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Sotheby’s auction of the Polaroid Collection will start tomorrow evening, Monday, June 21, following six days of previews. The auction will have four sessions: the first tomorrow, starting at 5 p.m., the remaining three on Tuesday, June 22. I hope it goes well — for the sake of Sotheby’s; for the sake of the creditors on whose behalf Trustee John R. Stoebner obtained the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court’s permission to hold the auction; and, most of all, for the market for photography. Poor results would serve no one’s interest, including mine. Indeed, I’d be delighted to see this sale set new records for some of the photographers involved. […]
The publication of such a glib, superficial and ill-considered “psychoanalytic” attack on freelance activity beneath a sensationalized headline was obviously intended as a provocative act; I found myself impelled to respond. A great many of my professional colleagues and close friends — artists, writers, photographers and others — have chosen to exist in what this remarkable diagnosis so condescendingly calls a “lowly status,” and they don’t strike me as inherently any more neurotic than the average late-twentieth-century American. […]
I propose that the creation of a virtual version of the Polaroid Collection, in the form of a comprehensive annotated database of its contents placed online, should become a priority as we move inexorably toward some disposition of the collection that will certainly include sales of individual pieces (the auction), as well as sales or donations of chunks of the remainder to one or more institutions. This should start with the gathering together of existing databases and other annotated records cataloguing portions of the collection or its entirety. From the standpoint of the collection’s significance to the history of photography and our understanding of visual culture in the second half of the twentieth century, the production and availability of such a resource would go along way to making up for the dispersal of its analog contents. […]
Between the years 1960-64 I cut my eyeteeth as a critic and cultural journalist by working on the Hunter College Arrow, the newspaper of Hunter College, City University of New York, while contributing poetry, short fiction, and a one-act play to the college’s literary magazine, the Echo. I did this while earning a B.A. in English Literature. In my senior year I edited the Arrow, preceded in that role by people like Paul Du Brul, Jack Newfield, Brian Sharoff, and Rita Dershowitz. Hunter College students in the Roosevelt House library, 1950s. Courtesy Hunter College. A reunion of those who worked on the Hunter Arrow in the 1950s and 1960s was held on Friday, May 7, 2010, at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, 47-49 E. 65th St., New York, NY. […]
Artforum finally perked up its ears and noticed that something’s happening here (though they don’t know what it is). A brief notice in their March 15, 2010 online International News Digest, titled “SPECTACULAR POLAROID AUCTION PUT ON HOLD?” summarizes the situation in a lengthy paragraph. Another county heard from. ARTnews, meanwhile, notified me that they wouldn’t be interested in the story until it concluded — surely a notable position to take for a monthly magazine with “news” in its title. My, but the art press is all over this one . . . […]
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 SPJ Research Award 2014 Thought for the Day Ignorance is a condition; dumbness is a commitment.
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Polaroid Collection: Update 20
Sotheby’s auction of the Polaroid Collection will start tomorrow evening, Monday, June 21, following six days of previews. The auction will have four sessions: the first tomorrow, starting at 5 p.m., the remaining three on Tuesday, June 22. I hope it goes well — for the sake of Sotheby’s; for the sake of the creditors on whose behalf Trustee John R. Stoebner obtained the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court’s permission to hold the auction; and, most of all, for the market for photography. Poor results would serve no one’s interest, including mine. Indeed, I’d be delighted to see this sale set new records for some of the photographers involved. […]