Photography has accumulated a plethora of its own tropes, their explosive growth encouraged as ever by any environment in which the jargonized and scientistic combine with the doctrinal. The present-day academic-art context thus provides the perfect fertile medium for their incubation and dispersal. This milieu functions, per Orwell, to suppress “criticality,” not to further it. […]
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Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […] It’s not to much to ask of a western European NGO that it revitalize itself after half a century of same old same old. It’s in that spirit — hoping for signs of some tectonic shift, though not expecting any — that I accepted the invitation to attend the opening reception for World Press Photo 2012 in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby at United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan on August 15. […] Late last year I gave a talk in London, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” in which, among other things, I bemoaned the fact that the newspaper and magazine industry has begun to replace specialized critics grounded in the visual arts (like me) with “cultural journalists,” generalists with no depth of […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Election 2012: Image World (1)
Eastwood’s star turn at the RNC conjured up the image of an “imaginary Massa,” an arrogant patrician Southern plantation owner, doddering yet white and gun-wielding, thus empowered to humiliate a grown black man who can’t talk back, in front of a laughing, jeering, cheering crowd of white people who roared with approval when Eastwood announced “We own this country” and “Politicians are employees of ours” before closing with an ominous “Make my day” chanted by the assembly. […]