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A Professional Autobiography

Acknowledgements and Preface to A. D. Coleman: Writings on Photography and Related Matters, 1968-1995, A Bibliography

edited by Nancy Solomon


Acknowledgements

My introduction to photography as a subject worthy of serious consideration came during a brief hiatus between my completing graduate studies in English literature and creative writing in late 1966 and my launching myself into full-time free-lancing in mid-1968.

During that interim phase, I worked an an assistant editor at Da Capo Press, a division of Plenum Publishing Corporation, a scientific-technical publishing house founded by my parents, Earl and Frances Coleman. Da Capo had started as a reprint project specializing in works on music, had then branched out into the other arts, and was beginning to generate original titles as well. Alan J. Marks, the editor under whom I worked there, was a knowledgeable collector of rare books and prints, and had begun to turn his attention -- and the press’s -- to photography. Through Alan, I came to know and love William M. Ivins’s classic Prints and Visual Communication, of which Da Capo produced the first reprint edition; got to watch the production of a facsimile edition of Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature aspects of the production of the second edition of Paul Strand’s The Mexican Portfolio, co-produced by Da Capo and the Aperture Foundation; familiarized myself with aperture magazine and the ideas of Minor White and others; and met a number of photographers working in different ways.

One day, Alan walked into the office with a Paul Caponigro print he’d just purchased -- a wonderful rendering of Caponigro’s “Untitled, West Hartford, Connecticut,” a 1959 study of the vertical face of a rock quarry. He propped it up on a shelf and told me, “Look at that -- it’s a miracle of seeing.” I did, and over a few days’ time came to understand what he meant and what Caponigro had done. In some ways, that’s where these efforts of mine found their initial spark. So I thank Alan for that unintended gift.

The research I did for the press on its photography projects during that year, my office dialogues on the subject with Alan, and the faltering first conversations I had with photographers during that time (as well as the discussions on which I was privileged to eavesdrop in the office), constituted a significant aspect of my introduction to the medium. Because writing has always served as one of my primary means for coming to terms with my experience, the hankering to write about photography began to manifest itself. Michael Hoffman of aperture -- then one of the medium’s few “little” magazines and outlets for serious criticism -- was the first to encourage me to start putting my thoughts down on paper. He didn’t publish any of those early efforts, but that push started me off; I thank him for nudging me at what proved to be an auspicious moment. However, I do not think that either of these two gentlemen should be held accountable in any way for what ensued.

*

From the very beginning, this bibliographic project has depended largely on the energies of others -- more so, surely, than any other book that bears my name. The demands of time aside, I did not think I could effectively synopsize my own writings; I'd already made them as compact as possible, from my standpoint. The perspective of outside readers on what was essential to mention for reference and retrieval purposes was required for this. So I have left the creation of this tool largely to others, restricting myself to a supervisory and advisory role.

Fortunately, I found willing and capable helpers all along the way. Until near the end, none of them had bibliographic training, and I provided them with no formal model for their synopses. The basic publication information has been conformed to a standard style; the synopses, however, are both idiosyncratic and inconsistent, a limitation for which I as project supervisor am solely accountable. With my inexpert guidance, these assistants did the best they could, which overall seems very well indeed. In approximately chronological order, then: Steven W. Albahari, whose dedication to getting this project off the ground and yeoman's work on my early writings in the first months of 1981 first gave it shape and made it seem possible; Harris Fogel, Peter Walts and JoAnn Frank, who moved it forward incrementally at various stages; Edward Q. Bridges, who produced about ten year's worth of entries covering the '80s and early '90s, and conformed the whole project to a standard format proposed by the CCP's Nancy Solomon; Harris Sibunruang, who revised the initial New York Times listings to make them more substantial and useful; and Tanya Murray, who did the same with the original Village Voice and Popular Photography listings, and also brought the entire bibliography up to date through 1995.

Sometime in the mid-1980s I began to realize that this reference material, originally created strictly to serve my own organizational and retrieval needs, might prove useful to others. By early 1987 I found myself in correspondence with James L. Enyeart, then director of the Center for Creative Photography, over the possibility of the CCP publishing it as a research tool. As that indicates, the process moved slowly; but the results are before you, and I believe it has proved itself worth the wait. The initial encouragement of Jim, and the subsequent support of Terence Pitts, who replaced him, was invaluable during the making of this reference work. So too was the labor on its behalf of the Center's Amy Rule, and especially that of the incomparable Nancy Solomon, its true midwife, whose enthusiasm and determination never waned and whose sense of order far exceeds my own; between them, they taught me a great deal about the premises on which research tools are built.

In the winter of 1996-97 the Center honored me by selecting me as its second Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence, specifically to work on this bibliography and explore the CCP's William Mortensen holdings. During those months, working under the direction of Amy Rule, Nancy Solomon, archivist Leslie Calmes, and myself, a small band of volunteers -- Lauren Smith, Michael Eisner, Jeanne Fransen, Lisa Reddig, Jessica L. Mackta and Jacinda M. Russell (most notably the last-named two), all graduate students in the University of Arizona's Department of Photography(?) -- made contributions that added greatly to its completeness, consistency, clarity, accuracy and usefulness.

Finally, a bibliography is only as useful as its retrieval system allows it to be; Linda Gregonis, the indexer, has made it all as accessible as possible.

Thanks are owed to all of the above, without whom this book would not be in your hands, or mine. And a special thanks to Terry Pitts -- for his friendship; for his introductory note, which does as succinct a job as I could hope for of putting this project in context; but, most of all, for his unflagging good humor, encouragement, well-timed prodding, and absolute faith in our collective ability to make this idea a reality.

-- A. D. Coleman

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Foreword/Preface: Feeding the Lake

When I wrote my first brief essays on photography in 1967, and began publishing them some months later in 1968, I had absolutely no idea that I was initiating an endeavor that would result, more than thirty years later, in what's summarized by the book before you.

As I've noted elsewhere,1 in starting out on this project I was directly inspired by the writings of four people: William M. Ivins, Jr.; Marshall McLuhan; Minor White; and Ralph Hattersley. None of them, however, were working critics; they functioned primarily as theorists and educators. Indeed, aside from Sadakichi Hartmann and, to a lesser extent, Charles H. Caffin, photography had never enjoyed the presence of a working critic committed to its regular scrutiny over some extended period of time. Hence its critical literature up until then -- even that generated by its part-time critics and occasional commentators -- must be described as sporadic and thin. This meant that, more than a century and a quarter after its invention, photography for the most part lacked what Hugh Kenner, in one of this bibliography's epigraphs, defines as a critical tradition: "a continuum of understanding, early commenced."2

The thought of making some contribution toward the development of such a "continuum of understanding" appealed to me. Not only did that tradition not then exist, however, but hardly any predecessors even exemplified its possibilities. The closest thing I had to a role model at the time was James Agee. Certainly I admired his few writings about photography, his well-known appreciations of Walker Evans and Helen Levitt (though I found them a bit overwrought and mystical). But his extensive critical commentary on a parallel medium, film, written from the perspective of a thoughtful, attentive lay member of the general audience, achieved exactly the mix of accessibility, provocation and insight toward which I set out to work my way.

Even today, though I’m years older than he was when he died, I am not the stylist Agee was, nor the poet, nor likely to become so. But I'd like to believe that I've managed to bring a similarly literate, autodidactical attention to bear on still photography and ask some useful questions, serving to stimulate the medium's audience into thinking more critically about something they were experiencing constantly but taking for granted -- in my case, photographs, photographers and photography. Critical writing about photography is, in any case, a subset of critical writing in general, which in turn forms a category (though not often enough acknowledged as such) of literature. And I feel toward my little corner of that territory as Jean Rhys felt about hers: "All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

In the process of tracing the history of the criticism of photography -- first for my own purposes as a working critic, and subsequently as a teacher of workshops, seminars and full courses on that subject -- I gradually came to know a good deal about Sadakichi Hartmann, whom I think of as my forebear in the field. Not so much in his flamboyantly caped and behatted "King of Bohemia" mode (though I'm impressed to recollect that Edward Weston proclaimed him one of the finest interpretive dancers he'd ever seen), but in his enthusiastic embrace of the role of the professional critic, and his acceptance of photography as meriting such concentrated thought.

Photography was only one of the visual arts to which Hartmann attended, but he treated it with the utmost seriousness and engaged wholeheartedly in its theorizing and its battles. From that, and from his determination to survive as what he called a "bread-and-butter critic," I drew much encouragement -- although, in regard to the latter aspect of his life, I regretfully conclude after over thirty free-lance years that it’s no accident he died in poverty; Calvin Trillin spoke true when he opined, "I basically don't think God intended for people to make a living by writing."3 Not by writing criticism, at least. Be that as it may, both these writers, Agee and Hartmann, have contributed considerably by their examples to the project encapsulated by this bibliography.

In prefatory comments to my several volumes of collected essays -- Light Readings, Critical Focus, Tarnished Silver, Depth of Field, The Digital Evolution and the forthcoming Available Light -- I’ve discussed the various phases of my working life and its professional context(s), and have elaborated considerably on those matters in some of the published interviews with me listed elsewhere in this volume. Rather than reiterate all that here, I prefer to point the reader interested in such issues toward those more expansive accounts of my experiences and what I learned therefrom. More to the point, I think, are the whys and wherefores of this bibliography as a reference work.

The present volume's origins, as a publication in and of itself, are quite humble. By the early 1980s I'd published enough essays that, even though I'd clipped and saved all of them systematically in looseleaf binders, I began to have trouble locating them for my own purposes. Also, at that time, scholars, researchers, students and others had begun writing to me more and more frequently, requesting both photocopies of various of my essays and citations -- basic bibliographic references -- for them. Tiring of replicating these by typing them out each time (those were the pre-digital days, after all), I decided that a simple bibliography -- comprising the necessary publication information plus short synopses of the essays -- would serve those needs adequately for everyone concerned; I'd be enabled to track down my own essays in their binders, and I could photocopy the entries to answer queries. With the help of an intern, Steven W. Albahari, a rudimentary bibliography of my writings through early 1981 was produced.4

In fits and starts, the project moved forward thereafter. By the late 1980s the number of my publications had grown to such a point, and the bibliography along with it, that it had become a potential publication in the making, with the Center for Creative Photography as its designated sponsor. From then on, it was just a matter of time until it found final printed form. But for the heroic efforts of Ed Bridges, who worked on it as my assistant for several years, and the devoted labors of Tanya Murray, who volunteered to complete it, however, that day would still be far off.

The CCP's designation of me as its Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence in late 1996 allowed me to spend time once again with the original material (which, by then, had mostly entered the archive). Perhaps even more importantly, it enabled me to move from a sporadic correspondence relationship into extensive face-to-face dialogue with the CCP's Amy Rule and Nancy Solomon, who guided me through something not unlike psychoanalysis applied to the sphere of scholarship and research: a gradual laying bare and naming and evaluating and rethinking of previously unarticulated motives and unidentified patterns in the organization of my life's work.5

In doing so, they brought to bear on this project a level of professional attention, experience and expertise (not to mention infinite patience) that resolved most of the structural and stylistic problems still outstanding at that point; they also supervised the work of the graduate students who helped us fill in many of the gaps in these entries. That concentrated period of collaborative effort finally shaped the raw material into something I could begin to imagine we'd finish, though I don't think I actually believed that until March 12, 1999, when -- during the Society for Photographic Education's National Conference in Tucson -- Nancy placed a bound draft copy of the page proofs in my hands, and a stack of pre-publication order forms for it on the CCP's table.

As this suggests, most of the work on this reference book was done by others, whose assistance is indicated in the Acknowledgements. The end result, I hope, is a basic reference tool that makes accessible a large variety of writings revolving around the hub issue of photography and addressing, in various ways, the medium itself and many of its ramifications. Since these texts were published in exhibition catalogues, "little" magazines, photographers' monographs, encyclopaedias, obscure scholarly journals, weekly newspapers, regional U.S. publications, periodicals from abroad, and other vehicles not widely distributed even in the U.S., the bulk of my output and the diversity of my interests and approaches have not been easily visible or accessible to anyone. Aside from myself, no one I know of has read all my writings; and many of even my most faithful readers have missed a number of what I consider to be my key essays. Short of putting copies of all the published versions of all these essays into your hands, an impossible challenge, I could find no way of bringing that extensive body of work closer to you;6 this resource at least tells you where to go to locate it for yourself, and sketches what you will find there.7

*

This bibliography's final shape merits some discussion. Early on in the process of converting it to its protoype as a publication, we had to decide on an organizational structure. I had always kept the clippings of the published versions of my essays on which it's based in looseleaf binders, running in chronological order (along with all editors’ published introductions to any essays, all readers’ published responses to any of them from those same periodicals, and all published interviews with me).8 However, once I established an ongoing, working relationship with any publication, and became a regular contributor thereto, I established separate binders in which all my appearances within that periodical's pages were contained, arranged once again in chronological order.9 There were also separate, chronologically ordered binders for "assorted publications" (those periodicals to which I was only a one-time or merely occasional contributor), for introductions and catalogue essays, for translations, for interviews with me, and for essays on subjects other than photography, art, and related issues.10

Putting everything back into the hopper and reorganizing my total output strictly chronologically would have been a considerable but not impossible task. However, part of our goal with this volume was to reflect the original structure of the archival material on which it's based, which is entering the Center's collection at this time -- and that's not how the dozens of binders I shipped to Tucson were organized. So we decided to stick pretty much with the way I'd filed the material.11

Beyond reflecting accurately my own organizational method, the advantage of our current system is that you get to see the scope and development of what I covered (and didn't) in every one of my long-term outlets, some indication of how I conceptualized and used each steady forum, major and minor, over a period of time -- which you couldn't do otherwise. What we lose with our schema is the sense of what I produced as it came out, piece by piece: the actual flow of my output (or, more precisely, the flow of its appearance in print, not exactly the same thing). Seems like a toss-up to me; my apologies to those who'd prefer the alternative.12 We hope that the structure we chose proves basically workable, and that the extensive indices (the heart of any bibliography) and cross-references allow access to everything you might need.

The discovery of some errata in such a sizeable project would not shock me; however, to the best of the abilities of all those involved, this reference tool is accurate. And, to the best of my knowledge, it is absolutely comprehensive and complete for the period it covers. We've gone through it, a number of times, with a fine-toothed comb, and I've had ample opportunity to make any necessary corrections. So final accountability for any and all mistakes rests with me, not with my collaborators.

This bibliography stops at the end of December 1995; I, of course, did not. We needed a closing date; though not exactly arbitrary -- mad optimists that we are, we had hopes of finishing it by the spring of 1997 -- it does not represent any symbolic transition point or terminus. To the contrary, it catches me, in effect, in mid-stride. By the time it reaches the printers I'll have published some 200 additional essays; and though, as a working writer, I now cover a broader range of subjects than ever before for a wider variety of publications, I foresee no end to my engagement with photography.

So I've I begun to consider this as an ongoing project -- especially in its eventual electronic/online edition. The updating needed to make this bibliography current through the present is already underway; and, with its structure and style now set, the process can be more systematic. I anticipate expanding it not only with entries decribing new publications of my own but also with the additional kinds of entries one finds in standard bibliographies: references to and comments on my work in the writings of others.13 Information about the progress of that project will be posted at my own website (www.nearbycafe.com). An online, searchable version of this volume is posted at this website and at www.creativephotography.org.

*

Over time, I've managed to publish, somewhere or other, virtually everything I've written on photography. During the years encompassed by this bibliography there were of course outlines for various unrealized book projects, large and small; a number of planned essays (or wished-for assignments) never undertaken due to lack of editorial sponsorship or limitations of my own time, money and energy; a few untranscribed or hitherto unpublished interviews with photographers (for which I still have hopes, and schemes); and, of course, the chronic scribbler's inevitable heap of raw notes. But, though the Center now houses some yards of my correspondence and typescripts, there's no hefty stack of unpublished texts there awaiting discovery; nothing more than a dozen typescripts of essays, all of them minor, that for one reason or another never made it into print. What I've produced, I've published, which means that I have done whatever I could to put it in the hands of its optimum and maximum audiences. This also means that what you see in this book is what you get. Researchers using the archive will find tearsheets and clippings of the writing as it actually appeared in print.

For about the first decade of my professional life, I discarded the carbon copy of an essay submitted for publication once it was printed. (Short-sightedly, I hadn't yet begun to explore the licensing of subsidiary rights, so those carbons just cluttered up the office.) Circa 1980 I began to keep copies of my final drafts on file, for possible revision and/or submission, as written, to additional outlets. Those have now been deposited with the CCP as well.

I've never bothered to hang on to early drafts of my finished essays, which announcement may well discourage any graduate student hoping to uncover something about my working method as a writer by comparative analysis thereof. That's the plan. I do not believe that the world of scholarship would gain much from studying my fits and starts, my discards and failures, and have decided to preclude any such efforts, confident that inquiring minds will have better (or at least other) things to do. Consider that my own personal Paperwork Reduction Act.

However, over the years -- and especially since mid-1988, when I began writing regularly once again as a reviewer -- I have published different versions of numerous essays. Some of the pieces listed here have appeared over a dozen times in English alone, in one form or another. As I hold no brief against researchers comparing and contrasting variations that I felt were worth some readers' time, we have made every attempt to indicate such variants in the bibliographic entries that follow; and the Center’s archives hold all those variant typescripts.14

*

I hope that researchers in various disciplines will find this resource both useful and usable. Because my own interests range widely, I suspect it may prove valuable not only to those involved with photography but also to others in such fields as art and art history, media studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical theory, visual anthropology and sociology, visual communication -- even, with my essays on the pre-photographic history of the lens taken into account, the philosophy and history of science. If, in addition to serving their needs, it also brings new readers -- scholars, teachers, students -- to some pertinent older material of mine that they wouldn't have come across otherwise, thus giving it an ongoing life and usefulness, I'll feel the effort it's required from all those involved in its production has more than justified itself.

-- A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, New York
January 2000

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Notes

1 "Preface," Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, l968-1978 (New York: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), p. xxii.

2Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 415.

3 In a public lecture, College of Staten Island, New York, April 19, 1980.

4 Steven came to me as an undergraduate on a work-study assignment from Bennington College in the winter/spring of 1981. Among the many chores to which he set his hand was the first draft of this bibliography. I'd thought he might get a few hundred entries done; on his last day with me he presented me with two copies of a bibliography complete up to that date. Steven was then trying to decide between a life in music and a life in photography. He's since become the publisher of the extraordinary periodical 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography and other projects, as well as a dedicated photographer in his own right. He claims he owes it all to me, but I know better.

5 These discussions educated me in areas I'd never before contemplated, including the complex interaction between primary research materials in an archive and bibliographic annotation thereof.

6 However, I'm doing my level best to make the most important and durable of these writings available in book form. In addition to the half-dozen collections of my essays already published and in print, listed in this bibliography's first section, I have at least as many more in various stages of redaction; some are already scheduled for publication, while others await their publishers.

7 Photocopies of any of these essays, (in their original, published forms) can be ordered from CODA Enterprises, POB 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002 USA; T/F (718) 447-3091, coda@nearbycafe.com. Write, call, fax or e-mail for further details.

8 The purpose of these binders was simply to maintain an accessible repository of everything I published, and everything I said in print via published interviews, along with the response to it -- editors' introductions, readers' letters -- that it evoked within the pages of the periodicals in which that work appeared. Those strict parameters define and delimit this research tool. (The occasional missing volume, issue, and page-number information in early entries results from my own laxity in recording that information in these binders; I welcome users' additions to and corrections of these entries, which will be made and credited in any subsequent editions.)

9 I've appended a listing of my formal, long-term writing relationships and other official positions with periodicals to this preface.

10 While photography and its various corollary issues has served as my central focus, over the past thirty-odd years I've written and published essays about numerous other subjects -- at greatest length, theater (as a third-string drama critic for the Village Voice, 1967-68), but also music, politics, cooking, and quite a few more. The CCP's archive also contains binders of clippings of the published versions of those writings through 1995, but they are not listed or synopsized in this volume.

11 See note 5, above.

12 However, we did begin working toward some electronic version of this database, to be made available either as a computer diskette, a CD-ROM, or an online database on the Internet (or more than one of those options). We've elected to post it as a pdf file, downloadable for free and readable with Adobe Acrobat Exchange. This is an ongoing project, planned for periodic updating; perhaps, in some future version, we'll get to have our cake and eat it too in that regard -- by building in some commands that will let the user shift from a totally chronological order to chronological within each publication, and retrieve data in other ways as well.

13 I've kept no specific file, scrapbook, or list of other people's commentary on me and my work, though copies of and/or references to many of those exist within my archives and are sometimes mentioned in my own writings. As indicated previously, a few elements of that much larger bibliography are contained in this one, but its production will require the efforts of another cadre of researchers, in that case starting from close to scratch.

14 A brief note in that regard: The most substantial editorial pruning my essays ever received, and the closest line editing to which they were subjected, came from my editors at the New York Observer. None of those changes -- most of them made in consultation with me -- did any harm to my prose; some may even have done good. However, aside from a few minor benefits of assiduous Observer fact-checking, I did not transcribe those changes to my own master versions of those essays. Hence the variants of them that I published subsequently -- in my "Letter from" in Photo Metro and elsewhere -- are either the original, full versions of those essays or my own revisions thereof, before editorial changes and cutting for reasons of space by others.
This seems like a logical place (or at least a handy one) to add the following information: As is the case for almost everyone who writes for newspapers, I had neither control over nor even advisory say concerning any of the headlines for my articles in the New York Observer, the Village Voice, or the New York Times. Those were devised by others; though rarely objectionable or glaringly inaccurate, they do not necessarily reflect either the tone or the central issues of those essays. The titles of most of the other essays covered here came from me, and I consider them integral to the essays.

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From A. D. Coleman: Writings on Photography and Related Matters, 1968-1995, A Bibliography (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 2000).

Copyright © 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com