Here I sit in front of my MacBook Pro on this, my 68th birthday. Yes, it’s the same computer as the one on which I wrote my birthday thoughts a year ago — except that I took upgrade matters into my own hands last May, replacing the MBP’s functional but severely overcrowded 1-year-old hard drive with a much larger one myself, and boosting its RAM to the max while I had it open on the dissecting table. (Roughly equivalent to saying that I’m still the same person, except for the brain transplant.)
Despite the initial panic attack at the very thought of tinkering with this instrument’s innards, it proved itself a relatively painless task, quickly finished, after which (for a very small investment) I had myself a renovated tool that will provide me with several more years of active service.
I wrote about the process for Mac Edition Radio in “The Compleat Writer: The MacBook Pro DIY Hard Drive/RAM Upgrade,” a two-part report (Part 1, Part 2) which I commend to any of you still terrified at the thought of taking a hands-on approach to the maintenance, repair, and upgrading of your own computers. If I can manage this, perhaps you can too — saving yourself a bundle in the process.
As this suggests, I continued this past year in my roles as chief cook and bottle-washer of my own SOHO venture. There’s always too much to do and too little time, so I remain overworked and underpaid. I’d welcome an assistant (assuming that he or she could raise any salary involved), but I’ve grown accustomed to handling most things by myself, which I anticipate as the modus operandi around these parts for 2012 as well.
My thanks to those of you who sent me birthday greetings, directly or via Facebook. Much appreciated. I don’t feel a year older, though I get progressively more cranky, which I attribute not to geriatric causes but to the world going to hell in a handbasket. Fortunately, few of the afflictions of aging have manifested themselves so far, with those that have relatively minor in nature. (Yes, that’s all my own hair in Willie Chu’s 2010 portrait, above; and no, I don’t dye it in any way.) Still, I noted with some concern that in 2011 people began, without prompting, to get up and offer me their seats on public transportation, in the U.S. and abroad. I believe in encouraging basic good manners, and I do get tired sometimes, so I welcomed the seats. But I’m not sure this is a good sign.
A. D. Coleman lecturing in Bratislava, Nov. 4, 2011.
Aside from that, all’s calm and well on the home front. In my professional sphere, the economic depression — yes, let’s stop the shilly-shallying and call it by its rightful name — has certainly hit the fields of art, education, and publishing hard, making the pinch felt around these parts. Some examples from my own experience in 2011:
• I had to threaten to sue a client for breach of contract, based on non-payment of the agreed-upon fee for a commission, having fulfilled my end of the contract and received the client’s approval of the text, which he then published in a printed exhibition catalogue and online at his website. After six months of non-receipt of payment, I used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to force his server to remove my material from the website. Payment received two months later. Delayed revenue: $2.5K.
• A client fired me (or not): Dissatisfied, for reasons still unexplained, with the draft of an introductory essay commissioned for a book, the small-press publisher thereof has tacitly declined my standing offer of a thorough rewrite upon receipt of an annotated version with clear indication of proposed changes. No indication of specific editorial problems has arrived to date, almost a year since I submitted the proposed draft. Rumor has it that this client intends to write the essay himself, possibly in a move to economize. Lost revenue: $2.5K. (I took this on at deep discount, since he cried poor.)
• Another client has delayed payment of a lecture fee for four months, ascribing this to cash-flow problems for the organization he heads. Delayed revenue: $1K.
Not exactly lumps of coal in my stocking, but I thought that, professionally speaking, I’d been a reasonably good boy last year, and might have some pleasant surprises coming.
Beyond these specific instances, the fees currently offered by institutions for lectures and workshops, and by book and periodical publishers, have shrunk steadily over the past decade, in some cases achieving the mere-pittance levels I recall from the mid-1970s. This does not bode well, not only for myself but for photo criticism as a whole.
I produced a decidedly gloomy lecture on that theme, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” which had its premiere at the Hotshoe Gallery in London on November 8, 2011, co-sponsored by Hotshoe International, Viewfinder Photo Gallery, and the VASA Project. I’m presently working on turning this into a video and a podcast, for posting sometime in the next few months. You’ll find the text here. Spoiler alert: I’m not sanguine about the future of the discipline to which I’ve devoted my professional life so far.
In addition to those difficulties, this year I found it necessary to fire a client, declining to undertake a second rewrite of a commissioned photo-book introduction. Both the editor and the photographer insisted that I refrain from discussing at any length the socially and politically charged subject matter of the pictures, demanding instead that I address the images purely in formalist terms, preferably by making comparisons to great painters of the past. Apparently they did give thought to my advice about not coyly ducking this issue but instead taking it by the horns; once I bowed out, they replaced me with an author whose professional background positioned the book squarely in the sociopolitical arena, and whose text mostly mirrored my own. (Of course, they could simply have saved time by coming back to me and acknowledging the change of heart that had resulted from my input.) Lost revenue: $5K.
Nonetheless, I did publish essays in Hotshoe, Photo Technique: Variations on the Photographic Arts, PhotoResearcher, The Photograph Collector, and of course in this blog and at my other websites. I also published introductions to catalogues and monographs by Errol Sawyer, Nancy Hellebrand, Richard Conde and Ryan Paternite. On the downside, with the death of Chris Dickie, publisher and editor of Ag: international journal of photographic art & practice, I lost an esteemed colleague with whom I’d worked for almost 20 years, and the field may have lost an important “little” magazine; with Chris’s passing, the quarterly’s future remains undecided.
In my role as an independent curator, I curated small retrospective exhibitions by Ralph Gibson, Arthur Tress, Mary Ellen Mark, and George Tice for See+ Art Space/Gallery in Beijing — the first Chinese exposure for any of them except Gibson.
Jia Yuchuan, “Transvestites, Shenzhen,” from “China: Insights.”
And I saw “China: Insights,” the touring cross-section of contemporary documentary photography from mainland China that I curated with Gu Zheng of Fudan University, Shanghai, handsomely installed on the walls of three venues this year: the Pomona Art Gallery at Pomona College, CA, the Katherine Nash Gallery at the Univ. of Minneapolis, and the Lowe Art Museum at the Univ. of Miami. The Miami showing, still on view as I write this, seems likely to become the last of the show’s seven stops on its travels since spring 2008. The organization sponsoring the tour, the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, still plans to produce a catalogue that will give the project some enduring permanent form.
I lectured at each venue in conjunction with those three showings of this project, and at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, on the same subject, as part of that institution’s “China InFocus” theme. I spoke also at the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) conference at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Galloway, NJ (co-sponsored by the VASA Project); the History of Photography Conference, Academy of Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovak Republic; and Hotshoe Gallery, as mentioned above.
In New York I gave several small-group lectures, and moderated a 40th-anniversary panel for the SoHo Photo Gallery (videos online at YouTube). I also served on a panel about “Challenges to Documentary Photography in the 21st Century” at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and another relating to the important but short-lived Apeiron Photographic Workshops, part of a reunion held in Black Mountain, NC.
As a result of all this, professionally related travel took me, in sequence, to Pomona, CA; Atlanta, GA; Bethlehem, PA; Philadelphia, PA; Minneapolis, MN; Black Mountain, NC; Galloway, NJ; Bratislava, Slovak Republic; London, England; Paris, France; and Miami, FL. This may sound exciting to some — it once would have to me as well — but in fact I found the planes and trains and buses and airports and transit stations and customs lines tedious and disruptive. At the moment I have only one trip firmly planned for 2012; I hope to cut down my time on the road drastically this coming year.
Don’t let that discourage you from inviting me to come to your institution to lecture, if you can come up with a fee commensurate with the labor and travel time involved. If you’re on a modest budget, however, I encourage you to consider a virtual visit, which will put less wear and tear on me. In 2011 I continued my online teaching efforts via the VASA Project, through which you can arrange everything from a seminar designed especially for your students to a one-shot “distance-learning” dialogue, even a full lecture delivered from here at action central via my juiced-up MacBook Pro. I’ve become relatively adept at managing the applications involved, and welcome the chance to enhance those skills.
Apparently you can teach an old dog new tricks.
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