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[Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, then a relatively new museum specializing in photography, announced an ambitious plan to bring together the works of dozens of eastern European photographers in a massive group show the next summer. I’d met Charles-Henri Favrod, founding director of […] The Metropolitan Museum has behaved like the latter in regard to photography, with the result that it has become so irrelevant and useless that it is in imminent danger of becoming completely divorced from the living medium. Unless the museum decides to take immediate steps to rectify this, it might do well to consider the possibility of turning its holdings over to any one of several other institutions which would be capable of treating them with the respect they deserve — and proud to do so as well. […] Fundamentally, Mark functions as a portraitist, fascinated by facial expression, body language, and costume. She treats her subjects, implicitly, as collaborators. […] The last thing photography needs, at this point or any other, is a generation of students whose instructors viewed teaching not as a calling but as a sinecure. […] In evaluating photography’s newly-conferred academic respectability, then, it is important to take note of the implicit premises thereof. Wrapping the mantle of scholarly approval around a medium which has received the cold shoulder from birth is surely a significant attempt at redefinition. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014All content of this publication is © copyright 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by A. D. Coleman unless otherwise noted. All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced for commercial purposes without prior written permission. All photos copyright by the individual photographers. "Fair use" allows quotation of excerpts of textual material from this site for educational and other noncommercial purposes.
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