My thanks to Sherry Turner DeCarava for providing an historian's perspective on my work, and a writer's insight into it. When I learned that she'd consented to introduce this award, the honor of it just about doubled in my eyes.
Naturally, since I'm a critic, as soon as I got word of this award and caught my breath, I looked through the entire book to see what I'd done wrong. Imagine my relief when I discovered that the only section therein on the ICP was a scathing review of the Magnum retrospective. I can't figure what their panelists were thinking when they made the decision on this prize. It'll only encourage me.
I've known Cornell Capa and his wife Edith for as long as I've been a working critic; it's a particular honor for me to receive this award in a ceremony at which they're present, and whose highlight is an acknowledgement of Cornell's enormous contribution to the field. Edith has long been one of my major fans; and I've learned recently, from a mole in the organization, that even Cornell has had good things to say about me, though never to my face. Last year I started publishing a column in a Hungarian magazine; one of the first essays they translated was a review of Cornell's recent solo show. As soon as a copy gets here, I'm going to present it to Cornell with my compliments. What a lovely turnabout: At last, Cornell, I get to give you something I wrote that's comprehensible to you and incomprehensible to me.
Cornell and I have had our go-rounds over the years, as I'm sure his successor, Buzz Hartshorn, and I will. I've known Buzz and his wife Patti (who's fast becoming the Dorothy Parker of photography's inner circle) since their Rochester days, even before they first came to New York, and re-met them here in the mid-'70s when they were running a custom mat-cutting service -- a time when none of us could possibly have imagined we'd end up here tonight in our current roles. I was in Sweden on a Fulbright when I learned that Buzz had taken on the impossible task of following up on Cornell's act and leading this improbable institution into the 21st century. I wrote him a letter of congratulation, and commiseration, in which I told him -- encouragingly, I hoped -- that I certainly wouldn't let years of friendship stand in the path of my obligation to give him and his colleagues a hard time whenever I felt it was called for. He replied, as I knew he would, that he wouldn't have it any other way.
My colleague and companion, Nina Sederholm, hails from Finland, and is extremely proud of it. She told me that, if at all possible, I should work in mention of her native land -- and of Finnair Airlines, Nokia cellular phones, and Finlandia brand vodka. However, since these matters have nothing to do with the subject of this occasion, there's just no logical place to fit them in. Sorry, honey.
I'm honored to be here tonight; honored by this award, honored to be among my fellow awardees, honored to be among you all. I want to share my portion of this honor with a few people:
Thanks to my various editors at the New York Observer, where much of this material originally appeared;
thanks to Henry Brimmer, who persuaded me to organize it anew for Photo Metro, and first published some of its contents;
thanks to Andreas Mueller-Pohle of European Photography, who connected me up with Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press;
thanks to Kathy Vargas and Colleen Thornton, whose close reading of the rough cut of this book helped me greatly in reducing it down to its final size;
and, finally, thanks to my wonderful editor and publisher, Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, whose energy and enthusiasm and good taste and fine sense of typography, layout and book design produced a book that looks so good to the eye and feels so good in the hand. I thank all of them, and I thank all of you. Thanks to everyone involved from Chris, too.
He and I are already at work on our next collaborative project, a book we're calling The Digital Evolution: Photography in the Electronic Era, Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1976-1997 -- twenty-one years' worth of my writing on the new technologies. That'll be out next spring; we both hope you enjoy that one just as much.
In closing, I'd like to read the dedication from Critical Focus:
To the spirit of my maternal grandfather, James Candlish Allan (August 23, 1877- November 25, 1956), of Elkins, West Virginia: born in Edinburgh, Scotland, freethinker, carpenter, housepainter and farmer -- my first memory of love.
Granddaddy Jim, this one's for you.
