Planet of the Academics: An Interlude (2)

(Continued.)

This brings me to the last of the baseless Schneider/Alt assumptions: That I number among “You poseurs, who have never taken a picture or contemplated a landscape on the ground glass of any camera” (Schneider), and that “As an academic, you have no access to this information [about Alt’s status “as an expert regarding cameras, lenses, and other aspects of working photographers”] as it exists in a very different part of the photo community, people who actually make images” (Alt).

“Joseph Fung photographing A. D. Coleman photographing Arno Minkkinen photographing,” Dali, China, August 2010. Photo by Anna Lung.

Here we find implicit and explicit variants of the old saw “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach (or criticize),” combined, in Alt’s case, with that Planet of the Academics notion — not just that I’m an “academic,” but that this presumed condition identifies me as an alien from another world entirely, said provenance eliminating my “access to information” about Alt’s technical expertise, and to technical information generally. Indeed, presumably it voids such access for all “academics,” since technical knowledge about photography is apparently restricted to “a very different part of the photo community” and kept secret there.

Some information in this regard, readily available to both Schneider and Alt via my writings and my CV (the latter posted online at my website since 1995):

• Almost without exception, my extended and one-shot teaching situations, short-term residencies as visiting critic, guest-lecture invitations, and other activities in the environment of colleges, universities, and art institutes have come from BFA and MFA studio programs in photography. This means that, as a sometime participant in the academic world, I’ve spent virtually all my time there surrounded by people making photographs. My students have almost all been pre-professional photographers; my teaching colleagues have almost all been photographers themselves. When I taught at NYU, 1977-93, my classroom was ten feet from the main darkroom. As a result, I’m no stranger to issues of photographic craft. Though I don’t consider myself qualified to teach photographic practice, as I’ve never worked professionally as a photographer, questions of craft, and a non-performer’s understandings thereof, seeped into my pedagogical concerns as a historian/critic in such environments.

• I spent two decades (1969-89) in deep friendship and close intellectual collaboration with the late photographer, teacher, and theorist Richard Kirstel. Photographic craft became a regular subject of our conversations.

“A. D. Coleman with people who actually make images.” (L-R: Kate Breakey, Paul Krieg, Arno Minkkinen, Sandy Minkkinen, Anna Lung, ADC, Jerry Spagnoli, Connie Imboden. Dali, China, August 2010. Photographer unknown.

• I’ve had numerous other friendships and acquaintanceships with photographers. Almost always, if these have become substantial enough that we communicate regularly and at length, their individual relationships to craft (tools, materials, processes) have had a substantial part in our dialogues. For example, this past summer my wife Anna and I organized the visit to China of four photographers (Kate Breakey, Connie Imboden, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, and Jerry Spagnoli) for participation in the Dali International Photography Exhibition). Under my direction, their presentations there included discussion of their individual approaches to their craft, and I got to watch several of them work as they made new images in Dali. I’ve always enjoyed listening to performers in any medium speak specifically to issues of performance, which I consider much more useful — as audience member, as critic, as historian — than their ideas about what their work means.

• There’s of course a substantial and growing literature of photography that includes numerous works in which photographers write about the craft. It will probably surprise Schneider and Alt to learn that in the course of my own researches I’ve read not only Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, Daguerre’s original account his invention, and Weston’s Daybooks, but also Adams’s How to Make a Photograph, most of William Mortensen’s technical treatises, and numerous other articles and books in which photographers address the specific issues of praxis.

• You can’t spend your professional life around practitioners of a given craft without some of their knowledge (including their craft understandings) rubbing off on you; osmosis works. As a result, over the years I’ve allowed what I’ve gleaned in this regard to infiltrate my writing. I suspect that’s why many of my regular readers come from the ranks of photographers (in some cases, after they’ve overcome their initial resistance to reading anything written by a non-photographer). I’m also inclined to attribute to this awareness of craft issues the lifetime achievement awards I’ve received from the German Photographic Society (2002) and the Royal Photographic Society (2010) — both of them organizations with memberships composed in large part of working professional photographers.

Now here are some things that Schneider and Alt wouldn’t likely know about me:

• I have my own b&w darkroom in the basement of my house. It’s been there since 1971. I’ve exposed and developed thousands of my own negatives (35mm. and 2-1/4, mostly — no view-camera work). I’ve printed a number of them, and shown a few, mostly in faculty exhibitions. I’ve even published one or two. Regrettably, I haven’t worked in that darkroom for a decade, but lately I’ve found myself eyeing it. (Back when I spent time there regularly I got in deep enough that I understood what Walker Evans meant in speaking of his early days in photography: “At times the possibilities of the medium so excited me that I thought myself mad.” Already maddened by the possibilities of writing, I stopped at that threshold.)

“A. D. Coleman with his Olympus Pen, in front of poster of Hua’Er holding his camera.” Dali, China, August 2010. Photo by Joseph Fung.

• I own about a dozen film cameras, mostly 35mm. Recently I dusted off my Olympus Pen half-frame and started running Tri-X through it again. I’m thinking about the little Rollei 35S too.

• That darkroom has also been used extensively by other photographer friends in need of a workspace — such as William Messer, Barbara Alper, and Harris Fogel. I’ve often spent time with them there when they were working, and have talked about photographic craft with them at considerable length.

• Several of my lovers, and my second wife, were photographers. I watched them expose negatives, sometimes served them as an assistant on shoots, helped them in the darkroom, and talked craft with them as well. Again, some of that rubbed off.

• All in all, then, contrary to Schneider’s and Alt’s uninformed version of my public and private activities and daily environment, I’ve spent a considerable portion of my adult life in close contact and communication with “people who actually make images,” and am — to an admittedly minimal and non-professional extent — one of them.

Planet of the Academics

• Finally, I did in fact have a discussion about Patrick Alt with a professional photographer (who asked to remain anonymous) who had interacted with Alt in his usual sphere as an expert on old view cameras. This photographer gave Alt high marks in that area, but added that he thought he’d gotten in way over his head in the Norsigian/Adams debate.

There you have (short version) my access to information about and understandings of the craft of photography, and my relationship to Planet of the Academics — the latter tangential at best, as I think you can see. I leave it to my readers to factor this information in to the commentaries about me of Jeff Schneider and Patrick Alt. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to work on my response to the substantive issues raised by Alt’s Guest Post, which I expect to put online and the end of this week.

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For an index of links to all previous posts related to this story, click here.