Who was J Dudley Johnston? (1)

(And why have I received an award named after him?)

On September 9 I received the J Dudley Johnston Award for Writing about Photography, conferred on me by the Royal Photographic Society (U.K.) at its Annual Awards gala. This event took place at the Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1. (Orthographic note: The use of initials without periods is a Britishism. Thus I received this honor officially as A D Coleman on the program, though they graciously allowed usage of the periods on the inscribed silver medal that came with the honor.)

ADC receives award from RPS President Mrs. Rosemary Wilman, Hon. FRPS. Photo by Nick Scott, FRPS.

The RPS describes this as “an award for major achievement in the field of photography criticism or the history of photography. To be awarded for sustained excellence over a period of time, or for a single outstanding publication.” In my case no specific publication was identified, so I assume I fell into the “sustained excellence” category.

The J Dudley Johnston Award is named after the Society’s former President and Honorary Curator 1924-1955. Previous recipients include:

1998          Dr Larry Schaaf
1999          Vicki Goldberg
2000         Colin Westerbeck
2001          Bill Jay
2002          Dr Mike Weaver
2003          Dr Sara Stevenson
2004          Colin Harding (Photohistory) and Val Williams (Curatorship)
2005          Ian Jeffrey (Photohistory) and Professor David Mellor (Curatorship)
2006          Gerhard Steidl (Photohistory) and Martin Harrison (Curatorship)
2007          Roger Taylor (Photohistory)
2008          Gail Buckland
2009          Matthew Butson

Good company to find myself in, surely. I take particular pleasure in the fact that this comes as unsolicited peer recognition. I find it especially gratifying because my work has never found much support in the U.K. — no lectures, no short-term teaching slots, no book offers, and very few opportunities to publish in periodicals. I must immediately make an exception by extolling Chris Dickie, publisher and editor of the excellent quarterly Ag: The International Quarterly Journal of Photographic Art & Practice, who’s presented my work regularly therein, and who supported my presence also at the British Journal of Photography for several years in the early 1990s when he served as editor thereof, before he left to found Ag. At my invitation, Chris attended the award event, so we got to meet face to face for the first time in a collaboration that now extends back almost 20 years.

Chris Dickie at RPS awards, September 9, 2010. Photo by Nick Scott, FRPS.

My friend Doug Sheer, who’d accompanied me from New York, and I wended our way to the Royal Society for the awards event. We arrived at the designated hour for cocktails on the Royal Society’s rooftop terrace, where we met Chris and also got to hang a bit with historian Gail Buckland (herself a previous recipient of the Johnston award) and Colin Ford, the first Director of the National Museum of Photography Film & Television in Bradford (now The National Media Museum), after which they ushered us into the auditorium for the ceremony. The RPS officers get to wear some serious bling, as you’ll note from the photo of me with RPS President Rosemary Wilman, above.

The RPS gave out, by my count, 23 awards that evening, in the space of two hours. So it was highly organized and carefully timed, with Andy Golding — Head of Photography and Film, Univ. of Westminster — as affable host. Golding spoke briefly about each awardee, after which one strode up to the stage, accepted a medal or certificate, posed for one’s portrait, and off. The only exception was photographer Albert Watson, whose Centenary Medal came with the privilege of making a (mercifully brief) summation of his professional history. Among the other winners: Nobukazu Teranishi (Japan), inventor of the pinned photodiode used in almost all CCD and CMOS image sensors, got the RPS Progress Medal; Sian Bonnell (U.K.) and Stephen Shore (U.S.) received Honorary Fellowships. (For the full list, click here.) Another round of cocktails, indoors, with canapés, and it was done — which meant, for us, back to the Days Inn on Hackney Road.

Aside from Chris Dickie, I had no particular reason to think that anyone in the U.K. held me in high esteem, so this award came as quite a surprise. I didn’t ask who’d nominated me, though I did discover that the RPS accepts nominations from anyone, anywhere — meaning that the RPS committee charged with plowing through, narrowing down, and finally voting on those submissions definitely has its work cut out for it. In any case, I extend my thanks to everyone responsible for selecting me.

Royal Photographic Society Awardees, 2010. Photo by Nick Scott, FRPS.

•

Some personal history: My family lived in London (Streatham Hill neighborhood) for about 6 months in 1953. And I visited London once, briefly, in the ’90s, to attend a conference on vision whose presenters included several people whose work I respect greatly, R. L. Gregory among them. But, until now, the closest connection I’ve felt to the U.K. goes back to 1978, when I contracted with Oxford University Press to publish my first collection of essays, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978. The New York division of OUP made the contract and produced the book, only a few hundred copies of which got distributed in the the U.K. But it mattered a great deal to me that the very first English-language university press, founded in 1478, had put its imprint (literally) on my work, especially since they’d published very few titles relating to photography — with the first edition of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s The History of Photography the most notable exception.

Light Readings, by A. D. Coleman (1979/1998).

That sense of connectedness to the tradition going all the way back to printer/publisher William Caxton got amplified by the contract, printed letterpress in several shades of ink. Even though I have a family background in publishing, and knew that a contract was a negotiable instrument, it didn’t occur to me to question or change a single clause; after all, the contract’s terms had actually been stamped into the paper. Who was I to argue?

Once we got Light Readings into the pipeline, that contract gave OUP dibs on my next book. Somewhat more professionally savvy by then, I took that contract to a literary agent, John Cushman, who’d expressed interest in representing me. We agreed that his newly founded JCA Literary Agency, Inc. would handle this contract. At which point John took out his pen and began slashing paragraph after paragraph, chortling as he did so, while I looked on in horror. “But, John,” I finally gasped, “it’s in letterpress!” He looked up at me and smiled. “It’s a contract, Allan,” he reminded me, earning his percentage then and there.

Tarnished Silver, by A. D. Coleman (1996).

That second book never materialized. John died a few years later; Tony Outhwaite, who’d been my editor at OUP, left that publisher to work at JCA, becoming my agent. Through Tony I submitted a follow-up manuscript to OUP, which they rejected — and rightly so, I say in retrospect, because it was sprawling and shapeless. (That heap eventually evolved into two tighter, separate wholes: Tarnished Silver, published in 1996 by Midmarch Arts Press, and Depth of Field, published in 1998 by the University of New Mexico Press.)

Instead, OUP proposed that I write a single-volume history of photography for their widely distributed series of books on different aspects of art. I pondered the offer carefully. Its inclusion in that series would have ensured steady sales, long-term revenues, and I certainly would have found the money useful.

Eventually, having concluded that the era of synoptic one-volume histories of photography had come and gone, and that I wasn’t the person to write one in any case, I expressed my regrets and declined the proposal. Ian Jeffrey — another previous recipient of this RPS award — took on the challenge, producing one of the rare such efforts to which absolutely no one ever seems to refer. (John Szarkowski’s Photography Until Now shares the same distinction.)

But I digress. . . .

(To be continued.)