Bring On the Tweens

Happy new year to all of Photocritic International‘s subscribers and visitors. I wish you a happy, healthy, productive, and fiscally stable 2010. Don’t know about you, but I’m glad to see the end of the oughts.

This blog’s subscriber base has grown slowly but steadily since my first post of June 1, 2009. I appreciate the patience of my readers and subscribers as I learned the basics of the blogware I use for this project, the excellent open-source program WordPress. I’m also grateful for the willingness of subscribers to stick with me as I develop my own approach to blogging, which falls somewhere between cultural journalism and critical essay-writing, a far cry from casual blogging and tweeting.

The quality of response evident from most of the incoming comments suggests that those who read me here enjoy the substance, length, and gravitas (plus periodic levitas) of my posts. So I’m getting the readers I deserve, and can’t ask for a better audience . . . just more like them.

To reward them, I’m sending emails to every 50th verified subscriber, offering each a signed copy of Confirmation, a hard-to-find artist’s book I first published in 1975 and reprinted in 1982. I’ll do this periodically, as a way of saying thanks. Any blog’s subscriber base constitutes a cyber-community. I feel honored to host this particular microcosm, and to have been described in the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court in August 2009 as a “rabble-rouser” in relation to this cohort. Carve it on my tombstone, pal. This rabble is welcome chez moi anytime.

Speaking of which, I realize that my concentration on the fate of the Polaroid Collection may have strained the tolerance of some readers and subscribers, even convincing a few that it’s the permanent main thrust of Photocritic International. T’ain’t so. A one-semester teaching commitment this past fall restricted my ability to post more frequently. And the imperiled situation of the Polaroid Collection strikes me as significant enough to the photo/art community that coverage in depth of this story as it develops (and the filling in of the backstory) merits prioritization. I’ll continue to cover this as it evolves; remarkably, Photocritic International‘s reports represent the only consistent, substantial inquiry into the threatened dissolution, via auction at Sotheby’s, of a unique, major, internationally respected collection of photographs. As a critic, historian, educator, and cultural journalist, I’d feel remiss in moving my attention away from this crisis.

However, that narrative will eventually conclude, well or badly. Meanwhile, I plan to leaven my ongoing response thereto with posts on other subjects: book, exhibition, and film reviews; commentary on various topics; reports on assorted professional projects of mine; vintage/legacy texts; and much more. So 2010 will see a broadening of the scope of Photocritic International, and an expansion of the territory covered therein. I also anticipate posting more frequently, at least twice each week.

I’m now into my fifth decade of observation of the increasingly global photo scene, having begun that involvement in spring of 1968. The changes in my primary subject have astonished me, as have the transformations of the media through which I’ve transmitted my first-person singular perceptions (and misperceptions). Never a dull moment, so I persist.

In short, excelsior! Smells like tween spirit in here. Barkeep, the next round of wood shavings is on me.