The most widely distributed type of writing about photography that I found in the late ’60s appeared in camera mags like Popular Photography and Modern Photography ― tutorial advice for amateurs, intended primarily to help them improve their technical skills. Mostly it was written by amateurs, by which I mean people with no notable professional accomplishments or reputations as picture-makers. None of them qualified as critics, in any meaningful sense of the term, with the exception of the late Ralph Hattersley. Which perhaps explains why, to a man (they were almost all male), they went on record dismissing Robert Frank’s classic book, The Americans as incompetent, unpatriotic trash, and never felt obligated to eat their words.

What I find at most forums in which members comment about each others’ images mirrors that Pop Photo mode of discussion, and has roughly the same value and durability. Worth noting that there’s no comparable discourse that I know of in any other medium. That is, no print or online periodicals exist to entertain and tutor amateur/wannabe painters, sculptors, etchers, engravers, lithographers, etc. Nor have I encountered any online forums in which unfledged practitioners of those forms post their works and solicit input from other entry-level newbies. This is unique to photography, and bizarre.

I would not expect meaningful commentary about images to emerge from such an environment. A camera-club mentality predominates therein, as it did ― still does ― in mags like Pop Photo. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in those sites merely replicate what that community considers “good shots,” and seek praise, not criticism. They seem mostly unaware of the medium’s field of ideas, historically or at present. They don’t read the work of the field’s committed critics; more than a few of them consider that work irrelevant, as my own brief involvement with such forums demonstrated.

With that said, I’m more concerned about the absence of substantive yet readable photo criticism in the mainstream media, which I bemoaned in my fall 2011 London lecture, “Dinosaur Bones.” As I proposed then, the presence of such a discourse in widely distributed platforms (both print and online) aimed at the general audience would provide exactly the kinds of models you and I find missing. This would also give an informed dialogue about the medium a level of credibility and influence that it doesn’t enjoy right now.

I’d like to think that, in my own oddball way, I’ve provided useful examples of how to talk about photographs, photographers, and photography over the decades. But I’ve had only intermittent access to mass-media general-audience platforms, and my last one dried up fifteen year ago. Still, I do what I can, though it feels like pissing in the wind.

(I get tired of both of beautifully printed but pretentiously described images and technically poorly done images with equal or greater loads of crap tacked on.)

There is this enormous gap between the work of most of the vast number of actual practitioners and what gallery speak actually looks at and cares about.

I am of two minds, at least, about this gap. I think criticism needs to extend beyond the narrow idea-driven pieces to those done with no intent but to capture beauty and interest or convey ideas. (I want to read a good book on how war or street photographers actually structure their art to take advantage of the basic cues in human perception and understanding.)
On the other hand, the bullshitization of picture speak diminishes the importance and value of my beloved craft.
There must be some medium – happy or unsettled or not.

I am active in several amateur photo communities and I despair of getting most of the members to actually even consider any comment about a piece of work that gets much above the level of technical perfection or its lack. There seems to be no model for critics-junior-grade to look at the analysis of a photographer’s work that covers the spectrum of its attempted achievement – what is the intent, how well does it achieve, what are the technical issues that contribute/diminish? Why does it often seem as if photography in criticism is an art that doesn’t give much of a crap about the craft and vice versa?

There is no modelling of the understanding that should go into the full appreciation of images.

So I hate galleries because the actual images are often poorly done by the photographer (but usually excellently by the printer) and not nearly as original as the catalogs.

I hate forums because the work is often poor technically but more because the intent is only to reproduce in some attractive – not necessarily pretty – way.

Most distressing is that I have a difficult time reading criticism (of photography) because it seems to have no contact with anything I know of – or can produce.

I did finish Let Us Now . . ., but more out of a sense of obligation that out of love for Agee’s prose, which in this book I find feverishly overwrought and desperately self-flagellating in its bleeding-heart white-liberal apologia for his position as a privileged outside observer. Along with Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, it was a canonical text for post-adolescent photographers of a certain MoMA persuasion in the late 1960s through the late 1970s. So, as both a critic and a teacher, I felt a need to spend serious time with these in their entirety, in order to understand their impact on our field. Were it not for that, I might have set the Evans/Agee book aside halfway through the written part.

Odd that Friedlander would defend it in that excoriating way, since while he’s not at all the anti-Evans he’s definitely the anti-Agee, in terms of artistic temperament ― far more Eliotic. I’m thinking here of Eliot’s comment in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921): “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

My question comes from my belief that Evans had done a splendid job of photographing the tenant farmers and their families but Agee had mostly written about himself. The book cannot stand without the photos; the photographs have achieved a life of their own. I did acknowledge that some few parts were beautifully written; I especially like the chapter “Near a Church.”

Judging from the reaction of the panel and certain members of the audience, one would gather that I was the anti-Christ. Friedlander stood up and compared me to someone who looks at a part of a painting and condemns the whole work, since I had admitted to not finishing the book. That seemed to end the discussion. The philistine (moi) skulked off at the end of the evening.

The next day I happened to meet a Professor of English at Northeastern University. He said “I’m sorry about what happened to you last night; I teach that book but I’ve never finished it either.” Recently, I noticed that in Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Great Depression, Professor Morris Dickstein discloses that “When I’ve assigned it to undergraduates, the results have been disastrous.”

A. David Wunsch

At the same time, business is apparently booming for professional vacation photographers ― who will document your casual, private experience. See “Don’t Forget to Pack a Photographer” at the Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2012.

There’s also a booming market for digital photo booths available for rental at weddings and other events. I’ve seen a bunch of these at the tech expos I attend. Here’s a link to one, ShutterBooth.

So we’re turning the documentation of our nuptials and other formal events over to amateurs, while professionalizing the production of our vacation pix. Go ask.

A disturbing and amusing piece in today’s NYT (Sunday). It’s in the Sunday Styles section page 18. Now that the news of the week in review now contains nothing but banal opinion pieces I skip right to the trivia and hunt for inter-racial gay marriage announcements. But what caught my eye today are 2 pieces on the changed nature of wedding photography. Today everyone is a wedding photographer. I wonder if the glass-plate view camera people had a similar experience when roll film was introduced circa 1890.

I just read your piece on Minor White in my newly purchased copy of Critical Focus. Excellent. I liked the way you dealt with the question of whether to preserve his “sequences” in the show.

David

Glad we could help with your domain names!

Keep up the good work.