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Charles Gatewood (1942-2016): A Farewell (1)

[Photographer Charles Gatewood died on Thursday, April 28, 2016 in San Francisco. According to his KQED obituary, the hospital attributed his death to “injuries after he fell off his third-story balcony several weeks before.” The New York Times obituary quotes his sister, Betty Gatewood, as saying, “There is no doubt that his death was the […]

Photo Ed: Awaiting the Millennium, 3 (1989)

More and more, teaching artists and art teachers (these are not synonyms) work under short-term contracts of two years or less, moving continuously from job to job. Their tenuous hold on stability is further undermined by the evolution of an underclass of freelance pieceworkers: part-time teachers willing to work for next to nothing, with no protection or benefits. […]

Photo Ed: Awaiting the Millennium, 2 (1989)

Facing up to the challenge of interdisciplinary studies in photography will require much painstaking reassessment of our educational assumptions, priorities, and methodologies. It will also require drastic, even brutal, upgrading of the typically minimal and mediocre standards of research, preparation, thinking and articulation to which students of photography are presently held. No part of that process will make anyone involved in it happy. But there is no way of avoiding that challenge without becoming irrelevant to the medium’s future. […]

Photo Ed: Awaiting the Millennium, 1 (1989)

Certainly photography teachers have done much to develop public awareness of the medium’s history and its influence on our culture. We have also successfully established and elevated those standards of craft which are the gauges for all who work in the medium. Nor have those been our only accomplishments. We have entrenched ourselves firmly — perhaps irrevocably — in the groves of academe. And we have, in record time, glutted the market for art photographs, for career art photographers and for teachers of art photography. […]

AIPAD 2016

You can view AIPAD as a (mostly) non-verbal version of the book that Benjamin planned to produce, comprised entirely of quotations from other sources. Benjamin structured his “Arcades Project” — first conceived in 1927 and unfinished when he died in 1940 — after the glass-roofed shopping malls of 19th-century Paris, epitomizing that “commodification of things” which he saw as the defining characteristic of modernity. […]