I accumulate a stockpile of ideas, leads, snippets as part of my working method for generating this blog. From that mulch heap I choose the ones that seem worth pursuing, a selection process involving arcane and idiosyncratic techniques. Inevitably, a lot of promising material never moves to the front burner. Some of it, however, seems worth passing along before it succumbs to the information equivalent of freezer burn. This is my way of cleaning out the fridge.

Before I start, though, let me note that I’ve decided to take social media more seriously as a component of my project. So I’ve revamped my heretofore stagnant Facebook Fan Page, where I encourage you to “like” me. (I’ll convert my FB Profile page into a space for family and close friends.) I’ve updated my pages at LinkedIn. And I’ve created a Twitter account (@ADColeman1), and have sent out my first tweets. May God have mercy on my soul.

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The CCP Wants You

Desperately Seeking Someone Dept.: My, my. Here we are in the middle of a severe economic depression, and the Center for Creative Photography can’t fill the post of Chief Curator, even with a $94,981 annual salary plus full benefits package. (For the job description and other details, click on the preceding link and search for Job #49311.) Apparently, the call they put out in spring of 2011 didn’t bring in enough of a candidate pool to yield a worthy successor to Douglas Nickel and, after him, Britt Salvesen. Clearly they’ve opted not to give the job to Rebecca “Becky” Senf, appointed Acting Senior Curator of the CCP when Salvesen resigned in 2010; had they planned to promote from within, they’d have done so by now. So the search continues.

Dean Carla J. Stoffle

I don’t keep my ear to the ground re the availability high-paying curatorial jobs, so of course it’s entirely possible — even at a time of economic crisis, with the arts sector particularly hard-hit — that there’s a glut of $100K curator slots in photography, making it a buyer’s market. That’s one possible explanation for the fact that this position remains unfulfilled after the first round of the search, which began on April 26, 2011.

Another, of course, would be that, recession/depression be damned, no reputable curator wants to work in that snakepit, whose writhing vipers — among them the Univ. of Arizona-Tucson’s President Emeritus John P. Schaefer, Dean of Libraries Carla Stoffle, and Ansel Adams Trust managing trustee William “Wild Bill” Turnage — I’ve described in detail in a series of posts here at Photocritic International. All of them remain in place as of this writing, so, as I said when passing along the notice of the first round of this search, caveat emptor.

William Turnage, managing trustee, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Let me add that I would not and will not castigate anyone for accepting this position. The state of the economy aside, the CCP is a unique repository and a major institution in photography. Running it, whether as Director or Chief Curator, is a dirty and dangerous job, subject to the well-documented machinations of a cluster of verifiable weasels. But someone’s got to do it.

I’ll suspend judgment on anyone who steps in to fill that role, and I recommend that attitude to others. Someone needs to clean up the mess created by Schaefer, Stoffle, and Turnage, and restore the honor and reputation of the CCP’s internal hierarchy. CCP Director Katharine Martinez has decided to stick it out despite the abounding treachery; I admire her gumption. My one advisory: If you decide to sign on, don’t just take Schaefer’s word, and Stoffle’s, that your duties won’t include kissing Turnage’s ass. Make them put it writing. Forewarned is forearmed.

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Fascist Art (in Depth)

A report by Julia Michalska in the December 6, 2011 issue of The Art Newspaper, “Research sheds new light on Nazi-era art ,” led me to a wondrously vast and strange internet archive. Here’s how Michalska describes it:

“Images documenting the Nazi-sponsored Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (GDK) have been made available to the public for the first time in an online catalogue created by Munich’s Central Institute for Art History. More than 100,000 photographs, categorised by artist, genre, theme and, remarkably, buyer, have shed new light on the annual art exhibition, giving an insight into officially approved art of the Third Reich and the collecting taste of its citizens.”

Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (GDK) albums

In a nutshell, you’ll find installation shots of Nazi-organized and Nazi-approved art exhibitions in Germany from 1937-44; individual documentation photographs of most of the original works; schematics of exhibition layouts with proposed traffic patterns; even the purchase prices for which the works sold. You can browse online versions of the leather-bound volumes in which these records were kept scrupulously, or search the database by artist’s name, medium, and other terms.

At present the site’s text appears exclusively in German; perhaps they have multilingual plans for it. But you can navigate it without much difficulty. I have two years of college German under my belt, mostly forgotten, so I managed. You can too, with the help of Google Translate if necessary.

Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (GDK) installation

The documentation is mostly photographic, but photography as a visual-arts medium didn’t make it into any of these exhibitions. There were separate shows of Nazi-approved photography during that period, of course. Yet apparently, despite the international prominence of the German pictorialist and modernist movements and their distinguished photographers, the Nazis (unlike their Soviet counterparts) didn’t consider photography an art.

It’s a fascinating glimpse of what the totalitarian mind considers acceptable in art, unnerving when you realize that — the occasional Nazi uniform aside — it’s exactly the kind of art the vast majority of our fellow citizens consider worthy of the name and would hang on their walls or want to see in a museum. “Scratch a good American,” as my late friend Richard Kirstel used to say, “and you’ll find a good German.”

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Bad Whether

Finally, on a lighter note, here’s something from my slush pile that dates back almost exactly a year, but somehow didn’t make it into one of my posts at that time. As we’re experiencing the warmest New York winter I can remember, making me long for at least one good snowstorm to make it feel like a different season, I thought I’d drop it in here.

January 27, 2011: Heavy snow yesterday and all last night. Set a record: 19 inches of snow fell overnight in Manhattan’s Central Park on Thursday, beating a single day record set in 1925. Just as deep, maybe more so, out here on Staten Island.

We have guests from mainland China flying in, not sure when or if they’ll get here ― many flights delayed or cancelled. [They did get in, by the way.] Checking my email this morning, while also checking the situation at LaGuardia Airport, I found the following announcement from my undergraduate alma mater’s alumni association:

That’s what makes us old grads proud. Having survived patches of bad whether (or not) myself, I know the feeling, and get the drift.

This year our local celebrity groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, has predicted an early spring— as distinct from his more famous relative, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil, who called for six more weeks of winter. My daily walk around the neighborhood tells me to put my money on Chuck.

Our repetitions and replications (Internet echo, photographs and otherwise) are crucial to pass on cultural practice and serve an important social function—even if on the face of it our actions appear, not only infinitely stupid, but repetitive, a bit outrageous, counterintuitive to logic, may serve no obvious purpose or may even hijack what A. D. Coleman and I both thought might be a productive thread. Our dumbness may kill us, or it may save us. The jury is still out.

The Internet in many ways and on many levels promises freedom when, in fact, it can deliver quite the opposite. Its multitudinous and disparate voices can give us all ADD. Walls around institutions have become nearly impenetrable, if only for the sake of the sanity of those within. Discussions remain fragmented and remain, not for lack of intent or purpose, within closed communities. Conversation is encouraged and simultaneously (intentionally and unintentionally) degraded and elevated via the form of its dispersion and by the practice of its participants.

As a critic, I try to approach each project (a book, a show) as an entity in itself, to gauge whatever satisfactions it affords and dissatisfactions it provokes, and only then to add it to the larger oeuvre in order to weigh it in relation to the whole. The question of expectations re quantity of output depends very much on the mode within which the photographer works and the processes of production within that mode.

I’m perplexed by the claim to cinematographic concern on Wall’s part, because I don’t know of any cinematographer who uses, or would approve the use of by others, a visual strategy that invariably places the subject front and center in the frame, with no significant use of the edge of the frame, no selective depth of field, no activation of the foreground, no foreground-background relationships . . . it’s a banal and tedious POV, one of the first habits they get you to break in film school. Even the purists at [the Danish film collective] Dogme 95 gave themselves more latitude.

I gather that you aspire to becoming a working photography critic — which might mean that you would piece together a revenue stream from some different activities, as I have (some writing, some teaching, some lecturing, some curating perhaps), but that you’d get paid for all of them, including the writing. In which case the writing would be done vocationally, not avocationally, meaning that you’d take it on as part of your daily job, not as a hobby or sideline.

This forum participant interrupted a cordial and collegial exchange among a number of more informed parties, jacked the thread, issued a string of the most bizarre pronouncements, adamantly maintained insupportable claims, sidestepped every polite invitation to provide evidence validating her extremist positions, flamed me — and neither the moderator (who’d asked me to participate in the first place) nor any of the forum participants took her task for any of that, or took her aside to correct her behavior, or responded at any length to even her most indefensible assertions.

This challenge seemed to me a reasonable proposal, one that would require an equal amount of labor from both of us in her proving her point and me trying to disprove it, placing our resulting efforts in front of an impartial professional jury for evaluation. How better to engage with the question of what makes the opinion of a person who’s knowledgeable about a given subject more valid than that of someone who doesn’t know shit from Shinola about it than by putting it to the test? My interrogator would have none of it, however . . .

I frankly don’t know how to respond to the question “What makes the opinion of a certain highly informed person more valid than that of someone who is not informed?” To paraphrase, what makes the opinion of someone who knows something about a subject more valid than that of someone who knows nothing about it? This query seems to conflate the belief that everyone’s entitled to an opinion (with which I agree) with the notion that all opinions carry equal weight (with which I certainly disagree).

Even the moderated forums I’ve observed or participated in have allowed entry to the inevitable person several notches below the rest in reference points and maturity (and, not infrequently, literacy), lacking any compensating modesty, who basically stopped the show by posting something excruciatingly naive, profoundly dumb, syntactically garbled, or some combination thereof. By tacit agreement, that individual gets to hijack the discussion, with no one — including the moderators — having the courage to intervene.