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A quiet late fall into winter, in preparation for what will likely turn into a hectic late winter through spring. Work proceeds apace on China: Insights, the second major traveling exhibition I'll co-curate for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP). Two sets of prints by each of the seven contemporary photographers from mainland China represented — Chen Yuan Zhong, Hua Er, Jia Yu Chuan, Li Nan, Yang Yan Kang, Yu Haibo, and Zhang Xinmin — await shipment from Shenzhen, and will reach their destinations (one set to Minneapolis, the other to Paris) by the end of January.
From "Night Moves,"
by Yu Hai Bo
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There they will get matted, framed, and crated to prepare them for their concurrent three-year tours. The North American set will make its debut on April 18 at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where it will remain on view through August 17. I'll attend that premiere, which will mark the culmination of more than 2-1/2 years' work on the part of all concerned. |
| This experience has definitely deepened my respect for all those who produce traveling exhibitions. The amount of detail involved proves endless.
Other scheduled stops on that set's tour already include The Light Factory in Charlotte, NC (mid-January 2009 to the end of March); the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, MA (early September to mid-November, 2009); and the Harnett Museum of Art, Richmond, VA (January 15 to February 28, 2010). The European tour continues to solidify.
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| Presently I'm wrapping up editorial work on the catalogue version of the project. This includes finishing the writing of my own curatorial essay, coordinating that with the essay of my co-curator Gu Zheng, organizing the translated texts by the photographers, and looking at several other potential text components for the book. All that effort should conclude by the end of January. The book — which will serve as both a catalogue for the show and an independent publication — will appear after the exhibition gets underway, most likely in spring of 2009.
I already have some other curatorial projects brewing, but nothing firm enough to discuss at this point. Details to come.
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From "Urban Identities,"
by Li Nan
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Much of whatever spare time this curatorial project has left me has gone into several technology-related processes:
• Leaving behind my much-beloved and trustworthy word processor, AppleWorks, which officially reached EOL (end-of-life) status last year, with Steve Jobs publicly giving it the coup de grace.
• Testing replacements. After spending 18 months with Mariner Write, I grew frustrated with some important limitations thereof (such as a badly designed footnote/endnote function), as well as with the parent company's failure to deliver a long-promised new release. Throwing in the towel, I began looking elsewhere.
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I then gave NeoOffice a whirl. This constituted my first experiment with open-source programming (outside of FileMaker). Intended as a full-scale substitute for MS Office, this suite of programs also includes an Excel-compatible spreadsheet program, a Powerpoint counterpart (I now use Keynote), and a database component (I do my db work in Filemaker Pro). If I'd felt comfortable with it, I would have dumped MS Office entirely.
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I enjoyed many things about NeoOffice. The NeoOffice development team and userbase reminded me immediately of the dedicated usergroup environment that surrounded AppleWorks from the beginning — a genuine community, based on sharing of information, resources, and skills, with developers and users working hand in glove. Most wonderful. (You can use NeoOffice for free, but they ask for a PayPal donation, and I gave them a small one for the opportunity to kick the tires.)
Unfortunately, it didn't work out. Hard to say what went wrong . . . too many functions hard to locate easily, or not simple enough for me to operate. So, to my alternate consternation and bemusement, I find myself now working in MS Word, version X, which I've had on my laptop for years just so I could open the occasional Word file someone sent me that wouldn't open any other way, or to convert an AppleWorks file into a form that some Word user could access. (Every now and then some editor would email one of those files with changes polychromatically marked up, so I had to have Word around, and even got to know how to use it. But I didn't have to like it, and I never made it my own.)
Call me Darth Vader. Or just someone who tired of fighting against the inevitable. In any case, I want to see if I can make my peace with this application. So I've turned off most of its bells and whistles, customized my toolbars, deactivated the little animated "helper," and otherwise created a clean, simple writing environment for myself. Who knows? Maybe I'll upgrade myself to Office 2008 . . .
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| As if changing my basic writing tool didn't give me enough to think about, I've also started to come to grips with database as an organizational concept. After some intermittent experiments with the db function of AppleWorks and some earlier iterations of FileMaker Pro, I have plunged headlong into the FMPro environment with release 9.0. This includes licensing existing commercial FMPro solutions, as well as retooling some freeware solutions to serve my needs. |
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In keeping with that shift, I've begun exploring an FMPro-based writing environment, Steve St-Laurent's Stories & Sources™ — as a result of which I now spend a large part of my working day in the FileMaker environment. A radical |
change for me, one that has immediately raised my efficiency level to a noticeable extent.
Probably this has as much appeal to the non-geekish among you as listening to photographers compare the features of their EOS digicams does for me. However, since I use this newsletter to track notable changes in my professional activity, I note these here. Further details about these software experiments will appear in reviews that I'll post at WordWork (another section of the Café), at Mac Edition Radio, and elsewhere.
Upcoming travel: In mid-February I will head to Shenzhen, China, to spend a month with my family and consult yet again with the photographers in the "China: Insights" project.
I'll return in early March, spend a few days in New York catching up, then go to Houston for Fotofest '08, whose theme, coincidentally, is China. In the middle of that event I'll fly to Vancouver for a few days, to lecture at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the University of British Columbia, and possibly other venues in the area. (A first visit for me to that side of Canada.) I will therefore skip the Denver edition of the Society for Photographic Education national conference in mid-March, first one I'll have missed since 1997. You can't have everything.
Then back home for a month and off to Oklahoma for the big shebang.
In this edition you'll find the text of remarks delivered at a dinner honoring Duane Michals as recipient of the 2000 Master Series Award sponsored by the Visual Arts Foundation and presented by the School of Visual Arts at the National Arts Club in New York City on October 25, 2000. (PDF format.) And also "2020 Vision: Photojournalism's Next Two Decades," the keynote address to the World Press Photo Awards Days 2000 in Amsterdam. (PDF format.)
The essays I post here remain on the Writings & Publications menu until I post a new issue and replace them, at which point they move permanently to the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, available thereafter to that repository's subscribers. A small selection of my texts will stay semi-permanently on the Writings & Publications menu here, along with links to other work of mine that appears elsewhere on the web.
For your convenience, we've set up an online store through which you can order my books, with a shopping cart, secure credit-card transactions, and other e-commerce frills.
This section of C: the Speed of Light contains brief synopses of recent, current, and upcoming projects and activities related to my work as a critic, historian, teacher, lecturer, and internet publisher.
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