But we might also agree that it would be difficult and perhaps futile for the NST’s critics to try to make P’s work accessible to a readership that lacks the necessary reference points, and that it would be unrealistic for P (or L) to expect that either the NST critics or their readership would be drawn to this work.

Does this mean that P shouldn’t show his work, or that he should not show it in the Northwest, or that the Northwest audience will never understand it, or that no critic could conceivably make that work accessible to that audience? No.² But that audience’s understanding of photography will have to be nurtured by one or more local critics committed to educating an audience for photography by starting at the beginning and establishing the appropriate and necessary reference points.

The best way to do so will be to use as examples work with which the audience can establish some kind of harmonious and rewarding relationship on its own, without the critic’s exegesis being the audience’s only route of access to it. Only after such a critical groundwork has been patiently laid could we expect P’s work (or L’s explication of it) to be met with anything more than blank stares. Such criticism as this groundwork mandates may well seem simplistic to the already sophisticated; most critics scorn it -- and, implicitly, discount the audience that needs it in order to progress. Yet such criticism surely serves a useful function. Those who choose to teach elementary school are teachers nonetheless.

We now come to the matter of the forum, and the issue of the real versus the ideal. Aside from every writer’s perennial desire for complete freedom of expression, sufficient space to build any line of reasoning, adequate compensation for one’s labors, and compatibility with the editorial staff, what kind of vehicle is appropriate for one’s particular brand of criticism?

Is it essential that your writing be accompanied by illustrations -- and, if so, what reproduction quality do you consider necessary? To what extent will frequency of publication affect your personal working rhythms? Is the frequency of publication of a particular periodical suitable to your critical style and emphases, or counterproductive? (For example, spontaneous response to first encounters with bodies of work is better fitted to weekly-newspaper format than is scholarly meditation.) Does the forum in question have an emphasis of its own -- for example, darkroom craft, visual anthropology, photo education? Does that emphasis connect with your own areas of concern? Do you have an emphasis, and is it relevant to the magazine’s purpose? Do you want to appear in a publication whose contributors share a common set of ideas and attitudes, or do you prefer an active divergence of opinion? Do you prefer to appear in a periodical that specializes in your medium, or in the arts, or would you rather be writing in a more generalized context?

Linked directly to this are the questions of who the actual readership of the periodical is (as distinct from the critic’s ideal constituency); what the readership’s relationship is to the general thrust of the publication; what the critic can reasonably expect of that readership, and vice versa.

These last questions, unfortunately, are among the most difficult to answer, because the necessary information is hard to obtain. Few publications can provide accurate readership profiles to prospective contributors, although most editors know -- or think they know -- who their readers are. Thus the writer is generally forced to combine intuition, hearsay, and speculation with extrapolation from the usually small amount of direct feedback from and personal encounters with readers that an author receives. Consequently, it can take a long time -- years, in fact -- of writing for a particular publication before a writer develops a clear sense of who is actually reading what he or she is saying, and how that statement is being understood by that constituency.

I think it’s implicit in what I’ve said so far that, from my standpoint, the ideal situation for a critic is not only to be operating on the basis of a fundamentally balanced equation but, additionally, to have a long-term commitment to (and from!) at least one appropriate vehicle. Long-term involvement with an inappropriate vehicle -- one in which the critic’s emphases and ideas are pronouncedly unrelated to the actual readership’s interests -- will achieve little but the generation of frustration and stress on both sides.

Frequently there is value in making a one-shot appearance in such a forum; it’s a variety of guerrilla tactic that keeps all concerned on their toes. Similarly, there’s nothing innately wrong in making one-shot appearances in a diversity of sympathetic publications. However, the consequent necessity of establishing one’s reference points for a new audience in every essay is time-consuming, tedious, and ultimately counterproductive, since this is the most difficult way of all to construct a coherent, consistent, and useful line of reasoning and contribute effectively to a critical dialogue. “Same time, next week” (or month, or quarter) is unquestionably the most desirable assumption for a critic and his or her audience to be able to make concerning their relationship.

If some of what I’ve outlined here seems applicable to artists and their decisions about the relation of their work to its audience, that isn’t coincidental. I consider it relevant also to editorial staffs of publications, and to members of the audience who may very legitimately ask if the criticism they’re getting is pertinent to their concerns and reference points.

For the critic, the equation I’ve suggested is a way of evaluating publication opportunities and of identifying the path of least resistance and optimum flow -- which, I should add, is not necessarily the route one should always follow. For artist and audience, it may be a means for understanding the set of relationships that pertain between the work, the critic, the forum, and the audience, and of evaluating the performance of critics operating within particular configurations thereof.

Notes

¹ “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” translated by Richard Winston, in Art in Action: Twice a Year 1938-1948, 10th Anniversary Issue (New York: Twice A Year Press, 1948), p. 126.

² Indeed, one local critic in that region is trying to do just that. Significantly, his background is in photography, his primary vehicle a regionally oriented photography newsletter.

This is the complete text of a lecture delivered at the National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education, Stevensville, NY, March 17, 1980.

"Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice" was first published in Exposure, Vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 1980. It subsequently appeared in my book Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979-1989 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1996).

Copyright © 1981 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.