(Note: On Saturday, October 10, 1998, I delivered the keynote address for the symposium held to celebrate the opening of the Long Island Center of Photography. The event was surrounded with controversy, due to the unexpected censorship of the accompanying group exhibit. My talk speaks to all the issues involved, and sketches the Comstockian episode in some detail. With illustrations of her censored work contributed by Bernice Halpern Cutler. Unfortunately, the LICP did not endure as an organization. -- A. D. C.)
"Couple No. 1" by Bernice Halpern Cutler
First, I want to say that I'm truly honored by the invitation to present the keynote talk for this symposium, and thereby to inaugurate the future activities of the newly-founded Lon Gisland Center for Photography. I'm not a native son, but one set of my grandparents and an aunt are buried here, and another aunt and uncle live here, and I at least know that the first word in this region's name ends with an N, and the second starts with a G. So let me wish the Lon Gisland Center of Photography a long, productive, and provocative life. As you can see, it's already well-launched on at least the last two of those three counts.
Second, I want to thank our host, the Photography Department of Nassau Community College. And, third, my thanks to Lisa Jaye Young and Deanne Pytlinski of the LICP, who have organized this symposium and the accompanying exhibit and catalogue. Not only have they proved a pleasure to work with on the usual logistical issues, but they've handled what became a difficult and even explosive situation with remarkable savvy, integrity, aplomb, and professionalism. Whatever else we may think, we would none of us be here today to consider the issues on the table were it not for their valiant efforts and their commitment above and beyond the call of duty. I think they deserve a standing ovation from all of us, and I ask you to join me in that.
Finally, I want to remind you that after my talk and the following symposium there'll be a chance to see the LICP's debut exhibition (or what's left of it -- more on that anon), and a book-signing during the lunch break, all of which we hope you'll attend.
I'd planned to give one sort of talk this morning, only to have circumstances beyond the control of any of us require something else. Yet what I intended to say in the first place is not irrelevant to the issues now at hand, and vice versa. So I've tried to construct something that speaks usefully to the several levels of this occasion. This has mandated that I do some condensing and make some quick jumps. My leap of faith is the assumption that you'll manage those hurdles alongside me, and that we can unpack some of these ideas during the discussion that will follow.
I. What Is the International Image Community?
In the late winter of 1994, while in residence at Gothenberg University in Sweden as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, I made an excursion into Finland to teach for ten days at a small art school for Swedish-speaking Finns located in a town called Nykarleby -- as close to a working definition of the middle of nowhere as you can imagine, in that season an ice-bound agrarian region half a day's train ride from Helsinki.
Once I got settled in my room, my hosts took me on the mandatory tour of the facilities, ending up in the photo department's lounge -- where, on the walls, hung three original prints of recent images by Sally Mann that I'd never seen before. Mann is one of a handful of younger photographers whose work I find consistently provocative, so I track it closely; there's not much that she's shown with which I'm unfamiliar. How, I asked my hosts, had these prints come to be there?
It turned out that, the year before, they'd made a class trip to Gothenberg, which hosts a biennial photo expo called Fotomassan -- a mix of trade show and photo festival. Mann had been one of the photographers featured, and had flown in for the event; they'd met her, and struck up an acquaintance -- and, a few months later, these prints had shown up in the mail, a surprise gift from this generous artist.
This small and seemingly simple incident exemplifies, for me, the operation of what I've elsewhere defined as the "international image community," a now-global network of institutions, venues, regular events, distribution systems, and of course individuals involved in the production and dissemination of photographic imagery. As a result of the evolution of this far-flung skein of connections, it's now possible for students in a small Finnish town to be influenced by freshly made work by a photographer based in a small town in the southeastern U.S. -- and even to experience that work before their U.S. counterparts (not to mention a critic who lives in one of the most photo-active cities in the world) come in contact with it.
This would have been impossible thirty years ago. Those of you here who are faddishly graying their hair may remember the way things were in the fall of 1968, when the New York scene consisted of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photographs, Norbert Kleber's Underground Gallery on Manhattan's east 10th Street, the walls and vitrines of some public libraries, a handful of bank lobbies and the anterooms of a few custom labs and processing houses. Well, we've come a long way, babies; there's now a complex, global network through which the traffic in photographs flows. It sustains at least a hundred museums around the world devoted exclusively to photography, thousands of departments in art museums with that specialization, major and minor publishers with significant lines of photo books, hundreds of large- and small- circulation magazines on the subject, a proliferation of annual and biennial photo festivals world-wide, a booming auction scene, countless galleries and private dealers handling photographs, a related and ever-growing body of photo collectors, a vast photo-education system, innumerable organizations serving one or another photo-related constituency, a hefty chunk of virtual real estate in cyberspace, and even such a sufficiency of writers on various aspects of the subject that I can proclaim we've finally achieved critical mass.
This, in a quick-sketch version, is the international image community, in which, to quote John Donne, "no man" -- and no locality, not even Lon Gisland -- "is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." The world needs to understand that Lon Gisland is an integral part of it; and, from the evidence, Lon Gisland needs to recognize in turn that it is inextricably linked with the world, and cannot afford, or even successfully achieve, an isolationist policy in relation to the field of ideas of our time.
II. What is photography today?
Recently, a young woman sent me a letter in which she wrote, "I believe that I am one of a very few photographers working with combined nineteenth-century processes." I didn't have the heart to break the news to her that, instead, she'd joined the ranks of an international movement that goes back some thirty years.
As that implies, we habitually date the start of the "alternative processes" tendency to the late 1960s and the spread of historical craft-related information resulting from the spread of the formal photo-education system in the U.S. and elsewhere. In actual fact, however, all the different methods of light-sensitive and/or lens-derived image-making have always existed as alternatives to each other. Photography, from its inception, functioned as a seedbed of process invention and subsequent experimentation with the possible permutations.
The medium's history, after all, commences with the contest between Daguerre's one-of-a-kind positives on silvered metal plates and Fox Talbot's salted-paper negatives and multiple paper positives. From there, we spill ceaselessly into new physical forms, and the imagistic potentials and presentational options they enable: cyanotype, tintype, ambrotype, wet plate, dry plate, albumen print, sheet film, roll film, lantern slide, stereo card and slide, platinum-palladium, gum bichromate, bromoil, Autochrome, Fresson print, Carbro process, silver-gelatin print, Kodachrome, dye transfer, Polaroid, hologram, digital image; collaged, montaged, assemblaged, photogrammed, multiply exposed, toned, solarized, hand-colored, chemically manipulated, silk-screened, reproduced in ink, hung on walls, bound in books, incorporated into installations, slide-projected, printed on a wide assortment of commercially produced and/or hand-sensitized papers, transferred to fabrics, embedded in ceramic, variously three-dimensionalized, even replicated in chocolate.
There are now so many engaged with all these historic and new hybrid forms, here and abroad, that no one show could encompass that entire territory. The Photographic Baroque: Manipulation, Motion & Mania, the exhibit and catalogue that Ms. Young and Ms. Pytlinski assembled for your edification and delight, introduces you to a representative selection of those approaches, and to a cross-section of the visual artists who've revitalized and/or devoted themselves to their practice, ranging from those who rediscovered older processes and reintroduced them into the vocabulary of contemporary practice to those who work with the latest electronic methods, and from those who invent unique new physical forms for the photographic image to those who push the envelope of how it can be presented. (Unfortunately, you'll now encounter some of this work only in the catalogue, and not in the flesh, so to speak.)
As this project makes clear, any informed overview of the evolution of the photograph as an object and image involves the recognition that those who work creatively with photographs -- photographers, artists from other media, and the population at large -- have generated an enormous range of works that must be considered in any serious discussion of what constitutes the photographic. It also becomes obvious that the perception of creative photography from 1940-1970 as comprising a single type of artifact -- the "straight" or unmanipulated black & white silver-gelatin print from an unmanipulated silver-gelatin negative encoding a single exposure, presented as an autonomous framed and matted artifact under glass, normally no larger than 20x24 inches -- was, no matter how widespread, fundamentally erroneous. In hindsight, that narrow definition must be understood as the result not of the field's voluntary self-delimitations or of anything inherent to the medium but rather of the extreme biases of a small but briefly influential coterie of historians, curators and photographers at a particular historical moment.
Happily, many picture-makers, here and abroad, refused all along to accept those strictures; and, starting in the '60s, they -- and a new, more broadminded generation of critics and historians -- began the battle to restore to respectability all those other approaches. That fight is long over, the forces of tolerance have won, and those times are past. We live today in the context of what I call an "open photography," whose hallmarks include the remarkable fact that the entire creative toolkit of the medium -- comprising virtually all of its tools, materials, processes, and styles, from the very beginning through the immediate present -- has been recuperated and is available as a matter of course to the contemporary practitioner, without prejudice from the medium's critical/historical/curatorial establishment, and certainly without resistance from the market for photographic works. Notably, most of those nineteenth-century variations, no matter how arcane or tedious, are currently in use; the present generation of photographers includes practicing daguerreotypists, tintypists, cyanotypists, wet-plate collodionists, albumen and platinum printers -- along with working holographers and digital-imaging devotees, who can be thought of as their direct or lineal descendants.
The field as a whole, unquestionably, has been reinvigorated by the recuperation of the fullness of its rich traditions, including its technical and performative antecedents. Presently one can see the influence of "alternative processes" ways of thought in works not normally associated with those ideas: in Robert Frank's collages and mixed-media pieces of the past decade, in Mary Ellen Mark's platinum prints, in Mike and Doug Starn's taped-together celluloid assemblages. And one can of course see those ideas actively and consciously investigated by a far-flung cohort of contemporary image-makers, among them those represented by this symposium's accompanying exhibit -- at least until it began shrinking.
Whether you are a member of the medium's ever-widening audience, a student or teacher of photography, or a specialist in the field, I think you will find much here to nourish your interests and deepen your understanding of these interrelated yet very different paths to praxis. I think the young woman I mentioned earlier, she who sent me that naive letter, would profit from it too, though I doubt she'll see this show. Too bad; here she'd discover the good and sizable company she doesn't yet know she's in.
Beyond that, of course, it's important to note that over the past three decades picture-makers working with photography have made it clear that -- like writers, filmmakers, painters, and artists in all media -- they claim the fundamental right to address the full range of human experience and to explore whatever subject matter promises to prove helpful in explaining them to themselves and the rest of us to ourselves. Years ago, the literary critic Kenneth Burke proposed, nonjudgmentally, that the two poles of art were, at one end, the aesthetic -- that which (to go back to the word's origin) shocks, disturbs, and provokes reassessment of established reference points -- and, at the other end, the anaesthetic: that which soothes, calms, and affirms established reference points. Like their counterparts in other media, those who work with photographs produce both these sorts of images and objects. It's our obligation as audience to grant them the same license we grant our poets, playwrights, and sculptors, and to recognize that provocation and challenge is one legitimate function of art, and to find ways of becoming comfortable with or at least accepting of the discomfiting effect of much serious art. It's just doing its job -- and we need to let it do so unimpeded, and turn our attention to our own task, which is coming to terms with it.
III. Why a Long Island Center for Photography?
Almost two decades ago, in 1980, a few years before his death, the late Lee Witkin, the medium's pioneering gallerist, told me during the course of an interview that "it may be time to let go of keeping photography as a medium all to itself, and let it go into that large sea of art where it properly belongs." With that in mind, I'd ask, for starters, is there in fact a genuine need, at this point, for yet another photo-specific organization? When I received notice of the founding of this Lon Gisland Center for Photography, my first question to myself was, What functions can it serve? Here are some provisional answers, or, to put it another way, here are some of the questions the LICP might investigate:
* What is the history of photography on Long Island? Walter and Naomi Rosenblum -- a noted photographer and photo-historian, respectively -- live and work in Long Island City, where P.S. 1, an important presentational site for new photography and photo-based art, has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Eve Arnold and Horst, among other notables, have lived and worked on Long Island. Who and what else constitute the landmarks of photographic activity here since 1839?
* Where is the history of photography on Long Island -- that is, where is the material, the imagery and the documentation -- and how can the LICP serve as a repository or central information bank on this subject?
* What is the condition of contemporary photography on Long Island -- the state of photo education here, the existing venues for the presentation of photography, the presence or absence of galleries offering collectors a chance to engage with this exciting medium as work to live with, the critical attention (or lack of it) paid to photography by writers for magazines and newspapers and other local media, the level of the public discourse on the medium -- lectures, symposia, conferences, workshops, websites, all the various forums in which the polity engages with whatever really matters and needs discussing?
* How can the LICP serve its regional and local constituencies, including not only the general audience but the extensive, complex educational system here -- from kindergarten up through university-level institutions, bringing them into the multi-faceted dialogue about lens-derived imagery and its impact on us all? Might it consider putting at least some of its efforts toward the challenge of redefining photography education as the media education that Marshall McLuhan advocated. "Education," McLuhan wrote in 1965, "is ideally civil defense against media fallout. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms."
* And, finally, how can the LICP join and interact with the increasingly global network of photo-specific and photo-related organizations, image archives, and non-profit educational arts organizations -- especially given the remarkable options that digital technologies and cyberspace offer to not only act locally and think globally, but to act globally and think locally as well?
I would certainly include provoking public debate, and serving as a forum for that dialogue, on matters relating to photography, art, visual communication, censorship, poetic license, law, community standards, and related matters. So it seems to me the LICP has already embarked on its mission, and I commend the organization on having stirred up so much dispute so quickly. It's not easy to generate this much controversy, or to get the forces of covert social control to show their hands; I congratulate you on your effectiveness in these regards.
IV. The Camel's Nose
"Ritual" by Bernice Halpern Cutler
Which brings me to the issue of censorship, and specifically the censorship by Reckson Realty of work by Bernice Halpern Cutler that was hung in the Omni office building's Omni Gallery as part of LICP's inaugural exhibition. I've had a chance to see the work, and to meet its maker -- Ms. Cutler was my host last night -- and I must say, to those who seek to demonize either: Hoo boy, do you have the wrong vampire! I can think of no more unlikely candidate for the eye of a censorship storm than this feisty little old lady (who reminds me of my late aunt Dorothy Seeman) and her amiable, engaging work about the complexities of aging.
There's an old Arab saying: You should not let a camel get its nose under the tent unless you are prepared to sleep with the beast. If we think of censorship as the camel, then I think we'd have to agree that in this situation the beast is already in the tent and edging its way into our sleeping bag. So if there's a place to start talking about artists' rights, audience rights, and the definition of community standards, it might as well be here, with the example at hand.
I'm sure we'll be speaking about this matter at length during the symposium following my talk. And while I regret that this episode has hijacked and redirected our attention on this otherwise auspicious occasion, I think we may be able to put it to profitable use. So I'm going to direct some brief comments to the various corners of this brouhaha, to establish what I hope will serve as at least a framework within which we can debate it fruitfully and some jumping-off points for our subsequent town meeting.
* To the decision-makers at Reckson Realty who created this imbroglio: You are know-nothings and nincompoops. We stand on the brink of the 21st century, and you've behaved as though we were still somewhere in the 19th. You may speak, as your ilk often does, of community standards, but this artist, and those who would enjoy seeing her work in your gallery space, are just as much members of this community as your tenants and office workers, and you have disregarded and offended their community standards with your comstockery.
Moreover, you've acted in bad faith. You led the LICP's representatives, and the artists in this show, to believe that your gallery space was open to a reasonable range of work embodying the contemporary field of ideas, which I can certify from long experience is what this survey represents. And you gave them a supposedly free hand in deciding what would be shown on this occasion. And then, rather than defending your decisions and your delegation of authority, you caved in to the first complaint you received and -- after the fact, without negotiation, and unilaterally -- you rescinded your policy in regard to artwork that you suddenly subjected to previously unannounced restrictions and attitudes. If that's the way you operate your business, I certainly wouldn't want to work for you, or hire you to work for me, or invest in your company. This is a working definition of managerial ineptitude, and I hope those responsible are subject to corporate discipline by the upper echelons of your firm.
You might be able to squeak out of this legally, if it came to that, but from an ethical standpoint there's no weaseling out of the fact that you stand convicted of breach of contract. Here's some advice for the future: Any parameters defining the impermissible (such as "nudes don't work here," to quote one of your reps), and any authorization of personnel responsible for enforcing such regulations, should have been articulated, put into writing, and made available to all concerned before your gallery ever opened its doors. That was your responsibility. Having failed to live up to it, and having led artists and their sponsors to believe the space was open to all ideas, you had a moral obligation to stand up beside them like mensches and take the rap for the consequences. You had absolutely no right to create brand-new "policies" after the work had been solicited and hung and the exhibit publicized, cavalierly springing these decisions on unsuspecting people who took you at your word and could only feel surprised and betrayed by your capitulation to the first carper who came along.
This was a classic case of false advertising. Henceforth, in your dealings with artists -- that is, starting with the very first letter or phone conversation concerning exhibitions in your space -- you need to make the following blunt, candid statement:
We censor. We censor anything we feel like censoring. We censor anything that anyone who works in this building objects to, and we censor anything that anyone who walks in here as viewer objects to. We censor arbitrarily, and without notice, and without apology. It's our gallery, and we feel free to take anything down off its walls for any reason whatsoever. If you don't accept that , there's no reason for us to talk further.
That, at least, is honest and above-board; it's what's called truth in packaging. You'll probably find some people willing to exhibit under those conditions, either because it doesn't affect their work in particular or because they have no strongly held principles in this regard or even, conceivably, because they agree with your principles and policies. But let me warn you that if you make such an announcement -- and I propose that you're obligated to do so -- you won't attract many artists of stature or substance. As the withdrawal of work by other artists in the current exhibit indicates, even artists whose work would not likely be subject to your whimsical dictates may find your policies and practices so distasteful that they'll refuse to consider your space as a suitable, responsible venue for serious, professional-level art. Who knows? Perhaps even the local camera club and watercolor society will show some gumption and decide that your space is inappropriate for their work.
And you'd better post that same advisory on the gallery door, and print it on all your gallery promo too, because there's a substantial audience out there that won't settle for a menu that's restricted to anaesthetic art, and that may choose not to patronize a gallery that makes censorship a matter of policy. In any case, you've failed badly and embarrassed yourselves considerably. The headline on one local news story about all this -- "Ding-a-lings pull puds"(Long Island Voice," October 1-7, 1998, p. 9) -- represents the kind of publicity money just can't buy, and that most companies pay their executives to avoid at all costs.
As a result of your incompetence, your exhibition space now has a shameful history, you stand accurately branded as blatant censors, you've created a spiral of bad publicity for yourselves, and you've made yourselves into laughingstocks -- all due to your eagerness to kowtow to prudishness. You've disgraced your company and yourselves, breached contract, violated democratic principles, demonstrated your un-American opposition to basic Constitutional principles, and done economic harm to your community by identifying it in the public mind as a cultural backwater at a time when the corporate world internationally has come to realize that the arts -- including arts tourism -- are big business. It will take you years to live down the mockery to which you've subjected yourselves, and for your gallery space to recoup its credibility as a venue for art.
On top of which, you've wasted your time. Who on earth have you deluded yourself into thinking you're protecting? O corporate, conservative Lon Gisland, your sons and daughters are not pouring into your local museums and galleries in search of nudes, or even explicit erotica. If they want such, they head to P.S. 1 in Long Island City, close to hand, or else into Manhattan, just a slightly further hop away. Look around you and see how few of them are in this room. Do you think they care about some grandmotherly woman's photographs in which her grandfatherly husband's penis is barely visible? No, your offspring are not hanging from the rafters here.
And why not? Because in recent months, as the linchpin in an exquisitely orchestrated plan to take over and dominate the international porn industry, Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republican "third-wavers" -- with Kenneth Starr as their stalking horse -- have used the Internet and the traditional media to effectuate the single most rapid and efficient distribution of sexually explicit material in the history of humankind. I'll wager that even as we speak your progeny are busily downloading the deliriously lubricious, taxpayer-funded, Republican-published Starr Report from the taxpayer-funded website of the Congress of the United States, while you fritter your time away shielding them from art that they have no particular interest in looking at. Don't be distracted into skirmishes with little Ms. Cutler; surely you have bigger fish to fry.
* To the local audience here on Lon Gisland, some suggestions: Speaking from experience in censorship cases and other controversial situations, I want to emphasize for you the significant difference between appreciation and support. If, as members of the polity, you have a commitment to one side or another in a referendum that's on the ballot in the next election, it's not enough just to sit at home feeling grateful to the politicians and the fellow citizens who are out there speaking for your side, gathering signatures on petitions, and doing the other necessary chores. That's appreciation, and it comes cheap, and it ain't worth spit in the clinches. The very least you must do to earn the title of citizen is show up at the polls and cast your vote. That's the bare minimum definition of support. Talking the issue up with your neighbors, and getting them to vote too, comes next.
A referendum has been called here on Lon Gisland on the subject of censorship and freedom of vision. You have an opportunity to stand up and be counted on this, to go on the record and show your support for whichever side of this debate you find most persuasive. I'm not telling how to vote, though I think it's clear where I'd cast my ballot if I lived here. I'm urging you to vote. You can do that by the simple expedient of writing to the President of Reckson Realty , or to your local paper, or to the LICP, and voicing your opinion, and sending copies of that letter to the other two of those three parties. That's citizenship in action, and I don't consider it a matter of choice.
For me, voting is not just a right but a privilege, an obligation, an imperative. The principle is simple: so long as there's even one person of voting age in the world who's not allowed to vote in free elections, then I don't get to even think of abstaining, of not showing up at the polls on election day. So if you won't do it for yourself, then do it in memory of all those who never once got to do it for themselves, and in honor of those who would -- and will -- give their lives to speak their mind without fear. As Carolyn Forché, a poet of my acquaintance, once wrote in a poem titled "Return," "It is/not your right to feel powerless. Better people/than you were powerless."
* To the artists in this show: First of all, I want to express my admiration for and appreciation of Bernice Halpern Cutler, who cannot have expected her work to become the teapot filled with this ludicrous tempest, but who has risen to the occasion with grace under fire and thoughtfulness and passion and conviction in herself and her work. Her behavior here has been a model of principled resistance to unprincipled intrusion on freedom of expression. May I ask you all to rise to your feet again and applaud her for her struggle throughout this ordeal and her stand on behalf of us all?
To Ms. Cutler and the rest of those in this exhibit, I want to say that I'm honored to have my work in a show alongside yours, including that work now noticeable by its absence. I'm strongly anti-censorship, as should be apparent, and extremely sympathetic both to Ms. Cutler and to those of you who removed your work in support of her. I was greatly tempted to join those of you who took that course of action; it would have been the simplest decision to make. Upon reflection, however, I decided to take a different tack: I instructed Lisa Young to cover my piece with black cloth in a way that evokes both mourning and a facsimile of a voting booth's curtain, which the viewer can choose to pull aside or not.
I did this not to gather for myself the attention of viewers which you sacrificed on Ms. Cutler's behalf and in support of principle. (I'm hardly a working artist, and my piece is, to put it kindly, of only minor significance.) Aside from my systemic tendency toward contrarianism, I wanted to suggest in this context, to the audience and to my fellow exhibitors alike, that there may be alternative strategies we should consider in responding to acts of censorship.
Most of us in this exhibit have objected, or would object, to political strategies -- I'm thinking here, for example, of policies regarding Cuba, Nicaragua, and some Middle Eastern countries -- that chastise governments with which we disagree by embargoing shipments of vital necessities to those countries. We protest this, many of us, because it results in withholding food, medical supplies, clothing and other life-sustaining basics from people who had little or no voice in their leaders' decisions.
I think of art as just such a staple -- men die every day, as one writer reminds us, for the lack of poetry. And, while I understand the impulse you all have felt to express your indignation and show your support of Ms. Cutler by yanking your own work out of the show, I want to challenge you to justify the consequence thereof, which is to withhold your art from the entire Lon Gisland audience, most of whose members had no role in this censorious event and many of whom, I'm sure, deplore it, and who, so far as I can see, do not deserve to be punished en masse by being deprived of everyone's art simply because a tiny number of them misbehaved badly toward one person's work. That kind of wholesale retaliation against innocent, hapless civilian populations developed a bad reputation during World War II, and for good reason.
I want you, Ms. Cutler, and this audience to understand this not as opposition to your chosen course of action, but as counterpoint to it. I want it clear that in no sense am I on the side of those who did the censoring here, and my censure of them has been, I hope, firm and unequivocal. But I ask you all to rethink what has by now become a knee-jerk response to censorship situations, and to use your fertile imaginations to come up with other creative options. Suppose, just for example, we'd arranged to arrive en masse at this symposium and then at the show -- exhibiting artists and audience sympathizers as well -- wearing clothing on which Ms. Cutler's censored imagery had been silk-screened, with nothing on underneath, and challenged Reckson Realty to remove the offending art? And suppose we'd notified the media of this plan in advance?
* Finally, to the LICP's management and staff: Let this be a caution to you. Money from home always comes out of the apron pocket, I'm fond of saying, and patronage always comes with strings attached -- sometimes visibly, sometimes not, sometimes prearranged and sometimes after the fact, as in this case. You can avoid these problems in the future by laying your cards on the table at the outset, and insisting that your sponsors and collaborators do the same. The best way to avoid impromptu outbreaks of censorship is to establish the parameters of the permissible beforehand. I strongly recommend getting it in writing; as you've observed, handshakes ain't what they used to be. I think you owe such precautionary measures to your patrons and presentational venues.
Certainly you owe it to the artists you invite to work with you; it's one thing to transgress willfully and knowingly, and another to learn you've somehow, in all innocence, stepped over a line no one ever drew. Most of all, you owe it to your fledgling organization, and to yourselves. The world provides us with a plenitude of causes for stress and grief; no need to court them. Trust me: build your field of dreams, this Lon Gisland Center of Photography, and those stresses and griefs will come.
Along with joys, to be sure. Because this ambitious project whose birth we're witnessing today has the potential of bringing the best of photography and photo-based art to Lon Gisland, and also of bringing out the best such work produced here, past and present -- so that Lon Gisland can take an active role in the rich, complex, contentious debate over the impact of photography on culture. That debate is the central dialogue of the international image community, where I assure you that difference of opinion -- even on matters of censorship and community standards -- is not uncommon.
Which means that this uproar need prove neither inauspicious nor unproductive. It shows that at least some of the people of Lon Gisland take photographs and photography very seriously, and have strongly held opinions about them, and are prepared to argue over those ideas. I think those are healthy signs, much preferable to apathetic indifference or passive acceptance. So I urge you to take heart from all this: embrace this difficult moment, own it, and build on it, by learning how to convert heat to light. Consider it Lon Gisland's own weird version of the welcome wagon, if you will; or, if that metaphor won't work, then think of it as the moil, and of this as your piercing moment of briss consciousness.
In any case, speaking for myself, though I'm sure also voicing the sentiments of many others, I welcome you to the international image community, and wish you the very best of luck.
Thank you.
(This is the complete text of the keynote address to the inaugural symposium of the Long Island Center for Photography, "Images for the Millenium: A Long Island Focus on Photography," held on October 17, 1998 at Nassau Community College, Long Island, New York.)
Photo credits: "Ritual" and "Couple No. 1" by Bernice Halpern Cutler. © Copyright 1998 by Bernice Halpern Cutler. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the artist.
Text © Copyright 1996 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.
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