Planet of the Academics: An Interlude (1)

I’ll respond to the substance of Patrick Alt’s Guest Post about his role in the Norsigian/Adams controversy in an upcoming post. But first I feel compelled to address a fundamental misapprehension under which Alt and his staunch defender, Jeff Schneider, appear to operate. This false assumption is three-fold: that (a) I’m an “academic,” (b) therefore grant credence only to other “academics,” and (c) consequently “do not have access” to understandings of photographic practice based on the experience of craft activity, understandings shared by “people who actually make images.”

Planet of the Academics

In effect, in their view, I come from some Planet of the Academics, located in a parallel universe or remote galaxy, in any case a world whose orbit never crosses paths with the world occupied by what Alt refers to repeatedly as “prationers” (by which I take him to mean practitioners). Consequently, by their lights, all inhabitants of Planet of the Academics are clueless concerning the activities of the inhabitants of Planet of the Practitioners — and, one might reasonably infer, vice versa.

A fourth assumption, voiced forthrightly by Schneider (but not by Alt), holds that there’s something suspiciously unmasculine about what’s widely understood as academic labor, historianship, research, and intellectual activity in general.

We do, of course, have academic disciplines no less physically demanding and occasionally risky than large-format landscape photography: archaeology, anthropology, field zoology and field botany, for example. (Though these rarely get to the “Indiana Jones” level of drama.) And many academically based disciplines demand complex technical skills — scientific lab work in various fields, say.

Still, most scholarly projects in the arts and humanities mainly involve reading, writing, looking, thinking, and nosing around in libraries, museums, archives and other repositories to examine documents and artifacts. All of these require craft skills, though less visible ones than are involved in exposing negatives and making prints; but, while they confront one with real obstacles and challenges and frustrations and risks and failures, none of them generally raise a physical sweat.

"Honest John (mule and wagon of photographer George Fiske)," Yosemite, CA, 1875, by George Fiske.

Now, even rigorous and thorough research is surely not as conventionally manly and ostentatiously testosterone-validating as wrangling your view camera plus related equipment up some mountain and making your mule your bitch after dinner by the campfire at the summit. In comparison, therefore, I can see how someone like Schneider can analogize a mere desk-bound scrivener like myself to “a spoiled, pubescent young girl,” “virgins in their tighty whities who like to throw stones from the safety of their firewalls,” and “a closeted homosexual evangelist.” (Click here and scroll down to the Comments area.)

Not to mention, though almost surely on the short list, a namby-pamby lily-livered pantywaist. These represent the familiar tropes of the defensive, anti-intellectual male, often compounded by sexual insecurity that makes it necessary to demean through feminization other males perceived as enemies — a classic symptomology. Having a macho doofus like this berate me in these antiquated town-versus-gown clichés for supposedly uncalled-for attacks on his friend and colleague takes us into the territory of low comedy.

I don’t consider Schneider representative of view-camera specialists, let me add. I doubt very much that Alt instigated this, so I don’t hold him responsible for Schneider’s adolescent bullying. Since Alt doesn’t appear to share Schneider’s attitudes in this regard, I’ll set that aside in order to address what Alt and Schneider have in common — their profoundly mistaken beliefs regarding my relationship to both the academic world and the photography world, and their severely misguided generalizations about the people active professionally in the field of historical research in photography.

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Patrick Alt's website.

Let’s begin with the fact that Patrick Alt has both a BFA and an MFA in photography, his chosen field, the latter considered a “terminal degree” (the highest degree one can get in studio art) — meaning that he’s automatically qualified to teach in an MFA program. My own degree, an MA in English lit and creative writing, isn’t in my professional field, and isn’t a terminal degree. (I did doctoral-level work in a media studies program in the ’80s, but never completed that degree.) Consequently, when I was invited to teach doctoral-level courses in the Cinema Studies department at New York University in the ’80s, I had to pass review for certification by an academic board that approved me on the basis of “equivalent professional experience.” In short, Alt has more formal academic qualifications for the profession he’s pursued than I do for mine. (Schneider, by contrast, states that he’s self-taught in photography.)

Moreover, while I’ve taught in post-secondary programs since 1970, I’ve done so (by choice) on an adjunct basis — that is, freelance, never permanent faculty, never tenured. My connection to the academic environment, therefore, has remained tenuous. My last regular teaching stint, in the Department of Photography, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, ended by my own choice in 1993, almost two decades ago. Since then I’ve taught only occasionally, as visiting faculty, in the U.S. and abroad. Not exactly the career path of the professional academic.

Given that I’ve only taught as adjunct faculty, I’ve had no institutional base for my research and writing activity, all of which I’ve undertaken (and subsidized) as an independent scholar. And since in 1970 I turned down the one offer I’ve ever had of a staff position at a periodical (the New York Times), in order to maintain my independence, I’ve done all my writing and publishing as a freelance. While I’ve placed some of my work in scholarly journals, and am frequently cited by authors of articles that appear in such periodicals, much of my writing has appeared (by my choice) in publications not considered academically noteworthy — the Village Voice, the Times, the New York Observer, assorted photo magazines, etc. — for non-academic readerships. Of the roughly 2000 essays I’ve published since 1967, no more than ten percent have appeared in scholarly journals. Also not the typical writing and publishing track record of the average academic writer.

I can therefore certify that the schools I attended, the schools at which I’ve taught, and my “academic” credentials generally have almost no relevance to whatever credibility I’ve achieved as an independent historian, critic, and curator. These lines on my CV have mattered only during the initial employment vetting in a very few post-secondary teaching situations. No editor or publisher has ever inquired on that score. None of the hundreds of schools at which I’ve been invited to give public lectures or served a stint as visiting critic have concerned themselves with such matters.

For better or worse (better, I think), my reputation as a scholar, such as it is, comes from the quality of what I’ve produced in that role, not from successful passage through some specific grad program or possession of a “sheepskin.” Thus, as criticism, as historianship, and as research, it’s primarily been tested for more than four decades by my peers in the field and, more broadly, by my readers. That doesn’t mean they agree with all my conclusions; it means they haven’t been able to impeach my scholarship, and have instead learned that they can rely on it.

"Tower of Ivory," stained glass window, St. Ignatius Church, Chestnut Hill, MA. Photograph by John Workman

So much for the Alt/Schneider fantasy that I reside in some ivory tower, privileged and protected from the realities of the workaday world or any commitment to serious craftsmanship. In fact, as a lifelong freelance, almost every day I get up and, with my second cup of coffee, walk down to my home office to deal with the question of how I’m going to pay the bills using my knowledge base and my craft skills. This probably makes me closer kin to Alt than he realizes. (I’ve no idea how Schneider makes his living.)

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As for my presumed insistence on academic credentials as a basis for taking seriously the expertise of others: Many of the people I’ve known over the years as writers on photography and consider colleagues — Gail Buckland, Lyle Rexer, Richard Whelan, Donna-Lee Phillips — haven’t enjoyed the dubious benefits of academic sinecures, instead working, by necessity or by choice, as independent scholars, curators, etc. More than a few of them came to photography, as I did, from an educational background in some field other than those we might consider most logical as training grounds for research work in this medium (photo history and art history, first and foremost). Sometimes it even works the other way around: Helmut Gernsheim, to name one, started out as a working photographer, with formal education in the practice of his medium, then went on to accomplish notable scholarly projects.

I’d call none of these individuals “academics” (though several of them have taught). My respect for the research contributions of all of them, and numerous others, depends in no way either on where they went to school, what they studied there, or where they eventually taught (if they did). It depends entirely on what they produced in their professional capacities as scholars, including the imbedded evidence therein of their commitment to the rigorous standards of scholarship.

"Man with sheepskin," William Henry Jackson, 1895.

Thus I can’t imagine what Schneider means when he writes that Alt made his contribution to the Team Norsigian report “without the benefit of a sheepskin that seems to be the only litmus for true immutable credibility.” Alt in fact has “a sheepskin” (by which I assume Schneider means a college diploma), two of them in fact, whose legitimacy I’ve never questioned.

Schneider also writes, “Patrick’s MFA seems to disqualify him from finding traction in the halls of academia in which you and the rest of the petrified antediluvians seem to covet.” Tortured grammar and syntax aside, this fatuous generalization simply doesn’t pertain to me. In fact, I can’t recall ever factoring anyone’s academic background into my assessment of something they’ve published, nor into my critical evalution of their imagery.

Similarly, I’ve no idea what Alt means when he writes, “Your arrogance in assuming the only path to knowledge must run through some graduate academic program is unbecoming of you and an insult to me.” I’ve never suggested that Alt’s irrelevance to Team Norsigian’s project resulted from his lack of any specific graduate degree. As a case in point, my own “path to knowledge” about photography didn’t “run through some graduate academic program,” so I’d hardly demand that of anyone else. What I did learn in college, and where those studies have stood me in good stead throughout my professional life, concerned the distinctions they inculcated in me between opinion and conjecture on the one hand and research, hard evidence, and knowledge on the other — and also concerned the standard procedures for formal inquiry and verification of evidence on which scholarship and genuine expertise in all fields bases itself.

Where one acquires one’s knowledge of the methods and strictures of formal scholarship doesn’t matter; one’s awareness of them, and application of them in one’s work, does. That Patrick Alt’s education in studio arts programs several decades ago scanted such grounding doesn’t surprise me, as most such curricula back then saw these skill sets as irrelevant to the working life of the professional artist. And I wouldn’t hold it against Alt that (as his report to Team Norsigian makes clear) he lacks such abilities, insofar as they don’t pertain to his production as a picture-maker.

Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

But with that report, and comments he’s made publicly about the Norsigian negatives, Ansel Adams’s work and career, and other matters, Alt stepped squarely into the territory of scholarship. Do I then hold him accountable to the established craft standards of that discipline? Damn straight — just as I’d expect him to do the same with me should I put a show of my photographs up on a gallery wall. Alt chose to put his credibility at stake by posing as an expert qualified to authenticate anonymous negatives as the work of a master photographer; this wasn’t forced on him. Neither he nor his chums get to piss and moan when the inevitable questions about accuracy, proof, and other fundamental issues of authentication get asked and he has no convincing answers. Nor do they get to whinge about unfairness if some jeering results when he shuffles the deck, shuffles his feet, and changes his mind, as he does in the Guest Post that appears here.

(To be continued.)

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