What we need, it seems to me, is a group of critics less interested in equating themselves with photographers or aligning themselves with curators, gallery owners, and other critics, and more actively committed to functioning as articulate intermediaries between the work of photographers and the largest potential audience for that work. […]
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In the half-century of its existence SPE transformed itself from its original form as an unofficial, photo-specific splinter division of the College Art Association into something akin to photography’s equivalent of the Audubon Society: $20 plus an interest in birds gets you in — and they’ll waive the interest in birds. […] In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […] The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […] Somehow, despite the separate and combined successes of K-12 photo-education, visual literacy, and media literacy, the ability to attend closely and thoughtfully to photographic images, and to analyze and evaluate them critically, has yet to become a widespread skill among the populace at large. This does not bode well for the future. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |