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. […]
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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. […] I gather that you aspire to becoming a working photography critic — which might mean that you would piece together a revenue stream from some different activities, as I have (some writing, some teaching, some lecturing, some curating perhaps), but that you’d get paid for all of them, including the writing. In which case the writing would be done vocationally, not avocationally, meaning that you’d take it on as part of your daily job, not as a hobby or sideline. […] This forum participant interrupted a cordial and collegial exchange among a number of more informed parties, jacked the thread, issued a string of the most bizarre pronouncements, adamantly maintained insupportable claims, sidestepped every polite invitation to provide evidence validating her extremist positions, flamed me — and neither the moderator (who’d asked me to participate in the first place) nor any of the forum participants took her task for any of that, or took her aside to correct her behavior, or responded at any length to even her most indefensible assertions. […] This challenge seemed to me a reasonable proposal, one that would require an equal amount of labor from both of us in her proving her point and me trying to disprove it, placing our resulting efforts in front of an impartial professional jury for evaluation. How better to engage with the question of what makes the opinion of a person who’s knowledgeable about a given subject more valid than that of someone who doesn’t know shit from Shinola about it than by putting it to the test? My interrogator would have none of it, however . . . […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |