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Ring In the New: 2015

I don’t aspire to greatness as an artist, or even to consideration in that category. If I’ve exceeded your expectations of the rewards of engaging with criticism, I’d prefer to think that I’ve expanded your definition of what criticism can do, rather than that I’ve stepped into some parallel universe and switched roles. […]

Birthday Musings 12/19/14

Professionally speaking, this past year proved unusually uneventful, even by recent standards. Travel no longer holds much attraction for me (been there, done that), so I welcomed the chance to spend most of the year here at home, enjoying the changes of the seasons and our daily routines. […]

“The True Meaning of Pictures” (3)

About my “belittling,” “infuriating,” and “ignorant” comments on Shelby Lee Adams’s work: These come from about 3 minutes’ worth of film clips in Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary, “The True Meaning of Pictures.” Those clips were extracted from several hours’ worth of interview. Inevitably, much context gets lost in the editing process. Doesn’t mean I don’t stand by what I said — just that these snippets oversimplify what I said. That’s inevitable in such a film, and nothing for which I fault Baichwal. […]

Bad Day in Vevey (3)

On a purely practical, bottom-line level, this gang of five — Michel Berney, director of the CEPV; Christian Rossier (on the technical faculty of the CEPV)Pierre Keller of ECAL; local entrepreneur Vincent Juillerat; and Anne-Catherine Lyon, director of the cantonal department of education — took a post-secondary photography program that operated in the black and turned it into a losing proposition, with no clientele, in the space of about 18 months. How very Swiss of them. […]

Bad Day in Vevey (2)

Apparently you intend to “professionalize the work of the CEPV students and to improve their relationship to the field” by removing them in their culminating third year from the guidance of an unprecedented group of established high-profile professional names in those various territories of photography — famous and influential senior figures whose connection to these students can benefit them in many ways — and instead placing those students under the strict supervision of a cluster of Swiss nonentities. The pedagogical rationale for this escapes me. […]