Do It Yourself: Towards a Responsible Audience

by A. D. Coleman

(Note: In October of 1996, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, I was invited to the celebration and asked to give the Founder's Lecture for the occasion. It had its scary aspects; when people start referring to you as a "Founding Father" and giving you engraved silver Revere bowls, you'd best review your life. I tried to say something that was appropriate to the occasion while at the same time true to the spirit of the PRC's three founders -- Chris Enos, Jeff Weiss, and myself -- as I recall it when we first set all that in motion. Here's what I came up with. -- A. D. C.)

I want to start by thanking John Jacob, Robert Seydel and all those at the Photographic Resource Center for the invitation to address you, for giving me carte blanche to speak my mind, and for trusting me to come up with some thoughts appropriate to the occasion, which I hope I'll manage to do. They haven't heard or read what I'm about to say, so -- aside from taking the perhaps foolish risk of turning me loose on you this way -- they're not to be held accountable for what ensues. I'm extremely pleased to be here with you tonight, and honored to be asked to deliver a "Founder's Lecture" on this occasion.

Last night Bela Kalman referred to me as one of the PRC's "Founding Fathers," which made me jump, evoking as it does images of George Washington and wooden teeth. So I must add immediately that, in my opinion, the title of PRC founder -- or, perhaps more appropriately, "Founding Mutha" -- unquestionably belongs exclusively to Chris Enos, who truly started all this, and who snookered Jeff Weiss and myself into serving as her accomplices, her goodfellas, and (as I used to refer to us, to Enos's considerable amusement) her molls.

Chris had deep, accurate intuitions about our collective chemistry that defied apparent logic. You cannot imagine a more unlikely team than this troika, each one of us terminally independent and mule-stubborn to boot, a trio of outsiders determined to foment community in a region to which none of us were native. God knows what a carpetbagger like me was doing in that gang -- I didn't even live in New England, and my closest link to Boston at that point was that (in the minds of many) I'd mugged one of its living legends, Minor White, during his golden years.

And don't ask me how locking the three of us together in a loft for weekend after weekend on a diet alternating between big salads and Chinese take-out resulted in something that would last for twenty years and turn out to look like that fancy place across the street. Talk about a pressure cooker. If we hadn't fundamentally liked, trusted and respected each other, we'd surely have become some legendary Beantown triple homicide.

None of us really knew what we were doing. Well, Chris did, or said she did -- it had to do with simple access to information, people being able to call up on the phone and find out what shows were in town, as I recall, or something like that; but then it got out of hand, as you can see. It was never quite clear to Jeff or me, but we could tell she had a vision -- she was our Joan of Arc, or our Ma Barker, and we was the kind of guys what did what we was told, and one thing just led to another. This is not a person one says "No" to with impunity, as many here tonight can testify. One day, for example, she just looked across her kitchen table at me and said, "Make us a publication." So I did. Which is how Views: A New England Journal of Photography came into being. More on that in a little while.

Two or three years later we all looked up and saw that what we'd made was an institution. It seemed like a pretty good one, as institutions go, and we felt reasonably proud to have made it, though we didn't quite know how it had come about. That's not what we set out to do, you need to understand that. This was a do-it-yourself project from the git-go. Enos may have had a vision, but if she had a master plan she kept it in the drawer. We saw some problems, some things that needed starting, some situations that wanted fixing, a few connection points to be set up, and we jerry-built these solutions. Some of them seemed to work okay, some didn't, and we learned from both. We brainstormed and tinkered. Our method, if you could call it that, probably couldn't be duplicated, and I'm convinced it's a blessing for everyone that we kept no records of our deliberations, since they'd probably read something like that volume of experimental prose that came disguised as the instruction book for your VCR. We merely wanted to set some things in motion that would make it easier for people -- including us, of course -- to do things for themselves.

Anyhow, when we came up for air there was this thing we'd generated: formal structure, legal papers, boards, personnel, equipment, physical plant. Scared the living hell out of all three of us, I remember distinctly; eccentric lone-wolf types that we are, we all had an innate suspicion of institutions, and discovering that we'd mysteriously given birth to one raised some very disturbing questions for each of us. Chris stayed on to find it a great home with doting adoptive parents, but we all pretty much got out of there as fast as we could, like leaving someone you love and admire but suddenly just can't live with.

Which is how it seems to me the three of us feel about each other now. No question there's a deep bond, probably something you'd call family, but we don't make a whole lot of contact, and when we do cross paths we give each other frequent, weird, sidelong glances and burst inexplicably into fits of wild laughter.

That's my PRC story, at least the short version. If you want the full orchestration, you'll have to put me under with sodium pentothal, because I've long since suppressed the details. In any case, it appears that I stand here representing all three of us tonight, an impossible task under the best of circumstances; so let me just say that I love them dearly, and always will, and assure you that I speak only for myself in what follows.

•

By coincidence, just a few days before flying up here I came across a scrapbook of mine containing material pertinent to the "Great Debate" between myself and the late Minor White that took place -- in the pages of the Village Voice and Camera 35, and in a lecture series here in Boston -- over two decades ago, between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974. A defining moment in my work as a critic, that episode had its painful aspects, in particular the loss of a cherished forum, my column at the Voice, which had run from early 1968 until then as the first regular column of photography criticism anywhere in this country -- and, so far as I've been able to discover, anywhere in the world.

I don't intend to reiterate that story, which is familiar to many of you and can be dug up with relative ease by everyone else. What struck me in going through these papers last week was the tangible evidence evoked by this event that my writing mattered to a considerable number of people in the field. Letters were written from all over -- not only to me, but to the Voice, for publication (though that paper refused to print any of them). They came from all sorts of folks -- figures as well-known as Les Krims and Arthur Tress, and as unknown as a kid living in Grinnell, Iowa, one Jonathan Silverman, who would grow up to write a solid biography of Margaret Bourke-White and become, all too briefly, the best literary agent I've ever had. Martin Schneider put the issue on the agenda of the (MORE) convention for the alternative press. Bill Edwards of Light Impressions wrote in to cancel that company's subscription and a forthcoming ad. There was even a sympathetic, encouraging letter from Minor, suggesting that I submit something for an upcoming issue of Aperture.

I cannot begin to tell you what that outpouring of not only sympathy but active support meant at that crisis point in my life. I don't want to dwell on the reminiscence tonight; I sketch it because it relates directly to the difficult subject I want to raise with you on this occasion, a matter which I hope is appropriate to this moment for all of us: the issue of the responsibility of the audience. Please indulge me as I come at this in my own roundabout way.

I've had a year dotted with perplexing experiences, and -- though I didn't know quite what to make of them, individually or ensemble -- they seemed connected in some strange ways. So I thought that I'd use the occasion of this lecture to probe them, hoping to uncover their common threads, perhaps in the process saying something germane to the moment at hand -- the larger moment of the state of our medium, and the more specific moment of the 20th anniversary of the Photographic Resource Center.

•

This past spring, I received a phone call from the director of a downtown Manhattan gallery, asking if I would stop by and speak with him, off the record, about a professional situation that perturbed him. As a congenitally helpful sort, I agreed. A few days later, in his office, he told me that a colleague of mine, a fellow critic who for years had written regularly but on a free-lance basis for a major daily newspaper in New York, had promised to review a show at this particular gallery, but the review had never appeared. Why, this gallerist wanted me to speculate, might that be, and what, if anything, was it appropriate for him to do in that situation?

Based on my own experience, I indicated that it was always possible the review had indeed been written and submitted, but then -- for any number of editorial reasons -- been held, perhaps even killed as the termination of the show's run neared. However, I proposed to him that the most likely cause was that, as I'd heard on the grapevine, the writer in question had been dropped unexpectedly from the paper's roster of freelance contributors and simply was not in a position anymore to keep such a promise.

That was news to the gallerist, who expressed his shock at this unexpected turn of events. He noted that my colleague had consistently reviewed at least two of the gallery's shows a year -- not always favorably, but knowledgeably and thoughtfully -- and that this attention was important to the gallery and the photographers who showed there.

I asked him what he found surprising about my colleague's disappearance from this publication. Puzzled, he asked why he shouldn't be surprised. I inquired whether, in the five years of his gallery's existence, he had even once taken out the smallest possible space ad in the paper in question to promote one of his shows. No, he hadn't. Had he ever written a note of thanks to the editor of that section of the paper -- my colleague's employer -- thanking him for the attention, and indicating that it brought people in to the shows? No. Had he ever written a letter to the editor, for publication, speaking appreciatively of the importance of that paper's critical coverage to photography as a medium, and the value of that to the gallery scene as a whole? No. Had any of the gallery's photographers who'd been reviewed ever done so? No. Had he ever urged them to do so? No, again.

In short, I said, over the years you and those associated with this gallery have never once done anything to support the continuation of my colleague's work, or even -- in the event of his departure from those pages, for whatever reason -- to ensure the continuation of that attention to the medium and to keep that space for writing on photography open. (Needless to say, though I didn't bring it up, he's never evidenced such support for me, or anyone else, either.) And, since every other gallerist around acts the same way you do, the editors of this city's newspapers receive no financial support for running photography criticism and get no correspondence even indicating that what they publish is appreciated by the galleries. As they get virtually no reader feedback on what they publish about photography either, they are free to believe -- as they do, on the whole -- that no one cares whether they publish it or not.

If every gallery in the city that specialized in photography advertised, once a year, in any one of the three local newspapers that run commentary on photography, and every director of such a gallery wrote one letter a year to another of the three, coverage of photography would expand rather than shrink, I told him. So, I concluded, he himself was the fundamental reason his show hadn't been reviewed, and he could also hold himself accountable for the likelihood that now even fewer of his exhibitions would be reviewed than previously, since the paper had no intention of replacing my colleague.

The gallerist didn't take this pronouncement at all well, though I gave it in as kindly a tone as I could muster. Indeed, it appeared to have struck him like a bolt from the blue. None of this, he told me, had ever occurred to him -- that there might conceivably exist some connection, however oblique and remote, between his shows getting reviewed and his contributing in some non-corrupting, non-extortive, minimally expensive and hardly labor-intensive way to the support system that makes criticism and reviewing of photography viable in daily and weekly newspapers. So I decided not to add to his chagrin and perplexity by pointing out that such pig-ignorance is pandemic in the photography world but virtually unheard-of elsewhere in the fine, performing and literary arts, where these equations are commonly understood.

•

I was speaking, of course, from personal experience. I myself had disappeared from the pages of two major New York newspapers, the Village Voice and then the New York Times, in the early 1970s. My vanishing, which in both cases had to with editorial differences, was made infinitely easier for those involved on the management side because no galleries, museums or publishers involved in presenting photography ever advertised with them on the basis of my columns' appearance there. And the small group of readers who bothered to write letters to the editor and engage in a public dialogue during my almost ten years' tenure (combined) at the two papers could have fit comfortably in my living room and kitchen.

My empathy with my colleague's overnight disappearance from a forum to which I'd once enjoyed access was heightened by my keen awareness that presently I find myself once again disappearing, though this time slowly, by increments. In 1988, after trying and failing for fourteen years to tap into another New York newspaper as an outlet, I created a column on photography at the then just-born New York Observer. Within months, I managed to make this a weekly feature of the paper, thereby effectively doubling the total newspaper coverage of photography exhibits, books, and related events in the New York City area.

Eight years and almost two hundred columns later, I can count the letters to the editor my efforts have provoked on the fingers of my two hands. Three commercial galleries -- two of them photo-specific, one with a strong emphasis on the medium -- have opted to run periodic ads. But, in a recession, that's not enough. So my column has gradually devolved from a weekly feature to a monthly one, becoming the single most marginal original "regular feature" in the entire paper -- so erratic in its appearance that the question my readers now ask me most frequently is, "Are you still writing for the Observer?"

I hasten to add that this situation is not peculiar to New York City. During that same period, from 1989 through the present, I've published a column ten times per year -- seventy- four of them so far -- in Photo Metro, a Bay Area publication widely distributed in California that has just gone national (and bi-monthly). The material I've published there -- reviews from the Observer, reports on international photography festivals, provocations, polemics and such -- has evoked fewer letters to the editor than I have fingers. Indeed, most publications in the field -- I'm thinking here primarily of the "little" magazines of photography, the specialized journals like the Center Quarterly, The Photo Review, San Francisco Camerawork, and, during its lifetime, Views -- don't even bother to plan a "Letters" page into every issue, but simply add that to the layout on the rare occasions when something resembling dialogue breaks out.

•

A few weeks after my visit to the non-plussed gallerist, I was taken to lunch by the newly-appointed director of a major photography institution. We go back a long ways, but after some catching up and pleasantries he startled me by asking a question no one in a position of power had ever asked me before: "What can our institution do to further the field of photography criticism?"

Many possibilities came to mind, of course: I have my own shopping list, the presents Santa could bring to those of us who make photo criticism if we've been good: systematic translation of key essays, regular conferences, a few more grants specific to this discipline, an annual "best of" compilation in book form.

But I decided to start at rock bottom. So I said to him approximately this: "If, every time one of your institution's projects got reviewed, you or a staff member wrote a note of thanks to the editor of the publication expressing appreciation for the attention, indicating that it had an effect on attendance or sales, that would be a start. And if, once or twice a year, you wrote a letter on your official letterhead for publication in any periodical of your choice, expanding on some critical issue that one of our colleagues had raised in those pages on some subject other than your institution's activities -- supporting, contradicting, extending the argument -- that would be even better. And if, on top of that, you authorized all members of your staff to write one or two such letters yearly, on company time, either in their official positions or simply as knowledgeable members of the audience, I couldn't ask anything more -- at least not for starters."

He nodded, wrote something in his notebook, and said that had never occurred to him. Which was also startling to me, since, in one of his past lives, he'd been a working critic himself. That fact, however, encourages me to believe that he'll follow through on this suggestion of mine. That my elementary suggestion surprised him continues to perturb me, for the following reason:

I've spent some time in recent years pondering the word citizenship. This began when a good friend, reading the typescript for a forthcoming book on which I'd solicited her commentary, pressed me in conversation to define the public function of criticism more precisely. To my considerable surprise, I heard myself explain, "It's the activity of responsible citizenship within a given community." Though I've worked as a professional critic for close to thirty years, I hadn't known I believed that. (As Thoreau once put it, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?")

My brooding on the nature of citizenship led me to assessing my fellow citizens in this particular polity, by weighing both the quality and the quantity of the public discourse on photography stimulated by my writings and those of my colleagues. Those of us who publish regularly on this subject do read and, in various ways, respond in print to each other's ideas, of course. But our broader readership persists in an astonishing and disheartening muteness on just about all issues. Rereading such letters to the editor as my own writing had evoked over the past twenty-eight years left me dejected, wondering why I even bothered.

During those three decades, my editors published virtually every letter written to them in response to my essays -- with the exception noted previously, at the end of my sojourn at the Village Voice. Available for my review, therefore, I had almost everything readers had cared to offer as responsive dialogue in the public forums in which I've done my work. Judging from that, the average sports fan -- who memorizes the stats on the players, throws stuff at the unfavorites, cheers on his or her chosen team in public, wears its colors at the stadium or in the sports bar, and actively debates its strengths and weaknesses with all and sundry, including the sports columnists in the newspapers -- shows more articulacy and gumption in this regard than all but a tiny handful of my readers.

Indeed, toward the end of my scrutiny of this slim file of public missives, and contrasting it with the much thicker file of unsolicited letters sent to me at home, I found myself so tired of hearing privately from readers who lacked the elementary sense of civic responsibility required to enter the public debate on any issue that I drafted a form letter intended to discourage any further such communication with me -- unless and until they first wrote something to some editor about some issue I raised, which I see as the equivalent within this community of voting in a local referendum. Here are a few paragraphs from it:

"If everyone who's ever written to me like you, or spoken to me privately in this vein -- to tell me how much they enjoy my writing, how useful they and their students find it, how important to them was my attention to their work (or their way of working, or of some cause in which they believe, or freedom of expression in general), etc. -- had in return taken the trouble just once over the years to write a letter to the editor of any publication to which I contribute, in order to add their voices to the dialogue on any subject and indicate that they read me with respect and interest, my life as a professional critic and a working writer would have been and would now be radically different. (I'm sure the same holds true for many of my colleagues.) I wouldn't expect that from the casual or occasional reader of my work, but it seems not unreasonable to look for it from the core of my readership, those who constitute the serious audience for the medium.

"Since I see such public feedback and debate in just about every periodical I read devoted to other subjects -- politics, music, art, literature -- I'm forced to conclude that the sophisticated audience for photography is uniquely irresponsible: in the fundamental sense of the word, unable or unwilling to respond. I've begun to speculate, darkly, that perhaps something in the very nature of the medium itself actually attracts the irresponsible, and feeds that incapacity in them. Even enlightened self-interest appears insufficient to overcome this basic inertia.

"Sincerely, etc."

What brought that on specifically was the response I received -- and did not receive -- to my fall 1995 commentary in the New York Observer on the posthumous publication of a set of photographs of developmentally disabled people made in the last years of her life by the late Diane Arbus.¹ My approach to this project was a version of what the Germans call ausstellungskritik -- "exhibition critique," aimed primarily at addressing the presentational project, in this case a publication rather than a show. In drafting it I found myself raising questions about the legal rights of photographers' subjects and the definition of the oeuvre in photography, getting stonewalled by the Arbus estate and the book's publisher (Aperture, by coincidence), and consulting with professionals in the field of developmental disability from three states.

I realized as I researched and wrote this critique that it mattered to me, on some very deep levels, contained something that seemed crucial. Not only did it evolve into a defining structure of thought and function as an important position paper for me, but -- since it broached two substantive cans of worms -- it seemed likely to stir up some controversy. So I forewarned my supportive editors of that, refined my argument, checked my facts, verified my sources and let 'er rip.

What resulted was nothing like I'd expected. This painstakingly crafted provocation was met, publicly, with dead silence for four months. Exactly one brief letter to the editor -- not a particularly cogent one, unfortunately -- came in to the Observer. Some commentary on the issues I'd raised made its way into an on-line photography discussion group's discourse, not exactly the public arena; and a message board I created for that purpose at my own website (also not quite the agora), where I'd posted the original article, began filling up with unilluminating monologues that had everything to do with their authors' feelings and nothing much to do with the matters of principle, both moral and scholarly, on which I'd based my arguments.

Meanwhile, a MacArthur fellow I ran into at a conference indicated full agreement with the principles I'd enunciated but declined my invitation to say so in the Observer's pages or anywhere else on the public record. So did a prominent specialist in photography at a major auction house, who felt that my points "were very important, and need to be discussed." The editor of a periodical aimed at collectors e-mailed me a note saying that I was "on the side of the angels" with this piece, but did not even mention it in his publication, though one of the issues I raised in the essay pertains directly to the definition of the authentic body of work in photography, and thus to the collecting of photographs. At the same time, a literacy-challenged gent from the Bay Area (where the piece had been reprinted, in my column in Photo Metro) decided that my encouragement of reader response meant that I was seeking pen pals, and began bombarding me at home with lengthy private letters, castigating me for my positions and instructing me on the responsibilities of the critic, while adamantly refusing my repeated invitations to put himself on the record by sending his letters to the editor and debating me in public.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself hissed at in passing by Janet Malcolm, of all people, in the pages of the house organ of Random House, The New York Review of Books.² And someone I once mistakenly considered both a colleague and a friend displayed not only a professional animus of which I'd been unaware but, more disturbingly, some previously unsuspected fascist tendencies -- lambasting me at length in public for my temerity, his counter-arguments incorporating the frightening assertion that "Human rights pale beside the necessity of seeing that great art sees the light of day." (As I write this, I remain the only person who found that position sufficiently objectionable to warrant refutation in print.) To date, that's the only substantial reaction to my critique on record.

So that's it, the sum total a full year after the piece first appeared. Nothing of either the quality or quantity of response I'd assumed my provocation would evoke. Instead, a few insults, unreasoned hysteria, behind-the-scenes pep talks, bits of amateur psychoanalysis, aimless chatter -- and, mostly, silence. Disheartening, to say the least. I found myself variously bored, discouraged, and offended by the low level of the discourse; moreover, I found no nugget of provocation for myself, no substantial challenge that made me rethink my argument, nothing to chew on.

•

I don't tell you all this to evoke your sympathy for me personally, or to wallow in autobiography, or to hold you accountable for what happens to me and my colleagues in other cities far away. I simply use the experience closest to hand, my own, to try to give you some sense of what it's been like to function in this community as a working critic of photography for many years. Nor do I propose that this is typical for my colleagues in the field. Because I've maintained a fairly high profile, I've probably had more success than most of them in sparking public response. From what they tell me, they feel themselves operative in an even greater vacuum than the one I've encountered.

A few of us don't mind that too much, or at least say they don't. A few of us may be satisfied with just hearing ourselves talk, or talking shop to each other. But many of us -- myself, certainly, among those -- are concerned principally with instigating public discussion of relevant issues, an open scrutiny of positions, active argument -- you know, democracy in action. Why are you letting us do all your talking for you? Look at the results of that bad habit. What happens when you call a referendum and nobody votes?

I've heard all the rationales for non-participation, everything from the "I'm, like, visual" line of defense to "I don't think it's appropriate for someone in my position to comment on such matters." A lot of folks feel insecure about talking or writing in public, and while my heart goes out to them -- I used to suffer from terrible stage fright myself -- I say to you now: Get over it.

I have spent a goodly part of my adult life not only writing to but speaking with people like yourselves -- people involved in photography, or seriously interested in it. I have found you, on the whole, intelligent, opinionated, perceptive, passionate, articulate and not infrequently eloquent on subjects dear to your hearts, photography among them. All of which brings me to ask a difficult question quite bluntly: What's wrong with you folks? Cat got your tongue? Cats got all your tongues for thirty years? That's quite a plague of witchery, even for New England. I don't mean to pick on any of you individually, since for all I know you there in the third row may write letters to the editor every week. And of course everyone has his or her reasons for keeping mum on this or that occasion. But doesn't three decades of collective silence in which you're implicated raise a few questions you need to ponder?

To put a finer point on it, the particular bone I want to pick with you tonight concerns Views: A New England Journal of Photography, which the PRC published for sixteen years. I served as its founding editor in 1981-82, tried to assist it on a consultancy basis through some subsequent difficulties, and was delighted to watch it blossom into a serious, full-fledged quarterly journal over the ensuing years. This was a period in which the critical dialogue around the medium was expanding rapidly, and the need for additional vehicles for that discourse was great.

There was nothing in New England available to serve that purpose at that time. Along with The Photo Review, San Francisco Camerawork, and the Center Quarterly, Views formed part of an invaluable chain of "little" photography magazines in the U.S. serving as both forums for serious debate on photography- related issues and as regional journals of record for activity in the medium. A lot of people -- Jon Holmes, Arno Minkkinen, too many more to mention -- deserve credit for their efforts in keeping it going.

The other publications I just mentioned have survived. But, as you know, Views has gone into suspended animation since late 1994. I mourn the closing of Views, not only (or even primarily) because I was its founding editor and felt a parental relationship to it but because that journal, and a baker's dozen like it, have proven essential to the recent literature of photography. They provide the historical trace of what's gone on in various parts of the country, they serve as testing grounds for younger writers and editors, and they function as stages for thoughtful commentary from all of us.

Of course they published some fluff, and some trendy junk, and some impenetrable academese. Did you do your job as readers by writing in to tell them so? They also ran some first-rate essays. And they offered you a space in which to voice your own ideas and opinions and responses.

Why were the pages of Views not filled with your comments? And how did you allow Views to go under? It wasn't replaced by anything else serving those purposes. A sizeable polity without a newspaper is like a stroke victim, stripped of memory and organs of speech. If Boston suddenly found itself without a daily newspaper, the shock would be heard around the world. Yet the photography community of New England has been without a journal of record and a printed forum for several years now, and I believe that this talk of mine represents the first public discussion of that unsettling fact.

Of course, it's possible that you no longer constitute or represent a community, perhaps even conceivable that you never did. I don't happen to believe that. I prefer to believe that you remain a community, but simply need a wake-up call, and that, in conclusion, is what I'd like to give you.

•

Thirty years ago, when I began reading and thinking about photography, there was no substantial critical dialogue on the medium, and no ready network of venues in which to conduct one. Minor White, in the pages of Aperture, did everything he could to provoke and support such discourse, and urged others to pitch in. I heeded that call, and have never once regretted it; the rich life experience it led to for me represents, among other things, a debt to Minor that I've tried to repay in many ways. Public contest with him was one of those, strange as that may seem to some of you; setting an idiosyncratic example of a lifetime commitment to critical thinking and writing about photography was another.

Minor used to emphasize the importance of creating what he called "the educated audience" for the medium to which he devoted himself. By this he meant that then-small mix of people who had spent some time studying how to make photographs, and how to research them, and how to present them to the public in instructive ways, and how to look at them, and how to respond cogently and deeply to them. I think we have that audience now, have in fact had it for some years. Many of them, of course, are committed photographers -- some of them professionals, some teaching artists, others serious amateurs. But an increasing proportion of that educated audience doesn't make photographs now, if it ever did.

However, they collect thoughtfully, serve on museum boards and committees, help to preserve endangered bodies of work, write biographies of photographers, staff art and photography institutions, curate shows, teach the medium's history, buy monographs and subscribe to journals, go to shows, and pay intelligent, informed attention to work made with lenses and light-sensitive materials. They talk among themselves about what they encounter and what they think of it. They even read critical and historical essays and sit through lectures on the subject. And there are enough such folks out there across the nation that on a crisp Wednesday evening in October in Boston you can find a sufficient number of them willing to forego the pleasure of a fall stroll around town in order to listen to a cranky critic that you can half-fill a decent-sized auditorium.

This is a good thing, I think, and not only because it keeps me from just talking to myself in an empty room. Its implications go far beyond that. It vindicates the commitment made some decades back by Minor White and Carl Chiarenza and Nathan Lyons and various others to help generate that audience. Indeed, around that core of educated audience -- radiating out from you, here, in the Boston area, across New England and much further, like ripples in the lake -- there's nowadays a much, much wider audience, perhaps not quite so educated or sophisticated as you but no less drawn to photography. They attend exhibits, buy photography books and sometimes prints, help make decisions about what gets included in the curricula of their local schools and placed on the shelves of their local libraries.

If you, as the medium's most serious audience, need the example of myself and my colleagues, as a kind of tacit permission to speak passionately and publicly about photographers, photographs, and photography, then they need you to model for them the next stage in their evolution as audience. You can probably see where I'm heading with this. I'm here tonight to tell you that it's time for you to take your next step, to graduate from the now-comfortable status of membership in the educated audience for photography and accept the challenge of becoming part of the medium's responsible audience.

When I began publishing my critical writing on photography in 1968, there was, as I said, no active public dialogue about the medium; I had no models, no colleagues, and no competition. Now that debate is international, and imminently global, and there are loons like me scattered across this country and others.

I'm often asked nowadays if photography as we knew it is dead, or at least over -- murdered or replaced, presumably, by electronic communication. My answer, emphatically, is: No. So long as our primary visual media depend on lens-derived imagery and light-sensitive registration thereof -- and for centuries after that, if it ever ends -- an understanding of photography will be essential to any scrutiny of world culture, and the questions provoked by this extraordinary medium will remain urgent.

The past three decades have seen issues that once were the sole concern of thoughtful photographers brought to the foreground of contemporary debate, not just in relation to art and photography but in connection to a wide span of cultural issues. The credibility of photographs; the distinction between literal subject matter and content; the photograph's problematic relation to what's before the lens; the subjectivity of photographic picture-making; the political implications of representation; the social function of different forms of photography -- my first discussions of these matters came in conversation with photographers, or in reading their writings. Nowadays, we find everyone from Susan Sontag to Jesse Helms clamoring to put their two cents' worth into that debate.

So that argument is far from over; perhaps it never will be. The emergence of digital imaging has not terminated it, only sharpened it and somewhat reconfigured it. Critics can serve as the spearhead and instigators of public debate, but they cannot shoulder the entire burden of it for long. Nor would it be appropriate or healthy for them to do so. In the last analysis, we serve best as exemplars of the possibility -- and the necessity -- of thoughtful contention within a community.

I believe that my colleagues in the field and I have managed to create a framework for such discourse: a vocabulary, a set of questions, several strategies of inquiry, an assortment of theories and positions. Unquestionably all that has its flaws, but I hope you'll agree with me -- especially those of you who remember the terrible void that preceded us -- that even bad writing about photography is better than no writing at all. Surely imperfect at best, we critics nonetheless function as models of citizenship. But we do not, cannot, constitute a citizenry by ourselves. That takes all of us -- and that's where you come in.

•

So, in memory of Minor White, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, but mostly for your own sakes, I ask you to transform yourselves from being merely part of the medium's public to becoming a segment of its electorate -- that is, to considering yourselves entitled to vote on the issues, and to exercising that right on a regular basis, by putting your own ideas, opinions and positions on the record. If you do that, you'll begin the process of creating the responsible audience that this pervasive, complex, difficult, engrossing medium desperately needs as we and it enter the next century together.

If you are to be an electorate, a genuine citizenry, you will require a Hyde Park, and a polling place. You can establish a new one if you so choose, start it from scratch. Fortunately, you also an alternative at hand: Thanks to some of you and to John Jacob and Robert Seydel and the current staff, and all those who came after Enos and Weiss and myself, the Photographic Resource Center lives, and sometimes thrives, and survives through hard times.

By the way, go right ahead and transform the PRC itself whenever that proves necessary. Help it move into the new millenium as a vital force and a flexible resource for this region. Shape it to your needs. Trust me when I tell you that Enos, Weiss and I did not intend it to be a static monument to anything -- not a monument to one or another approach to photography, not in any way a monument to us, and definitely not a monument to itself. So by all means close it down or let it wither if it outlives its usefulness, but -- forgive the mixed metaphor -- don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. This place, with Views a part of it, was created as a resource, hence its name -- a tool for all those interested in photographic imagery. The number of such people has not shrunk in the past two decades, but grown. This place, its possibilities, are yours. I know I speak for Jeff and Chris too when I say: Treat it like you own it.

Finally, I want to emphasize that Views has neither been given its last rites nor formally interred. I believe now, as I always have, that the PRC needs Views, or something much like it, and that New England and photography need it also. Its revival or rebirth will require financial assistance, volunteer labor, and creative midwifery. I am convinced that among those of you here tonight, and the wider group of concerned citizens of the photography community you represent, the means and the energy necessary for that task can be found.

A critical journal and paper of record for this part of this country is not a luxury, but a necessity. So I call on you to join with the PRC's John Jacob and Robert Seydel -- the latter a former student of mine, I'm proud to say, and no slouch as a writer himself -- in either resuscitating Views or giving birth to an entirely new forum for discourse, both in print and as an aspect of the PRC's Website. And I ask you also to then keep its editors and its contributing writers honest by prodding and pushing and arguing with them in print, filling the "Letters" column of every issue with your responses, agreeing with them only when absolutely necessary.

That would gratify me deeply, of course, but that's not an important reason for undertaking that task. What matters is that, one way or another, you do it. Don't do it for Minor, or the Gipper, or Jeff or Chris or me. Do it as a means of establishing, or reestablishing, participatory democracy and public debate in the New England region of the North American photography community. Do it because it needs to be done. Do it for yourselves.

Thank you.

Notes

(This is the complete text of the "Founders' Lecture" given at Boston University on the night of October 9, 1996, as part of the Photographic Resource Center's 20th Anniversary Celebration.)

© 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.