Let me add that I would not and will not castigate anyone for accepting this position [Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography]. The state of the economy aside, the CCP is a unique repository and a major institution in photography. Running it, whether as Director or Chief Curator, is a dirty and dangerous job, subject to the well-documented machinations of a cluster of verifiable weasels. But someone’s got to do it. […]
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Our repetitions and replications (Internet echo, photographs and otherwise) are crucial to pass on cultural practice and serve an important social function—even if on the face of it our actions appear, not only infinitely stupid, but repetitive, a bit outrageous, counterintuitive to logic, may serve no obvious purpose or may even hijack what A. D. Coleman and I both thought might be a productive thread. Our dumbness may kill us, or it may save us. The jury is still out. […] The Internet in many ways and on many levels promises freedom when, in fact, it can deliver quite the opposite. Its multitudinous and disparate voices can give us all ADD. Walls around institutions have become nearly impenetrable, if only for the sake of the sanity of those within. Discussions remain fragmented and remain, not for lack of intent or purpose, within closed communities. Conversation is encouraged and simultaneously (intentionally and unintentionally) degraded and elevated via the form of its dispersion and by the practice of its participants. […] As a critic, I try to approach each project (a book, a show) as an entity in itself, to gauge whatever satisfactions it affords and dissatisfactions it provokes, and only then to add it to the larger oeuvre in order to weigh it in relation to the whole. The question of expectations re quantity of output depends very much on the mode within which the photographer works and the processes of production within that mode. […] I’m perplexed by the claim to cinematographic concern on Wall’s part, because I don’t know of any cinematographer who uses, or would approve the use of by others, a visual strategy that invariably places the subject front and center in the frame, with no significant use of the edge of the frame, no selective depth of field, no activation of the foreground, no foreground-background relationships . . . it’s a banal and tedious POV, one of the first habits they get you to break in film school. Even the purists at [the Danish film collective] Dogme 95 gave themselves more latitude. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |