M.S.: In 1977 you organized a conference on photo criticism at the Visual Studies Workshop. The proceedings were published in Afterimage¹ and had a real effect on my intellectual development. Recently, thinking back on this, I realized that many of the persons at that conference are no longer writing. How did you manage to survive while others drifted away?

A.D.C.: I think there are a number of possible answers to that. I know a number of those folks and I know where they are now -- people like Dan Meinwald, Chuck Hagen, or Martha Chahroudi, and others. I think part of the answer would be that on a very simple and professional level it's not easy to make a living working in this particular narrow specialty. That's just a part of it. I think another part of it is that while Visual Studies was certainly teaching people to develop their critical faculties and giving them exposure to criticism, it was not really providing training in making a living as a writer -- whereas it was providing training in museum curatorship, for example. If you specialized in photo-curatorship and graduated from Visual Studies, especially in the late 1970s, you had a leg up on the field in terms of the Workshop's intense and prophetic concentration on a lot of these issues.

So someone like Martha Chahroudi went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example. I can't remember where Dan Meinwald went, but Charles Desmarais ended up at the Riverside museum [the California Museum of Photography]. Visual Studies seemed to be a pipeline for that, more than it was for criticism, simply because in a sense there isn't a pipeline for photography criticism. It's still not really understood as a significant discipline. It's still treated as a minor subset of art criticism. And that's still the case 17 years since those conferences I organized took place.

I think that's a part of it. It's really only within the last 5 or 6 years that I've been making anything that I would consider -- I just turned 50. Given the fact that I've put 25 years into the field, I'm just now beginning to make the kind of income that I consider reasonable and comfortable for someone at mid-life who's been in the field this long. It took me somewhere between 15 and 20 years to make that happen for myself: to find a way of professionalizing my own practice, just as a working writer, to such an extent that I can make a living at it.

So a lot of those people are still writing; Dan still writes, Martha still does some writing, Chuck Hagen has gone on to be basically a full-time critic and editor. A lot of those people still write, but they do it, by necessity, part-time, because it's not easy to make a living at it. [Note: In 1990 Terry Barrett published a most useful tutorial text, Criticizing Photographs, that grew directly out of a paper he'd co-authored with Pam Linehan and presented at that conference. -- A.D.C.]

M.S.: You've touched on what was going to be my last question in this interview. With your writing talent and intellectual ability you could be a major talent in any number of areas that would have guaranteed you larger audiences than the photography arena and been more lucrative. Do you have any regrets that you chose to write about photography instead of some other area?

A.D.C.: I certainly appreciate your estimation of my overall talent. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I'm certainly flattered by it. No, I don't have any regrets. I didn't have any particular desire to be an art critic per se. That is, I was drawn very specifically to the range of issues that photography, it seemed to me, very precisely posited. Philosophical issues, perceptual issues, issues concerning mass media and visual communication, political issues, social issues, etcetera. There I mean not only the issues addressed by the imagery, but the issues inherent in the medium itself. I was drawn to that complex, that nexus of issues to address. I found that very provocative

I could probably have gone and sold my talents on Madison Avenue; I had some minor success as a copywriter in a publishing house. I could have done something like that. Frankly, that was never of interest to me. I always wanted to earn a living with my medium, with my craft, but I did not want to be, in that sense, a hack writer selling my talents for merchandising purposes.

There are other subjects that have interested me -- theater, music, politics, cooking, and things like that -- that I've written about to some extent, though nowhere as extensively, and that's certainly not as widely known as my writing about photography. I have always tried to break my writing out of what I see as the kind of ghetto of photography-specific publications, and have not been as successful at that as I would have wished. I don't have a good explanation for that. I keep trying, and every now and then something happens. I'm certainly happy writing for a publication like the New York Observer, going on 6 years now, which puts me in front of a general audience again as I was at the [Village] Voice and the [New York] Times, because that's where I really feel I do the most good, in that environment, with what I'm trying to do. I feel I reach the best and most diversified kind of audience there. Not that I in any way disdain the photography audience. By no means. Because that's a very important part of my constituency. But my preference is to be in general-audience publications, because I think part of what I do -- I think I'm very useful as a synthesist. I think I have a capacity to take complex ideas and make them accessible to a broad general audience, and in that way to enlarge the dialogue around photography, which has always been one of my goals.

A lot of that, Marc, is just the luck of the draw. That is, I've tried to get into certain kinds of magazines and haven't succeeded. I've gotten into other magazines. And I do have a tendency to go where I'm wanted. There is no way of forcing the issue, of making, I don't know, Esquire magazine run a column on contemporary visual imagery. I've tried; I've approached them on several occasions. I've approached Rolling Stone with that idea. I've approached Harper's magazine, I've approached Interview magazine. I've gone any place I though my work might be viable. The results have been the results. If that's a failure of mine as a self-presenter, then it's a failure of mine. If it's a failure on the part of those publications to recognize the importance of this, then it's their failure. If it's just a reality, which is how I take it, then it's just a reality.

In a roundabout way what I'm saying is: No, no regrets. I've worked very hard as a professional to get my ideas out to the maximum possible audience and the optimum possible audience. I don't feel I've reached the optimum audience for my work, but I get to communicate regularly to something like 50,000 people through the New York Observer, and something like 50,000 people through Camera and Darkroom, and maybe 20,000 people through Photo Metro, and a number of people through European Photography and other European magazines. So I've got an audience of something like a quarter of a million people, 150,000 people. I can't complain.

I've had access for five years to the New York Times to say what I've wanted. I've had access to the Village Voice. I've had access to the New York Observer. I've never had major ongoing editorial struggles; I've had some editorial conflicts, but they've usually happened at the tail end of the relationship with a publication. What I've written has not been seriously interfered with by editors. I really don't have any complaints professionally. I have goals and ambitions and even some frustrated ambitions, but I don't have complaints, and certainly not any regrets.

M.S.: [One] of the components of your writing that distinguishes you from a number of other critics is your ability to integrate almost any topic you can imagine . . . into your writing about photography. How do you manage to do this? You must read an incredible amount.

A.D.C.: I don't know that I can answer that, in the sense that I don't have a methodology [for that process]. I do read widely in a lot of disciplines. It's something I've done virtually all my life. I read all kinds of periodicals, including periodicals that give me access to the foreign press, so I get that outsider's view of the States and of the world, a non-U.S. view of things. I'm interested in sociology and psychology and history, so I look very broadly for what nourishes me.

To some extent I'm an eclectic, and to some extent I'm a scavenger: little scraps of data that cross my path usually end up in a, I wouldn't call it a clippings pile, a kind of clippings heap, a kind of mulch heap that surrounds me in my workspace. Those things sit there and germinate, and sometimes they just decay and lose whatever stimulus they originally had and sometimes they connect up with something else in my head. I don't know if it's a collagist's mentality or what, but things gnaw at me and tickle me, and eventually either build up a kind of stew or head of steam around a certain idea -- where something begins to click, and I say, "I see certain relationships here and here and here," or they don't; then maybe they just go back in the heap, or maybe I lose all interest in them, or they become outdated and I discard them.

For me, part of what was exciting about photography from the very outset, when I first got interested in it, was that it seemed to me to be connected to everything. It seemed to me an arena of discourse, a position, from which one could find connection to many things: not necessarily everything, but many things that were going on in the world, many different kinds of issues. Maybe in a roundabout way this is another answer to the question you asked me at the outset, because I didn't come into this from photography; I came into this with a background in English literature and creative writing. I came into this with a background in left politics and the peace movement and the civil rights movement. I came into this with a sense that anything, not just photography, that I had chosen to write about I would try to bring a broad perspective to bear on, and certainly would not be writing about simply from the standpoint of a photographer or what was then taken to be photography's history. I would try to make as many connections as possible, in part to persuade a broad audience that there was really rich material to be thinking about here -- that photography wasn't something that was of interest only if you were a photographer, it wasn't something that was of interest only if you wanted to collect photographs. That it was of interest regardless of who you were, regardless of what your work was in the culture -- that you had a need to be thinking critically about photography. That this would be useful to you, that this would enrich your life in some way, would empower you, because that's what I felt when I came to photography and found it in the mid- to late 1960s.

So I don't have a methodology for this -- at least not a conscious one. I don't sit down and say, okay, how am I going to cast my net broadly on this? Sometimes, in fact, I feel the obligation is to look very closely at those specific photographs and really speak very precisely to them without in fact contextualizing them much more widely. But I think it's a process that I'm engaged in, yet I can't really specify further, in the same way that it's hard for me to judge my own writing.

M.S.: You mention that you read the foreign press, and it seems to me that over the years you have made an effort to include worldwide issues and events in your work. A number of your columns have been written from Europe, about European events. Have you consciously tried to look worldwide for material to write about? Another thing I've noticed is the increasing attention the photography world has been paying to third-world and Japanese photography. Is there no one major center for photography now? Good work seems to be coming from all over the world. What's going on?

A.D.C.: Well, I'm not sure I can tell you exactly what's going on, but my sense certainly is that we are seeing the emergence of -- or the recognition of the existence of -- what I'm coming to call the "international image community," which is a kind of version of the EEC in Europe. That is, there is an international traffic in photographic images, and there is hardly a culture in the world, at least a culture that's dealing with current technology, that does not have a photographic aspect, and does not have a history of photography within that culture.

The kind of historianship of photography that was standard when I first got into the medium -- we're talking about the middle to late 1960s -- the only really available histories of photography, aside from a couple in German, there was Gernsheim in English, there was Newhall in English and there was Taft's Photography and the American Scene and Peter Pollack's book, and that was about it for the history of photography. They were basically either U.S.-centric or British-centric/Western European. Gernsheim was sort of British/German in his orientation and there were a few others like PointonneŽ and some French historians, but that was really it. I was not a hugely sophisticated person, certainly not in terms of photography, when I first encountered those people, but those biases were fairly clear to me -- that Newhall was writing a North American history of photography and that Gernsheim was writing basically a British or European history of photography, and that they had left out the rest of the world. I don't say that to castigate them; they did what they had the scope to do and what they had access to materials to do and what they had the capacity to do.

But what I think has happened since that period, the mid-'60s, has been the emergence of, let's call it a kind of micro-study, or a kind of cross-sectional study, in which we look at either a specific issue in photography and try to look at it broadly or we look at a different culture or country and the history of photography in that culture or country. So I would think, at this point, if you could pick up a history of photography -- just offhand I would assume that there's now a book on the history of photography in Sweden. I certainly know that there's a history of photography in Scandinavia. In any case, there are many different histories of photography in particular countries, so that we're past the point where it's possible to have a single-volume history of photography that's credible anymore. Even someone like Naomi Rosenblum with her A World History of Photography, which is a very ambitious project and which is a very modest project at the same time, doesn't really encompass everything; she tries to, but she can't, at least not effectively. The medium is too big, it's too widespread. It's in too many cultures in too many ways for one volume to effectively address it all.

I simply became aware of that; and I became aware, I'd say by the mid-1970s, of what I considered to be my own parochialism as a critic. Not that I was in any gung ho nationalistic way pro-American photography, just that that's what I knew the most about. Simply because there were not a whole lot of -- or I did not have access at that point to a whole lot of -- European publications or Japanese publications or Latin American publications. So mostly what I found out about was U.S. photography; and most of the discourse in the U.S. was very limited to U.S. photography. That began to bother me, that's all. I just began looking and over the next few years, I'd say starting with some degree of effectiveness in the early 1980s, began to make connection with my European colleagues and to do a bit of traveling and that turned into more traveling by the late '80s, so as to have more of a sense of what was happening elsewhere, with the goal of becoming genuinely international in my outlook and losing as much of my American-centrism or U.S.-centrism as I could. With some degree of success. I now think I'm beginning to get a bit of a handle -- although it's too big for anyone to really encompass, again -- but I'm beginning to have more of a sense of the true internationalism of the medium, which doesn't mean obviously that I can speak authoritatively, in the authoritative way that a Japanese critic could, about Japanese photography. Even though I may write about that, it's very clear that I'm writing about that from the perspective of someone from the U.S. who is not Japanese and doesn't even speak or read Japanese. My insight is an outsider's insight, as distinct from an insider's insight.

M.S.: In the coming year you will have six books coming out. Could you discuss them?

A.D.C.: One of them, which I just finished the manuscript for and submitted to the University of New Mexico Press, is a new collection of essays called Depth of Field, which has been long promised and in fact in terms of that title has been promised for years and years and has finally taken final form as a set of, I think it's eleven or twelve essays, none of them reviews, none of them occasional pieces, all of them more theoretically oriented or research-oriented essays. Not pedantic, I hope; I don't think of myself as a pedant -- but these are somewhat more scholarly in tone and more theoretical than, let's say, the work in Light Readings. Closer, I guess -- at least in terms of what's in Light Readings -- to something like the essay on the directorial mode; in fact there's a second piece on that subject in the new book.

Some of my early research on the lens is in that book; and there's an essay on William Mortensen, a reconsideration of Edward Curtis, a piece on the question of redaction that I raise somewhat in my essay on Brett Weston . . . . That one is now to some extent in the pipeline; that is, the University of New Mexico [Press] has at least my version of the final manuscript, and I'm assuming that that will be out between next fall and spring 1995. They will reprint at the same time Light Readings, which has been out of print now for some years, even in the paperback edition, which I'm very glad to see getting back in print. That will come out either simultaneously or shortly thereafter. I'm hoping to expand that slightly; there's about 60 manuscript pages' worth of material I had to cut for space reasons from the first edition that I would like to restore to the second edition. There are a couple of holes in there. You know, when you start cutting you get to a point when you are very close to the bone and it gets very painful and these are the painful excisions that I'm hoping to restore. I'm not sure that's going to happen. I'll know more about that over the course of the spring. Those will come out presumably fall 1994 or spring 1995. [Note: Fall '95 is the projected publication date for both; and Light Readings will contain the material discussed above. -- A.D.C.]

At the same time I've just begun editing a book for a publisher based in Munich, Nazraeli Press. They've done a couple of Bill Jay's books, a Fred Sommer book, and so on. They contacted me this last summer and asked me to put together a book for them; what we agreed on is a selection of the best of the material that's been appearing in my "Letters From" [column] in Photo Metro over the last five years, 1988-1993. That will be a selection of the cream of the reportage and the book and exhibit reviews and other kinds of commentary that I've been publishing in the New York Observer, mostly, but also some of it written for Photo Metro and some of it for a few other publications. That should be out also in that same time range, as a high-quality paperback book. They have reasonably good distribution in the States, excellent distribution in Europe. [University of] New Mexico [Press] has good distribution in the States, reasonable distribution in Europe, so I'm hoping that these books will find an audience in both places.

For a number of years now I've been talking to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson; they were interested in my "archives," meaning my correspondence files and other materials, my looseleaf binders of clippings of publications, and so forth. We have finally, although we haven't resolved on a final price, we have sort of agreed to agree, that my materials from 1968-1993 are going to go there. In conjunction with that, they're going to publish a 25-year bibliography that also will come out sometime during this same 1994-95 period; a bibliography of -- if you counted up the total number of items, about 1500 different publications from that period. We may also -- we're negotiating on this -- produce that on a diskette. There might be diskettes with this data tucked into the volume, which would be very exciting. I would like to see this become a database; in fact, if there's anyone out there working on or creating an electronic bulletin board or database situation who's looking for something, Barkis is willing. I'm available for discussion on this. I think that's a very exciting possibility. Because, as you saw from the material I sent you, I've been publishing in a lot of very diverse places, especially in recent years; and a lot of what I've published has simply not crossed the paths of many people in photography. I think this will make some of that material more accessible than it has been. [Note: This is now planned for mid-'95. -- A.D.C.]

Then there are two kids' books in a series called "Looking at Photographs" that Chronicle books is producing. I'm just in the process of finishing up the text on the first of those, the first of two, and if those two do well there will be another two down the pike. It's for an audience of 8-to-12-year olds. That's been a very interesting challenge to me, to write for that audience and really find some way of taking my ideas and putting them into a vocabulary and a thought structure that I think someone that age might find accessible and exciting, and have my editors agree. It's not a book about picture-making; that is, it's not a "how-to" book about photography. It's about reading photographs. That's been a very provocative and expansionary challenge for me to work on. S, those two should also in theory be out sometime in 1994 or 1995. [I ended up authoring only one of the first two volumes; it's due out in April '95. -- A.D.C.] Basically, that's it. Then I've got a couple of other projects in the can, waiting to go.

M.S.: Don't you have a new edition of The Grotesque in Photography coming out too?

A.D.C.: I thought I had a publisher for that, but it fell through; so I'm more or less back to square one, which means really that I'm continuing to gather materials and expand the study and I'm looking for a publisher. What I'd like to do with that, and with my project on the lens before photography, is to do a combination publication/exhibition. Possibly with some kind of video program -- a half- hour video program, let's say --accompanying it, as a kind of synergistic package. That's a project that really needs some sponsorship, in the form of a publisher or someone willing to travel the exhibit.

M.S.: Are you attempting to make a whole new edition of the Grotesque in Photography?

A.D.C.: It's 17 years down the pike since I published that [first] edition. In some ways, when I look back at it now, I think that the book was, I wouldn't quite say premature, it certainly was anticipatory and maybe even a bit prophetic. I knew at that point of the work of Joel-Peter Witkin. I had seen some of it as early as 1971 in fact, but it didn't look anything like the work that emerged six months to a year after that book came out. There's work by Andres Serrano, there's work by Cindy Sherman, there's work by many newer photographers since that book came out. There's also all kinds of work that I couldn't get my hands on or didn't know about -- by people who were already active in the field -- at the time I was doing the book. So, in a sense, that book was a very first and very rough survey of the area; it carved out the territory, but I don't think it really did it the full justice I feel I would want to do now.

I would want to rewrite the text; I would certainly reedit the images. There's a lot of material I would seek out that I have notes on or photocopies of or slides of that I would seek out for a new edition. There's work I would leave out; I don't think there are people I would leave out, but there are certainly images I would leave out. I'd look for a much more scholarly presentation of the material. The publishers in that case wanted a fairly flamboyant presentation, and they went to a magazine-design style. It just looks very '70s to me right now. There were things I didn't have any control over -- things like pictures being bled to the edge of the page or run across the gutter -- that I would fight very hard against at this juncture, feeling maybe a little more powerful than I felt then.

I would pull back from that and do a more scholarly version. It was a mass-market book; they didn't want footnotes. I had to fight to get even a minimal bibliography in. And I would certainly want to do this as a somewhat more scholarly presentation in terms of the text, in terms of the arguments and the substantiation of the argument. I've had 17 years to think about the subject, so my ideas have changed or evolved or grown since then. Yeah, I would do it differently. This isn't to begrudge that book. I'm very proud of that book. It opened the door for a lot of things, and no one has come close to touching it.

M.S.: I recently had a situation come up at my workplace where a woman I work with had just seen the Mapplethorpe photographs for the first time and she was very upset. In talking things over with her one of the points I made concerned the effect Joel-Peter Witkin's work would have made at the time of the NEA controversy. If you had the opportunity to explain to this person why this work is important, what would you say?

A.D.C.: First of all, in terms of Witkin, I think he didn't come up because at that point he had not received public monies. I have since heard a rumor that Jesse Helms is planning a new attack on this whole issue and it's going to be centered around Joel-Peter Witkin becauseWitkin has recently received NEA money, or some kind of federal support. I haven't been able to verify that. It wouldn't surprise me. I wasstartled that Joel-Peter hadn't become an issue, but I ended up assuming that it was simply that the right -- very intelligently, I think -- restricted its commentary to the issue of public funding. I think that was a very strategically savy ploy, and not, by the way, an incorrect one. I've got a lot of questions about how public money should be expended and what say the population should have over it in terms of art sponsorship. Anyhow, leaving that issue aside -- whether public money should be used to support Mapplethorpe's work or Witkin's work or Serrano's work or what have you -- my feeling is that there is art whose function is to disturb us. That is, it is one function of art to disturb us: to unsettle us, to challenge our preconceived ideas and our set of assumptions. There is other art whose function is to soothe us and numb us and corroborate our belief systems. And I don't have a problem with the existence of either. I see them as two different functions of art.

Sometimes art that starts out being one of those becomes the other. The f.64 movement at one time was a shock to people and a challenge. The very style in which they were working was considered to be shocking and challenging and disturbing. It's since become entirely acceptable and in fact is no longer in that sense disturbing to anyone to look at. At the same time, imagery that was once thought of as innocent sometimes becomes reconsidered and for one reason or another becomes disturbing. So it's not that work is permanently one or the other of these, but that's some of what art does, that's all, and if you don't want to be disturbed by art or literature or whatever then stay out of libraries and stay out of museums and stay out of galleries, or at least don't go to them without reading reviews first to tell you whether this work is likely to upset your belief system or not.

M.S.: A few years ago, when the NEA controversy was in full bloom, letters were showing up in the newspaper questioning federal funding for the arts, especially as people saw things like school lunch programs being cut. What are your thoughts on public spending for the arts?

A.D.C.: I think it's healthy for any government to provide some kind of support to its nation's cultural life. I think that's part of what a citizenry normally expects, at least in the contemporary world. I think that per se, symbolically, there's nothing wrong with that, and I think it should be encouraged. What the amount should be, proportionate to other things like school lunches and sheltering the homeless -- I mean, frankly, my concern is with food and housing first and art second. I'm perfectly willing to argue that art is essential for the full rich life of any individual, but it's certainly not on the top of the list before getting fed or getting clothed or having a warm place to sleep. I think that's a whole other question, as to how much should be spent proportionate to this or that national need.

The fact of the matter is that, compared to most other Western nations at any rate, we spend a pathetically small amount on the arts and, conversely, piss away an enormous amount on military spending, much of which is in fact quit literally pissed away, much of which is pork-barreled and scammed and overcharged and so on. I think it was Merce Cunningham, talking to the U.S. Senate at one point, who said that the entire budget of the NEA was one foot on a battleship, as a comparative cost. So there's a level on which that argument is ridiculous. If we were talking about a huge amount of money being spent, that would be one thing. We're not, really, so I think there's every reason to spend as much as we are spending on the arts and maybe more.

In fact, every poll that I've seen from the Lou Harris organization or other polling organizations over the years that I've been a working critic indicates that the American public is spending more time involved with looking at art in various forms -- I'm including dance and theater and so forth -- and believes firmly that there should be at least as much money, if not more money, spent on government subsidy of the arts as was being spent at the given moment of those polls. I think the popular support is there for that, and I think that it's symbolically a right thing to do.

Then we get to the question of what kind of support there should be for the arts. Frankly, I have a great resistance to the NEA's policies regarding grants to individual artists. I don't think it's been well handled, and I think it's very problematic. I don't think that any citizen should be receiving no-strings-attached gifts of tax monies from the federal government. I don't think that's particularly healthy for the arts themselves. It puts the arts on the dole; it turns into a kind of bizarre lottery; and it gives nothing back to the public in any direct or tangible way -- which makes that funding, I think, very vulnerable to attack. I think the NEA, in its program of grants to individual artists, at some point way, way back -- I mean back in the early 1970s -- eliminated any project description or report from the procedure of giving grants to individual artists, and simply allowed artists to file requests for funding to "continue my own work," I think that's the phrase. This was a terrible mistake. What it means is that the public has no way of gauging the bang it's getting for its buck.

M.S.: Right, no accountability.

A.D.C.: There's no accountability; and, since it's happening on a federal level, there's no real way for there to be accountability. Are you going to go back to the committee -- which is composed of people who are no longer on the committee and are not from one particular community -- and say, "Hey, we don't think you should have given a grant to X because he or she spent it on a Porsche or whatever?" You can't really do that; so my inclination would be to give that money back to state, regional, or local organizations and let them do the direct funding of individuals, which I still don't think should be done on a no-strings-attached basis -- but let them do it, because "them" is a local agency that's accountable for that and accountable for its choices.

That local agency is presumably responsible to the citizenry in some way, and accessible to the citizenry in some way. I think that the citizenry should have some say over what kind of art their money is funding; if that makes me a right-winger then that makes me a right-winger. I don't think it does; I think it makes me a democrat, with a small "d", and even a populist. No taxation without representation. That's my belief. What we have had is art imposed -- on a federal level --from above, by committees that are drawn largely from the main art centers in the country and that therefore feel very detached, and are very detached, from what the average citizen in the country is ready for.

I find it very peculiar to read these statements that the NEA was created to fund the "cutting edge" of art. I don't believe that; I don't believe there's anything in the NEA's original mandate that says anything of the sort. That's what the art world wanted it to be and turned it into, to a certain extent; I'd put "cutting edge" in quotes there, because I don't believe there can be such a thing as a governmentally subsidized avant-garde. I think it's a contradiction in terms, I think it's an oxymoron.

If I were saying it, at any rate, I would have found it enormously embarrassing during the NEA flap over Serrano and Mapplethorpe to get up and say, as many of my colleagues did, "We couldn't possibly be your avant-garde unless you were subsidizing us." You would have to wring that confession out of me with red-hot pokers. I can't imagine any more mortifying statement, any more embarrassing confession of being in the pocket of the power structure. I was shocked that people were getting up and volunteering this information proudly, asserting it as if it were some kind of claim on something rather than a rather shocking and scandalous confession of failure and corruption and hypocrisy.

I have problems with that idea. I have problems with the idea of governmental funding for avant-garde art per se, or "cutting-edge" art as such. I frankly tend towards the notion that what the government should be funding is something tangible that the citizenry can witness, can look at and really see what they got for their outlay of tax monies. For something that will, let's say, in a certain sense like the Farm Security Administration project, end up in public hands, usable by the public. It may mean that those decisions should be made on a local level and that may mean that a more conservative kind of art will be sponsored by tax monies than might be sponsored by private monies, by private foundations or by individual patrons and collectors. I don't have a terrible problem with that. I don't think that makes me a fascist; I'm perfectly willing to hear an argument that it does, but I don't have a problem with that idea. I tend to believe that there is something inherently unhealthy about any governmental intrusion into the working lives of individual artists, even if that intrusion is the positive benefit of playing "The Millionaire" and giving them a blank check -- or a check that they can do anything with that they want to, if not a blank check. I don't think that's a healthy thing, and as a citizen I have problems with that.

I also believe that if I have the right to object to the fact that the U.S. government in its mindless stupidity, in my opinion, decided that they should homeport a nuclear fleet five blocks from my house, which they did -- I'm on Staten Island, right where they put the nukeport, which they are now going to dismantle, but 7 years ago they put this sucker here. If I have a right to write to my congressman and say, "I don't think this is an appropriate use of my tax monies and I object to this," and if I have a right to go out and rally my fellow citizens to protest with me, and if I get enough of them we might stop that from happening, then it seems to me that somebody else has an equal right to say, "Hey, I don't want my money spent on what I consider blasphemy in the arts for public display, and if I can rally enough of my neighbors to sign petitions maybe I can put a stop to that."

That's the way democracy works. The fact that that can be manipulated by someone like Jesse Helms or what's-his-name with the Moral Majority or Donald Wildmon or whoever doesn't mean that that's wrong, or that therefore some committee should be able to say what art gets funded and the taxpayers should have no say. No, I don't agree with that. That's the price you pay for democracy.

M.S.: Going back to the 1977 conference on photo criticism at the Visual Studies Workshop, you made an introductory statement that went, "How can we at the same time enrich or deepen or make more encompassing the critical activity that we are doing and keep that from becoming less and less accessible except to an increasingly narrow audience?" It seems to me that you were prophetic in that statement, because in the 1980s we saw any number of critics come up who were writing about topics that were difficult to understand in a language that was even harder to deal with. People who were writing in places like October and Afterimage. How did this happen? What do you think about this? Do you agree with my description?

A.D.C.: Yeah, I agree that it happened. I think it was probably an inevitable consequence of the academicization of photography and of photography studies. It seems to be inherent in academic activity, academic theorizing, criticism, historianship, etcetera, that in effect the discourse is an attempt -- and I don't think it's a conscious attempt, I don't think it's a planned attempt, I think it just happens -- that the arena of discourse is in part defined by a jargon and the jargon becomes a way of people recognizing each other as members or participants in the arena of discourse and it becomes exclusionary, to some extent, of people who don't have a handle on that jargon.

Every discipline has its jargon or shoptalk. Your car mechanic has his shoptalk, and the purpose of that is not to make you feel like a schmuck. The purpose of that is to facilitate rapidity and ease of communication with other people who are fixing cars. Either you get to learn that shoptalk or you have to ask the guy to explain it to you very patiently. Now a good mechanic if he's going to talk to you and he realizes you're not a mechanic yourself is going to explain those terms, is going to be capable of explaining those terms to you in lay language. That's really, I think, where my colleagues fail. It's not that they accept or utilize a jargon. I have words that I use also that are not common words of the language and there are terms from the jargon of my colleagues that I find useful and use. But I feel an obligation when I'm talking to an audience that I know doesn't have those as ready reference points to gloss those terms and to define them and explain them for that audience and to explain why I think they're useful and what kind of time they save by encompassing a field or a set of ideas.

So I have found that disturbing, myself. There's a lot of contemporary writing about the arts, about photography, about literature, that I cannot read. Even if I hack my way through it and work out the definitions, etcetera, ultimately I believe they are there to mask the fact that the person doesn't have a whole lot to say -- and that's disturbing. I think there are a lot of people out there writing who don't have a lot to say and who mask that fact with a density of prose and an opacity of prose that serves as a kind of camouflage for the fact that there's really nothing going on underneath all of that. I tend to agree with the philosopher Karl Popper, who says that clarity of thought is a moral obligation; and I think that -- without saying that all complex ideas should be reducible to some simple locution, or that the average person on the street should be able to understand me without work, which is nonsense -- there's no idea in contemporary photography so complex that we should not be able to put it into a language that the average college-educated adult should be able to understand.

M.S.: A few years ago I found myself in a graduate seminar reading and discussing current art criticism. Half the class couldn't participate in the discussion and the other half continued to argue amongst themselves over what the pieces were saying.

A.D.C.: Right; but that's an intellectual style and an intellectual mode and it's an intellectual fashion. It's not one that I participate in. I want people to wrestle with my ideas. I don't want people to have trouble understanding what my ideas are.

M.S.: Do you think this is an example of critics writing specifically for critics?

A.D.C.: Yeah, to some extent, but there's a difference between shoptalk -- which does serve a function, and the function is ultimately to get that engine fixed -- and the kind of bandying around of the jargon or shoptalk simply to impress each other with the fact that one knows all those terms.

I read an awful lot of pieces that have what I consider an obligatory set of footnotes and references. You have to have a quote from Barthes, you have to have a quote from Baudrillard, you have to have a quote from Julia Kristeva, you have to have a quote from this person and that person, you have to have Guy DeBord -- and then, somehow, your idea is validated. What rather startles me is that I rarely find my colleagues referring to anyone who's not part of the "in" set of readings, the current "in" set of references. That perplexes me. Do they only read what each other are reading? It all becomes a self- validating and self-perpetuating system. I find that very intellectually prohibitive.

I've read some of those same people. I find some of those same ideas valuable. When I find them pertinent to what I'm writing I certainly footnote them and reference them. But I don't feel that my writing is illegitimate because you won't find a footnote to Julia Kristeva in it or, at this point at any rate, a footnote to Michel Foucault in it. Which doesn't mean I haven't read Foucault; it just means I haven't found where to apply those ideas usefully in my own work.

At the same time, I think that there's now a wider discourse about photography than there ever was before. I think there's a lot more accessible writing about photography than there ever was before. I think that certainly there's what I would call a genuine critical dialogue about the medium now, which I don't think there was in any meaningful way in 1968, when I started publishing. But only a part of that is this jargonized and impenetrable academic segment, and even there some interesting ideas are being kicked about and nosed through and something may emerge from that. I read that part of the dialogue and some of what's going on there filters into my writing, and through that trickles down to a general audience to the extent that I can open that up and make it accessible. So I wouldn't devalue that. I would say that if those of my colleagues who are participating in that kind of writing are upset by the fact that they're not being read by a lot of people, then they ought to look to themselves for the problem. These are not people I'd recommend to the editor of the New York Times if he or she was asking me for someone to write a review of a book that would appear in the Book Review section.

I think another aspect of it is that most of these people are not professional writers. Most of these people are professional academics, and they don't write frequently. Often they don't write particularly well. Most of them don't have any actual background in writing as such, except for being college students and college teachers, so they haven't been working writers. A lot of what I'm able to do as a writer comes from the fact that I write for a living. I write every day. I write lots of stuff -- lots of which, by the way, I consider to be disposable, not hack-work but stuff that's useful one time around. Yet, on another level, that serves to keep me fluid and fluent and to keep the flow of thought and the flow of my writing energies going. If I were writing just one or two essays a year and the essays had to meet academic standards for academic journals and all of them had to be footnoted and all of them had to be argued in standard academic style, I think I would be a very different writer.

M.S.: We have an incredible number of people trying to communicate photographically. When you look back to the 1940s and compare the number of persons exhibiting and getting published to today, it's just phenomenal. In the past two decades photographers have been beating the bushes by using alternate processes, unusual equipment and techniques to come up with something original. Is the concept of originality valid any more, and how does this fit into the critical view?

A.D.C.: On the one hand, I think we'd have to say that there's hardly anything, if anything, that's wholly and entirely original -- that has no roots, no antecedents, no lineage -- whether it's an idea or a kind of image-making or a style or even a particular image structure. There's a level on which I certainly agree with part of the critique of modernism that comes out of post-modern theory: that modernism emphasizes or valorizes a notion of originality that makes it heroic beyond any kind of reality. People draw on sources. I draw on sources. I think we are all synthesists, in some way, in whatever we do.

I don't take quite the fatalistic view of it that post-modern theory takes, which is that since everything involves synthesis there is absolutely therefore nothing that originates and all we are doing is recycling the already known. I don't believe that's true either. I think there's a middle ground that's where most people operate, most creative intelligences at any rate. What you do have -- and I think you are quite right -- now, however, is a vastly larger number of people practicing all the arts, not just photography. One result of that is that we experience quantitatively much more mediocrity -- mediocrity just meaning average, not a negative judgement -- much more average-quality work than we have ever experienced before. Physically more, in volume. Much more such work is around; and much more such work is not only "around" in the sense of being made by people, but it's being presented in the expanding number of presentational venues for the arts.

That's, in a sense, a new kind of logistical problem. Because, on the one hand, I'm very much an advocate of the citizenry as a whole having access to the tools and the materials and equipment and opportunity to fulfill the individual citizen's own creative impulses. I think that's a good and healthy thing for the individual to be able to do, and I think it's fine that we find ways of supporting this with arts education and arts programming and arts funding and so forth. On the other hand, what it leads to is a curious leveling-off effect. It's my belief that, in terms of real substantial creative capacity, every generation has a fixed and maybe a limited number of people who are really going to be the first-rate artists of that generation. I don't know what the number is, but let's say, hypothetically, that in photography it's going to be 25 out of a population of 200 million. Now let's say that if everybody had a chance to express themselves in photography you might come up with another 5 who would have the impact on us of a Joel-Peter Witkin, pro or con, but who would have that degree of potency as image makers. So if you gave everybody cameras you would get an additional 5. You wouldn't get an additional 5000; you would get an additional 5.

At the same time, if you give everybody cameras you're certainly going to get an additional 5,000 who are going to think of themselves as photographers and are going to want to publish their work and have their work out there and are going to apply for grants and are going to see collectors and are going to galleries with their portfolios and so on. Which, in a certain sense, is what's happened here. One result of that is that in order to get to those 25 or 30 people who are significant in their generation, you now have to wade through an additional 5,000 peoples' work. Has that been "worth it"? I can't really say. I can only say that as a critic -- again, dealing with this in an almost logistical sense -- I can only look at so many pictures in the course of a day or in the course of a week. I only have so much time for that, in the most literal sense, and also only have so much energy for that. Looking at pictures attentively, critically, takes a lot of energy from me. I only have so much of that energy at any given juncture; and if I have to wade through a lot of mediocre work -- not to mention bad work, but just mediocre work -- in order to get at substantial work, I may never get to the substantial work because my energy may be exhausted by the process of looking at the mediocre work.

I think that's true for all of us. We're faced with so many choices at this point, so much stuff -- there are so many movies we can see on a given night, there are so many books of poetry we could pick up, there are so many photographs or paintings we can see, there are so many plays we can go to, there are so many records we can listen to -- that it becomes very difficult to locate that which is really meaningful for us, because the field is very cluttered up with adequacy. Again, I'm leaving out the stuff we could look at and say it's just egregious, it's just bad, and we can give it a glimpse and turn away from it. The stuff that's intelligently made and competent and so forth but doesn't ultimately matter to us on some deep level, there's just more of that around.

That's a problem -- or it's a social situation. I don't know what to call it. I think it's an inevitable consequence of a "democratizing" of art education, of creativity -- or of creative activity, in any case. I think it's simply a situation we're going to have to live with. I don't know that there's a way around it; and I don't know that the trade-off is all that terrible, in terms of the social benefits of widespread art education and widespread creative activity on the part of the populace.

M.S.: Now that the phone and cable companies are merging and promising us 500 channels, that's not going to be 500 channels of exemplary programs.

A.D.C.: No, it's not. You're going to have access to more, but the quality level -- well, I don't know; in terms of commercial television, you can't really talk about the quality level -- but you know it's going to fill up. That'is what's going to happen: cultural "nature" abhors a vacuum, so if you create that kind of vacuum -- the vacuum of an art education system, for example -- art-making activity of all kinds rushes in to fill it. I think what you have now, partly because people have more leisure time than they had 50 years ago, is a lot of people making art as, essentially, Sunday painters. That is, people who have full-time jobs at something else but who like to think of themselves as artists and who make art but who are not exactly content to show in their local church show and the local art show, who are sending their work to the Castelli Gallery on the off- chance that Leo is going to like it and pick them. And the fact that every now and then Leo does that confuses things even more, because then it's as if there's a lottery out there and somehow anybody can get a ticket to that lottery and win that lottery. You can be the Starn twins. You can be in grad school and get plucked out and thrust into stardom at the age of 21. I don't think that's particularly healthy, but it's the way things are. I don't know that there's a solution for this; it's just the way things are.

M.S.: We've now seen electronics making their way into photography over the past few years. Much of what I've seen is a slicker version of what's already been done. Do you think we are going to see a new type of work, or is this going to be similar to what the word processor did to writing? It made it faster and easier, but you don't see a whole new genre of writing coming out.

A.D.C.: I'm not sure I agree with you in terms of the word processor. It hasn't just made -- I'm speaking as someone who works on one who had a lot of resistance. I didn't start [using a computer] until 1987. Now I can't imagine going back to an electric typewriter, although I still do some writing by hand for initial drafts. I know that the word processor has changed my writing. I can't say whetehr it's for better or worse, and I'm not sure I can tell you exactly how, but it has affected my writing. Among other things, I do know it's made me feel my words as more plastic, as more malleable than they felt to me when I was basically engraving them into paper with keys that struck paper. Therefore, it's allowed me to view an essay as it evolves on the screen more as a piece of material that I'm going to play with and massage and mold than as something graven in stone or graven on paper.

I may be over the cusp -- in terms of age -- as someone who's likely to make or be or find a major breakthrough stylistically as a result of the computer; but there are writers -- cyberpunk writers like William Gibson, for example -- who have done some very experimental pieces of writing based on the computer itself. Texts, for example, that come up on your computer and then disappear as you read them, never to be retrieved, at least not from that diskette -- you get it once and that's all. I think that there are possibilities for writing built into the computer that are being explored and are being discovered, and I think there are possibilities for visual imagery built in there that are just beginning to be explored.

Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying that the first thing people do in a new medium is replicate the previous medium: radio replicated vaudeville, film replicated Broadway theater, and so forth and so on. In a certain sense, I as a writer am more or less just replicating, with certain fancier hardware, what I used to do with scissors and paste and whiteout and so forth. I'm not really using this tool to its full advantage; and I think that's true with a lot of electronic imaging. What people are doing is collage and montage without having to fuss around in the darkroom and use multiple enlargers and various kinds of masks and so forth on their prints. But I believe that, inevitably, out of all this hacking around and experimenting and reiterating the past, etcetera, some new and very medium-specific forms are going to emerge. I believe that eventually you're going to see some version of purism, some version of inquiry into what is it in the nature of the computer to do, in terms of electronic imaging versus what is extraneous to electronic imaging. I think you'll see that emerge at some point. I think you'll see self-referential stuff emerge that will be very computer-specific. I just don't think we're seeing a lot of that yet. I think everyone is caught up in just mastering the technology and in staying abreast of the constant change in the technology, which is a big problem for an artist because the ground is always shifting.

For example, back in the 1960s, when I was in graduate school in a writing program out in California, I wrote a text that was ns attempt to imagine myself into the mind of a man who either was crazy and institutionalized or was in fact the last person -- at least as far as he knew -- on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. Without going into too much detail, I wrote this text in a very specific way to try to render his thought process, but I was never able to read it to anyone, or have anyone read it, in a way that caught both a certain mechanical tone that I wanted to the reading or the hearing ear and that also caught the rhythm of speech or thought-speech that I wanted.

About five years ago -- I've got a friend out in Cleveland who was working with the Amiga. She had what we now consider a very primitive program called Talker, which enabled you to take a text and have the computer speak it out. You had a choice of voices: you had male, female, and robotic. You could alter each of these in terms of pitch, in terms of speed, etcetera. I flew out there and worked in her studio for a week with this text, which I had converted into ASCII text and then fed into her computer and then brought up and massaged. I got something very close to what I imagined as the sound of this piece. It was almost as if I had been waiting for this technology -- for twenty-five years, roughly -- in order to actualize this piece of writing, and was finally able to hear it. Parts of it I was dissatisfied with -- it was twenty-five years old, I was young when I wrote it. But I was finally able to hear it the way I imagined it in my head and realize that I could now convey this to an audience in a different way.

So I think there are potentials within this technology that simply have not really been realized yet, certainly not fully . I don't think we even have yet a single body of work in electronic imagery that we would look at and say, "This is a definitive body of work, this is a standard, a marker, for decades to come people are going to refer to this." I think we will; I think it's just a matter of time. I may not like that stuff. I may not want to look at images on a screen. I may love the finely crafted silver print. But I have to look at this technology and say that this is going to be the direction for a lot of people, and certainly for information-based imagery, information-oriented imagery -- photojournalism, etcetera. This is bound to be the direction it goes in.

M.S.: Based on your earlier comments on the democracy of photography and the sheer number of photographers, do you think that we are going to see a have versus have-not problem, just simply because of the cost of the equipment to do computer imaging? This arose in your piece on Todd Walker and electronic imaging [Camera & Darkroom, September 1993]. At one point he says something like, "This is all a retired fellow on a fixed income can afford."

A.D.C.: The economic issue, I think, is only going to be a temporary issue. Todd is now working on a machine that is more powerful than the Univac computers that cost I don't know how much money, millions of dollars each, whatever, that he photographed in the 1950s. I've been to Todd's studio; he's got a 486 -- I've got a 386 -- and he's got various peripherals, etcetera. So even this retired guy on a fixed income can afford a more powerful computer than the U.S. government could afford 35 years ago. Five years from now, assuming Todd lives and is in good health, which I don't see any reason to doubt, he's going to be able to afford something that's probably ten times as powerful, because that seems to be the rate of progression. So five years from now, if he can hang in there, he'll have that.

Cost will be a problem for someone who doesn't have the time for some reason -- because they're aging, or because what they are working on is too urgent to wait for the next development. But the fact is the stuff keeps getting better and faster and more powerful and cheaper. We have just seen it. I have a little laptop that basically is the second laptop that Tandy ever produced, the laptop I still work on; and it's a dinosaur compared to what I can now get: a laptop just as powerful as what I've now got on my desk for about the same amount of money, more or less, as what I paid for the Tandy five years ago.

No, I'm not worried about it from that end. I'm convinced that five years from now you're going to have a twenty-five-dollar home computer that's about as powerful as what I've got on my desk, that you will just plug in to a terminal wire through which your 500 channels that you were just speaking about will feed also, and you will be able to hook into the Library of Congress. At least in this country you'll have that. You will go buy that computer at Computers 'R' Us or Toys 'R' Us or something like that for your kids, and they'll hook into the Library of Congress. I don't see costs as a major problem.

The most recent statistic I read said that in 1991 46% of U.S. schoolchildren were using computers at home or in school, kids between age three and seventeen. Okay, granted that the 54% that aren't are probably minority kids. This stuff is going to open up; this stuff is going to get very, very cheap. There is not going to be a school without these computers within the next ten years. If these kids aren't getting them there they're getting them at other places. I've been reading that crack dealers are using all kinds of sophisticated electronic equipment, including computers now to log in sales -- little pocket computers and laptops to log in sales and for record keeping. So this stuff goes everywhere in the culture; it's really pervasive. I just don't think that's going to be the issue.

I think the real issue is going to be that the computer has become the sort of quintessential "black box." That is, people use them without understanding how they work. Teaching people genuine computer literacy isn't just showing them how to use a particular program that's so self-explanatory you don't have to understand how it works. I think the problem is going to be getting people to understand how computers are programmed. That's true with any technology: the problem is getting people to understand the cultural bias of the technology itself. That's going to be an educational challenge, and I don't see that challenge being met.

¹ Afterimage 5:1-2 (May-June 1977) and 5:3 (September 1977).