"At his best, photography critic A. D. Coleman is everything one would want. He draws not only from a wealth of knowledge about how photography is made and who makes it but also from his own extensive readings in subjects beyond photography. He is a lucid thinker and an elegant writer.

"All this is evident in Coleman's new book of essays, Critical Focus. In the pieces . . . Coleman ruminates on the big issues and big names in photography of the last five years. In praise, Coleman's prose is transcendent; in reproof, he does not mince words. . . . One hopes that in future volumes there will be more of Coleman's dry, laconic prose."

— Margarett Loke, ARTnews

— Library Journal

— Mettye Sandbye, Katalog (Denmark)

• 

"Critical Focus is . . . wide-ranging in content and elegantly produced. . . . Coleman is a civilized writer whose attention, mercifully, is not exclusively fixed on matters photographic . . . However, the author is perhaps at his best (and certainly at his most entertaining) when demolishing sundry sacred cows or, delicately but lethally, puncturing overblown reputations of all kinds. . . . [H]e is completely immune to the charm of the many legendary zombies haunting the photographic ghetto."

— John Stathatos, European Photography (Germany)

 •

"[F]or clear, unencumbered, jargon-free writing that assumes the intelligence of the audience, [Coleman] has no equal. . . . His short pieces burst with energy, like an Andrei Codrescu commentary, and they are equally mordant, funny, and insightful. His longer works brim with ideas and clear explication. . . . [R]equired reading for anyone who values understanding photography in contemporary culture."

— Stephen Perloff, The Photo Review

. . . John Szarkowski has proclaimed Winogrand to be 'the central photographer of his generation.' He has yet to reconcile that assertion with his admission (in the texts which serve as wall labels for the show and which are elaborated further in the exhibit's lavish accompanying monograph) that Winogrand had no large idea, that the work became redundant, collapsing in on itself toward the end. Indeed, the curator goes so far as to confess that the last seven years of Winogrand's work — including roughly a third of a million negatives Winogrand never even bothered to edit — was a pointless waste.

This must be especially painful to Szarkowski. He and Winogrand were not only friends but teammates — Winogrand exemplifying the praxis, Szarkowski providing the theory. Furthermore, in his relation to post-World War II photography Szarkowski's reputation as a curator will (by his own decision) eventually stand or fall on his decades of sponsorial commitment to Winogrand, and he's clearly on shaky ground. (Winogrand has been a veritable house brand at the Modern ever since Szarkowski's public backing of him began with the 1967 'New Documents' exhibit.)

For another thing, his argument that Winogrand's work embodies an expansive approach to the medium is belied by the work's petering out in such ineffectual self-imitation. Szarkowski himself calls the later work 'deeply flawed.' The 'heroic' efforts to preserve Winogrand's last, 'unedited' work become, in retrospect, an embarrassment. . . .

The real problem here is that Winogrand's devotees and acolytes would have us see him as an epic poet. . . . [But] epic scale demands, among other things, the capacity for prolonged attention that Winogrand so clearly lacked. How seriously can we take the droppings of a gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a third of a million negatives without bothering to look at any of them, much less analyze them critically? This was not a photographer; this was a shooter, afflicted with a textbook case of terminal distraction, the quintessence if not the prototype of the dreaded 'Hand With Five Fingers' you have surely seen in Nikon camera ads on TV.

At some time in the future, Winogrand's main usefulness to the medium will be seen to have been his willingness to go down this dead-end path and explore it to the bitter end — so that no one needs to pass that way again.

— From "Letter from: New York, No. 2," April 1989.

• 

. . . Meanwhile, I was reading and pondering Arthur Danto's review of the last-named exhibit in the March 29th issue of The Nation. This is an ambitious attempt to establish distinctions between 'photography as art,' presumably produced by photographers, and 'photography in art,' produced by artists Danto elects to name 'photographists.' Unfortunately, for all its striving, it is terminally flawed by failures that are uncharacteristic of Danto: sloppy thinking, unfamiliarity with the field of ideas, and a profound unawareness of key issues of craft.

It is uncommon to find, at this late date, anyone so naive as to believe that photography 'replicate[s] the forms of reality' or 'transfers appearances from the face of reality to a blank surface' — that is, anyone who still assumes, as André Bazin did so innocently fifty years ago, that photography of any kind is transcriptive rather than translative, indeed tranformative, in its relation to whatever's before the lens. To define photographers simplistically as picture-makers concerned with generating, in Danto's words, 'aestheticized work of the kind urged, for example, by Alfred Stieglitz,' is to ignore — or be ignorant of — not only the complexity of Stieglitz's own thought but some five decades of subsequent photographic activity by people who called themselves photographers, including serious hermeneutic and exegetic inquiry. And to conflate photocollage (the gluing together of scraps of photographic images) with photomontage (the superimposition of one or more photographic images, in the negative or in the print) is to mix up two approaches to craft more radically different than, say, etching and woodcut, which one can hardly imagine Danto allowing himself to confuse.

The real function of his proposed distinction between 'photographer' and 'photographist' would seem to be the creation of a chasm between the two — a chasm which not only segregates the two but, implicitly, leaves 'photographers' behind, endlessly retracing the footsteps of Stieglitz in the desperate hope of being called artists. That, in turn, eliminates the necessity of acquainting oneself with their work, and with the field of ideas from which it comes. Would it not seem reasonable to expect Danto, who's written at length about Cindy Sherman, to know and refer to the work of Les Krims, who began creating grotesque tableaux vivants in the mid-60s, and under whom Sherman studied in Buffalo? Or the directorial work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who Sherman herself has acknowledged as an influence?

— From "Letter from: New York, No. 43," June/July 1993.

•

Click here for Bill Jay's introduction, "Defining the Peaks among the Plain."