Facing up to the challenge of interdisciplinary studies in photography will require much painstaking reassessment of our educational assumptions, priorities, and methodologies. It will also require drastic, even brutal, upgrading of the typically minimal and mediocre standards of research, preparation, thinking and articulation to which students of photography are presently held. No part of that process will make anyone involved in it happy. But there is no way of avoiding that challenge without becoming irrelevant to the medium’s future. […]
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Certainly photography teachers have done much to develop public awareness of the medium’s history and its influence on our culture. We have also successfully established and elevated those standards of craft which are the gauges for all who work in the medium. Nor have those been our only accomplishments. We have entrenched ourselves firmly — perhaps irrevocably — in the groves of academe. And we have, in record time, glutted the market for art photographs, for career art photographers and for teachers of art photography. […] Irene Caesar, engrossed in her process, seems entirely oblivious to my discomfort, even when, quietly, I give verbal indications thereof. Crouching, kneeling, sometimes squatting on a soft-sided suitcase of mine, she appears to have entered a trance state in which she channels the spirit of David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. Squirming around to adjust her vantage point, she calls out, repeatedly, “Give it to me! Give to to me! Show me your eroticism!” […] |
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Spring Fever 2016: Bits & Pieces (1)
In “Virginibus Puerisque” (1881), Robert Louis Stevenson noted that “Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.” In the emerging android era we won’t need what Tom Wolfe dubbed the “culture buds” to perform this task; there’s an automaton for that. […]