Preface to Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community

by A. D. Coleman

My critical project, initiated in 1968, began as and remains an attempt to provoke and participate in an ongoing society-wide debate over visual communication via lens imagery and its manifold consequences.

Such an agenda requires a regular forum in a large-circulation publication that is distributed to a sizeable general audience at low cost. Along with Walter Benjamin, I believe that " . . . the place where the word is most debased -- that is to say, the newspaper -- becomes the very place where a rescue operation can be mounted. . . . [T]he newspaper is, technically speaking, the writer's most important strategic position."¹

Subsequent to my forced departure from the pages of the Village Voice and the New York Times in the early 1970s, I found myself for many years unable to gain access to such a forum. Instead, I became unwillingly ghettoized in art and photography periodicals, with occasional book opportunities. While I was delighted to be able to reach the readership of a variety of small and hard-to-find magazines and journals (Exposure, Camera 35, Lens' On Campus,and Artforum among them), I was frustrated at being restricted to those specialized audiences because, as Alfred North Whitehead once said, "I write for the layman." I'm convinced that some of whatever impact my writing has had is attributable to its viability in mass-circulation presentational contexts. So my search for vehicles through which my writing could be made available to the general public continued.

Then, in the late summer of 1988, with the encouragement of then-Culture Editor Suzanne Mantell, I created a slot for myself at the New York Observer, a new weekly newspaper, and began producing a weekly column on current photography-related books and shows. At that juncture I was also providing criticism, commentary and reportage to some publications abroad, European Photography foremost among them. Henry Brimmer of the San Francisco-based magazine Photo Metro got wind of all that, and my goose was cooked. Somewhere along the line, over beers, he said something like this: "Listen, Allan. Suppose you just take whatever you're writing for these other publications that you think would be interesting for Photo Metro readers, package it into a column, and send it out to us once a month with some pictures? You'll get a west coast readership; they'll get input and opinion about work and events from outside the region and even outside the country."

Though the idea hadn't occurred to me, this proposition did not take me entirely by surprise; Henry and his magazine and I already went back a ways. So, when he proposed that basis for a column, how could I say no? By then I'd been working for a couple of years on an IBM-PC, which makes such re-editing comparatively simple. Besides which, I've got a soft spot in my heart for the Bay Area, where I spent the best of the Sixties going to graduate school, playing rock and roll and radically altering my consciousness. So I agreed. Shortly after New Year's Day in 1989, I sent in the kickoff piece in this series I'd decided to call "Letter from," and we were underway.

That first "Letter from" appeared in the March 1989 issue. There have been some sixty since. Aside from the New York scene, they've by now covered local and national events in Rockport, Philadelphia, Rochester, Las Vegas, Houston, San Francisco, Santa Monica -- and, outside the U.S., in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, and Switzerland. This book draws on the first forty-nine of those articles, comprising the cream of the column's first five years. A few of the columns are presented in their entirety; with rare exceptions, the segments excerpted from other columns appeared there, as they do here, as complete, self-contained segments. The reports on photo festivals have been trimmed for reasons of space. All excisions from a given essay I've indicated with ellipses. Some minor corrections aside, none of these pieces have been revised.

Much of this material -- the book and exhibition reviews, primarily -- first appeared in the New York Observer and Photography in New York. But, because the forum is right for it, and because I believe in giving good weight, a number of these pieces (principally the reports on festivals and overseas events) were written, either in whole or in part, especially for Photo Metro.

The period during which I produced the body of work that was distilled in my first published volume of occasional pieces -- Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978 (1979), -- witnessed an explosion of the photo scene on a national level in the United States. The point at which I began reviewing and reporting regularly again -- coincidentally, almost exactly twenty years after my first essay on photography appeared -- was one in which a parallel burst of activity was taking place on a global scale. This signalled the emergence of what I came to call the International Image Community, a microcosm with all the problems, pitfalls and potentials of the nascent European Economic Community.

By the early 1980s I'd become painfully aware of how goegraphically and culturally restricted my own view of photography -- and the views of most of my colleagues in the U.S.
-- must have seemed to anyone from outside our borders. The problem wasn't jingoism, nor even a willful parochialism, on anyone's part -- just ignorance and lack of easy access to information. To rectify that deficiency in my own case, as well as to help my readers overcome it, I began making an increasingly concerted effort to broaden my own horizons, so that my understandings and commentary might take on a more expansive perspective.

Fortunately, my professional opportunities over the past decade supported that purpose in diverse ways, enabling me to nose around in that new territory at some length. The reader can determine whether I've succeeded or failed in that larger effort to internationalize my own overview of the field. Regardless of that -- and my own hopes, fears, reservations, gratifications and disappointments in the evolution to date of that "international image community" notwithstanding -- it's been profoundly instructive, indeed transformative, to function as both an observer of and an active participant in this photography-oriented version of McLuhan's global village, as it invents itself at century's end. In addition to synopsizing my responses to a wide range of contemporary photography and photography-related work, this book attempts to convey some of the excitement of engaging with that polycultural process, and to distill some essences of the lessons learned.

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Notes

¹ Benjamin, Walter, "Author as Producer," in Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin (London: The MacMillan Press, Ltd.), p. 20. Today I would add, as a logical extension of Benjamin's concept, radio, television, email and other electronic forms.

From Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1995).

Copyright © 1995 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