Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

My Camera in the Olive Grove, 1 (1975)

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. […]

Allen A. Dutton Turns 93

The surrealist photocollages of Allen A. Dutton began to circulate in the 1960s, linking him to a cohort in photography that, collectively, challenged the photo establishment’s dictates regarding acceptable subject matter and content while, simultaneously, extending the range of approved craft practices. This put him in the company of Jerry Uelsmann, Les Krims, Arthur Tress, Bea Nettles, and other transgressive spirits expanding the definition of photography. […]

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. […]

Bad Day in Vevey (1)

Never underestimate the long-term havoc that determined arts-education careerists can wreak in a short time, or the permanent damage (including financial damage) such rampaging functionaries can do to students, faculties, programs, and even entire schools. […]