“Octave of Prayer” represents a man, once a respected and vital teacher and philosopher in photography, coming to believe his own legend and making himself into an institution. This auto-deification is a sad and dangerous turn of events. […]
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In other words, boys and girls, that ain’t Aperture you’re holding, it’s a copy of The Watchtower, intended to make converts willing to follow a man who can simultaneously assert his own “natural talent for camera” and lack of egotism, who can claim, in so many words, that he and his followers are God’s gift to photography. […] I believe that Minor White’s group show and catalog “Octave of Prayer” is an insidious insult to all photographers, not only to those whose work is included therein but also to anyone trying to sculpt an idea in silver. […] That a capitalistic impulse is at the core of this object-fetishism should by now be clear. Photo-Realism is emblematic of the jealously-guarded power of “serious artists” to convert a financially valueless image into a financially valuable object. […] [Toward the tail end of my decade as the photography critic for the New York Observer I had the opportunity to review the Museum of Modern Art’s celebration of Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series, a complete set of which they had recently acquired and were showing for the first time, in an exhibition sponsored […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |