What we need, it seems to me, is a group of critics less interested in equating themselves with photographers or aligning themselves with curators, gallery owners, and other critics, and more actively committed to functioning as articulate intermediaries between the work of photographers and the largest potential audience for that work. […]
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Somehow, despite the separate and combined successes of K-12 photo-education, visual literacy, and media literacy, the ability to attend closely and thoughtfully to photographic images, and to analyze and evaluate them critically, has yet to become a widespread skill among the populace at large. This does not bode well for the future. […] What gets scanted is “photography literacy,” the ability to understand, analyze, and have a critical relationship to still photographs of any kind, perhaps most importantly those one did not make oneself — the grounding necessary to “read” those images, valued as the visual equivalent of reading comprehension in relation to written texts not of one’s own devising. […] From my outsider’s perspective, the visual literacy movement has possibly missed an important boat by failing to recognize the relevance, significance, and longevity of the K-12 photo-education movement, and by not encouraging or even undertaking the creation of an annotated history thereof. […] No matter how pampered and groomed, how sleek and well-fed they appear to us superficially, can we fail to understand why, when we ask these starvelings to make art that might nourish us, they not only “prefer not to” (like Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener) but couldn’t possibly do so — even if they wanted to with all their hearts? […] |
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