I don’t aspire to greatness as an artist, or even to consideration in that category. If I’ve exceeded your expectations of the rewards of engaging with criticism, I’d prefer to think that I’ve expanded your definition of what criticism can do, rather than that I’ve stepped into some parallel universe and switched roles. […]
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Professionally speaking, this past year proved unusually uneventful, even by recent standards. Travel no longer holds much attraction for me (been there, done that), so I welcomed the chance to spend most of the year here at home, enjoying the changes of the seasons and our daily routines. […] About my “belittling,” “infuriating,” and “ignorant” comments on Shelby Lee Adams’s work: These come from about 3 minutes’ worth of film clips in Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary, “The True Meaning of Pictures.” Those clips were extracted from several hours’ worth of interview. Inevitably, much context gets lost in the editing process. Doesn’t mean I don’t stand by what I said — just that these snippets oversimplify what I said. That’s inevitable in such a film, and nothing for which I fault Baichwal. […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Film the Police (1)
We’d know nothing of the truth about the death of Eric Garner if bystander Ramsey Orta hadn’t made and immediately posted a video. That video of the Staten Island police beatdown on Garner, and still images derived therefrom, plus other documentation by other concerned citizens, have gone globally viral. So this is about images. […]