I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and Robert Heinecken continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. They knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle. […]
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Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […] World Press Photo was founded in the Netherlands in 1955 — not coincidentally, the year in which Edward Steichen’s extravaganza, “The Family of Man,” made its debut as a traveling exhibit and a catalogue. That enormously influential show and book undoubtedly exerted a considerable influence on the way that the WPP exhibitions took form when they began. That influence can still be felt today; the individual images for the most part reiterate the classic tropes of that era, the show itself collects and sorts its contents into little more than a yearly variation on the Steichen model. […] I’m not sure if anyone today expects press photography generally, or particular stories told in that form, to change the world; I certainly don’t. At the same time, because we become what we behold, I don’t think that anyone in the field doubts that press photography is a process of perception management, and thus shapes the world in important ways. Much of the decision-making is of course in the hands of management and capital. However, I find it hard to believe that photojournalists and their agencies and their editors are entirely hapless pawns in the hands of witless and/or malevolent but all-powerful publishing cartels. […] |
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Thoughts on the Freelance Life
The publication of such a glib, superficial and ill-considered “psychoanalytic” attack on freelance activity beneath a sensationalized headline was obviously intended as a provocative act; I found myself impelled to respond. A great many of my professional colleagues and close friends — artists, writers, photographers and others — have chosen to exist in what this remarkable diagnosis so condescendingly calls a “lowly status,” and they don’t strike me as inherently any more neurotic than the average late-twentieth-century American. […]