Reading Shortlist 6.29.16

From Jacob Bernstein, Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87, The New York Times

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

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Ahorn Letter #1. Glad to hear one of the best and most respected independent online photo magazines is not only relaunching after a couple years off, but expanding into new projects.

Kate Palmer Albers, Becoming a Stock Image, and other Surrogates for the Online Self, CIRCULATION | EXCHANGE. Interesting piece about the (im)possibility of public online erasure as well as on the work of David Horowitz.

Jacob Bernstein, Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87, The New York Times. Have a look at the documentary movie "Bill Cunningham New York" and you'll see why every photographer in your newsfeed was sad that he died.

Joerg Colberg, Photojournalism and Manipulation, Conscientious Photography Magazine. Colberg has a pretty amazing ability after all these years to keep finding arguments to stir the conversational pot. This piece raises an interesting question: where does the burden of a photograph rest - in this case, romantic photographic kitsch that straightjackets its subjects as one-dimensional stock characters? The photographer who makes it, the publisher who distributes content employing art directors looking for specific images or the public who creates demand? I'll meet you at the bar and we'll discuss.

Daniel S. Palmer, ARTnews, GO PRO: THE HYPER-PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE EMERGING ARTIST. The dangers of heavy speculative investment in young artists and of their precocious professionalization.

Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows. Highlights the latest problems in gallery-museum financial intertwining and interdependence.

Neal Rantoul, A Disturbing Trend. A professorial rant on the deskilling of photography and the use of text to hide poor images in a project.

Peter van Agtmael, Time Lightbox, Why Facts Aren’t Always Truths in Photography. A nice reminder of the difference between the facts and the truth and between manipulation and deception in the midst of another community debate on those ideas.

War History Online, The Executioner in the Infamous Vietcong photo opened a Pizzeria in Suburban Virginia After the Vietnam War. Some context on the executioner in the Eddie Adams image.

Progress and Problems: Coda

This is a summary of three posts on the idea of progress and photography that can be found here, here, and here. A previous related article can be found here. There have also been outstanding posts recently on the idea of progress (or lack thereof) and fine art photography on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious and A.D. Coleman’s Photocritic International.

In my series of posts, I’ve argued that photography, as part of the western tradition in the visual arts, needs “progress” because of its function communicating ideas within our culture. We need to create fresh, challenging work that forms new modes of speaking in order for the language to remain vital. This stands in contrast with other cultures – I used Southeast Asian art as an example - in which fidelity to existing models has been historically more important than innovation.

I’ve also suggested in my posts that photography has reached an historical moment of maturity; correspondingly, “progress” will be more incremental and will happen along many visual fronts by small groups of photographers or by individual photographers. The modernist age of revolution, movements, and the avant-garde as well as the postmodernist age of “anything goes” should be replaced by a moderated model of progress that takes into account this maturation of the medium and our contemporary historical moment.

This moderated idea of progress proposes that a photographer and their body of work be judged in relation to the innovation and strength of their own artistic proposal and their abilities to combine existing elements into innovative, exciting, fresh, and challenging images, not by any singular, overarching cultural visual agenda or idea of “progress.” Photographers and their images should be their own limiting factor, but the “progress” of the photographic language matters, and some images and projects strengthen and expand our ways of using the language more than others.

I do not hold out hope that digital photography offers us a way to return us to an era of revolutionary leaps in the photographic language itself. I see the digital “revolution” in photography rather in terms of the broader trends of the digital era. As for individual digital images and projects, however, I think Colberg has a good point in that there have not been a lot of projects taking advantage of the new ways of making images offered by digital photography.

His point – in combination with comments he has made in other posts and on Twitter – hints at a broader question about the reasons behind a sense of stagnancy in the growth of the photographic medium today. I agree with Colberg’s conclusion, at least to a degree: contemporary photography has become dominated by trends that many – but by absolutely no means all - photographers are following and there is too much backward looking. I looked at a list of eight possible ideas as to why that might be; I am sure there are more. In fact, A.D. Coleman’s writings on the problems of today’s MFA programs would be a good addition to that list – I think he has put his finger on a real issue.

These ideas of “stagnancy” and “crisis” are played out on the meta-level and about creating an atmosphere for thinking about and viewing images. There are fantastic photographers making incredible work today – I would argue perhaps more strong images and projects than at any point in history. The sense of “stagnancy” is a criticism towards SOME of today’s image-makers, but not all. It’s also a reflection of a larger cultural sense that neither modernism nor postmodernism is satisfying anymore and a reason to look for new ways of framing progress in a way that will allow us to appreciate how some photographers today ARE pushing questions and ideas in our medium that are keeping what we love to do and think about vital and relevant.

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I’ve received a number of interesting emails and messages on these posts – a couple of them have raised a flag at the use of the term “progress.” In short, I agree it’s a loaded, problematic word. I have tried to use it carefully and to explain my use. I’ve couched it in quotes or tried to refer to it as “narrative of progress” because it is, at the end of the day, a cultural narrative we tell ourselves about history; there is no “fact” of a singular, linear, monolithic advance of our culture or our visual language.

When I talk about “progress,” I have used it to signify the expansion of a language, not necessarily the progression of overall quality of a particular project or photographer in relation to what came before.

For example, Robert Frank’s photographs – to use the example from one email exchange – are not necessarily progress in relation to Walker Evans’. Frank’s introduction of new ideas in how a camera could be used to expand the types of images that could be considered art helped to grow our visual language. Simply to have repeated Evans’ ideas would not have done the same. That is how I see the “progress” of a language. Other word choices – such as “evolution” - are equally loaded and problematic. I would welcome another term. After thinking a bit about it, a possible choice would be to simply use “change” instead of “progress.” It’s obviously less loaded, and gets across the idea that a language needs to keep shedding its skin and combining in new ways to avoid stagnancy and repetition.

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We live in the era we live in – photography is grown up. We can choose how to judge it and talk about it, however, in a way that accepts this fact while remaining aggressive in what we demand from the medium in terms of its growth and optimistic about its future. These posts have attempted to suggest a way to do that.

I hope Colberg is right in holding out for another revolution in photography. As he says, we can’t rule this out. It would be fantastic. But I’ll go with my odds.

Progress and Problems, Part III

In posts one and two I’ve argued progress matters in art photography, but that we need to change how we consider the idea of progress to fit the contemporary historical moment. Today I want to build on those ideas and move into an article by Joerg Colberg on Conscientious that has generated conversation entitled "The digital revolution has not happened (yet)."

Colberg’s post boils down to an intriguing question: just where are the digital-based projects that take advantage of the inherent properties offered by a new technology to push the boundaries of the medium in ways not possible with analog?

I’d like to respond by first framing expectations. Whatever truly revolutionary element I would hold out for in the digital era for photography I would place in the broader impact of digital technology on the field and culture, and not in the actual making of images.

The digital era has brought massive change to photography, in how we make images and how we distribute images. Given this is obvious, let’s just list a few changes, some of which Colberg mentions in his article as well: the rise of citizen photojournalism, online image sharing, an exponential increase in images created, the further democratization of photography by lowering the bar of technical proficiency and costs, the embedding of metadata in images, and the explosion in the number of photographers considering themselves professional and the subsequent destruction of the traditional commercial photography market.

The main consequences of the digital era on photography have been broadly established by now and will continue to profoundly influence our medium for decades. This – in my view – was the “revolution” part of the digital revolution. No sense messing around with words, let’s light the fire: I believe that the “digital revolution” has largely happened already in photography through broader impacts on the field, not the actual production of individual projects and images.

In terms of projects and image-production, digital forms another link in an ongoing historical chain - dry plates, Brownie, Leica, Polaroid, etc. - and now digital. This chain has been about making cameras smaller, cheaper, more portable, and easier to use and digital has generally been developed, approached, and used in line with these expectations of previous new technologies. All have tried to maintain the quality of image of previous generations of cameras as much as possible while making photography more convenient. The Brownie, for example, put a camera in a lot more middle-class hands; that was its revolution. Similarly, dry plates eliminated the hassle of mixing chemicals in the field allowing more people to take more photographs and for them to travel to new places to take them. This was its revolution; not a particular photographer or project.

So in terms of expectations from a digital revolution, I'm not holding out for something shockingly new and shiny in terms of a project or image or a new genre of photography. What I hope for is an increase in the use of digital photography to create new form and content that harnesses the advantages of a new technology to speak in a new way that move the lines of visual communication forwards. I think that is possible with individual photographers and projects.

This brings us back to Colberg's question: where ARE the projects taking advantage of the properties of this new technology to create content? He’s on to something. There aren’t many.

As an exercise – how many 35mm digital photography fine art projects can you think of? And inside of that group, how many could not have been made with an analog camera and how many are actually using the new opportunities digital offers to create images (not including post-production manipulation that’s a whole other conversation)?

Not many. Why is this?

First off, this question doesn't ask about projects investigating the medium itself – projects where the subject is digital glitch or fringing, halos and strange digital color. Those types of projects are horrible necessary investigations of technology, but aren’t what we’re getting at.  There are a number of these projects already, and I believe projects where technology is also the subject are of limited potential as an avenue headed “forward” because they don’t use the new technology to say something new in terms of visual communication.

In exchange, going with Colberg's example of Nan Goldin we have someone who used the advantages of a smaller, cheaper, more portable technology to work with her everyday life and relationships. That’s what we’re after – the weaving of technological change into new form and content, projects that have been allowed by a technology that are not exploring the media itself, but exploiting the smaller size and increased portability and new aesthetic features of the newest camera evolution to create fresh visual communication.

There are some great projects that work with digital cameras, though not perhaps as many as you would expect. Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell, Phil Toledano to start a list. These projects, however, don’t answer Colberg’s call to take advantage of the inherent possibilites of digital – all could have been made with analog. One project that I believe DOES use digital capabilities to create new content is “a shimmer of possibility.” Paul Graham uses the high burst capability of the digital camera to create questions around “the moment,” framing, and the relationship of cameras to cinema that would have been hard, if not impossible, to pull off with an analog camera and a motor drive. This, however, even if true, is an exception to the rule.

Part of the reason might be the fact that digital cameras haven’t completely followed the trends of technological innovations of the past. Digital SLR cameras are not actually cheaper, more portable, or smaller than analog cameras. Only digital point-and-shoots and cell phone cameras continue the technological trend of smaller, cheaper, more portable and those cameras, at this point, continue to have fairly severe quality limitations. Perhaps when time brings them more quality, projects will be generated that use their inherent abilities to provide new form and content. Additionally, the larger digital SLR’s do offer ISO advantages, burst modes, perhaps facial recognition technology...but we’ll run out of items on this list quickly. Digital isn’t THAT much different from analog in terms of the ways a camera makes images.

Moving beyond a few speculations around the new technology itself, I think we are more likely to find answers hidden in the implied question behind Colberg’s question. He uses the conversation around the lack of projects taking advantage of digital properties to hint at something broader - why does photography feel “stagnant and anemic” today?

A qualifying statement is necessarily before I reply. First, there are a lot of great images being created right now, as Colberg says as well in his post. I would say there are probably more quality images being made today than at any point in history on a year-to-year basis give the sheer volume of photographers, the level of visual sophistication we’ve developed during the last 150 years, and the variety of modes of working available to us today as established over the course of photographic history.

So the question of “stagnant and anemic” isn’t about the quality of images; I think it's rather about the way those images relate very closely to images of the past and to each other, about how they orient themselves. Why do we seem to see the same projects over and over? The same types of images? And especially when we’ve just been handed a major new technological toy?

As I’ve said in parts I and II of this post, there needs to be an understanding that progress will be more limited in photography as photography grows older as a medium, and that progress is about a creation of fresh modes of working and visual communication by a photographer, not a movement. The situation needs to be considered correctly in terms of expectation and history.

That being said, let’s get to a list of possible answers to Colberg's question that I hope will provide for reply posts and further conversation on other sites. I would eventually like to expand on some of the following points as well as separate posts.

Not in any particular order:

1. Group-think due to social media and the centralization of information. As a cut-and-paste from a question I asked Blake Andrews in an interview recently: The social dynamic of the photography community in comparison with other visual art forms is a very particular and highly developed one. There are very few painting or sculpture blogs in comparison with photography blogs. Photographers also seem to me much more active on Twitter and other social media forms than other visual artists. And I'm not aware of an equivalent to online discussion spaces like the Flak Photo Network for other art forms.

With all this in mind, I think of a quote from a recent interview with photographer Gregory Halpern: "Photographers can sometimes be the most conservative and least ambitious of visual artists."

I'm wondering if all this connectivity, all this common intake of information, all this drinking from the same well results to a degree in homogeneity of thought and more of a tendency for group-think than other artists in other art forms. Why is the photography community so integrated socially as compared with other mediums? Is this something that makes us more prone to being conservative in our thinking, to homogenization and to group-think?

2. The limited guardians of the gate. Photographers attend reviews that don't exist for other art forms that in large part are about networking. Many of the same reviewers appear at Santa Fe, Photolucida, FotoFest, etc. The number of major photography blogs is actually fairly small, a dozen or two. Thankfully we’re not in the John Szarkowski era (nothing against him at all) in which a single person is really the definer of what is considered quality and contemporary in photography. However, the people in charge of selecting work to show in well-considered venues is not very large – and they mostly know each other and I believe are influenced at least to a degree by each other. We remain a community of too few guardians, and a lot of those guardians have a fairly similar vision.

If you give me a photograph, I think I can pretty much tell you if a certain blog or reviewer or gallerist or editor will respond to it and thereby predict your “success.” On top of that - and this is where the problem lies - the image's chances of success are fairly consistent across many of those venues. Seen a lot of the same names across a lot of sites, galleries, and at the top of awards lists? Out of hundreds of thousands of photographers? That’s not good.

3. Issues in the broader cultural zeitgeist. As John Armstrong noted in the recent Flak Photo Books conversation based in Gerry Badger’s “The Pleasure of Good Photographs” and as Colberg noted in his reference to Simon Reynolds, there is an almost fascinating lack of cultural movement in the 2000s across all disciplines, not just photography.

Think of how quickly you can associate music and art and a cultural atmosphere with the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s...now try the 2000s. It’s not for a lack of issues – September 11th, Obama, the Arab Spring, the US involvement in two wars, global warming, religious warfare, the dawn of smart phones.

4. The Numbers Game. I am not sure how the increase in the number of photographers is actually affecting photography production, but I am sure that it is.

On one hand, I can believe that to differentiate themselves, photographers are more than ever searching for new modes, new forms, new ground in order to claim space in the contemporary landscape.

On the other hand, I can equally believe photographers are scared by the numbers game into conservatism. To find acceptance and modest reward, I think a lot of photographers ape a type of work they’ve seen, ending with a formulaic conservatism to their visual ideas. This gives the impression of seeing the same project repeatedly, or seeing an image and being able to believe one of three dozen photographers could have produced it.

5. The Moat Theory. I believe part of why the art world sticks to medium and large format film has to do with keeping a barrier between themselves and the masses. How do you create a unique visional idea against the billions of digital images created every day, many of which will be more interesting than what any one single photographer can make? By not playing the game and keeping away from digital completely. Stay with equipment that’s more expensive and less convenient and therefore less used that produces a different “look” from the masses. The flip side to this is a lot of art photography is now using the same tools resulting in a similar look, even with a wider choice of potential tools.

This also, helpfully, allows us to produce larger prints that gallery’s can then theoretically make more money from, making us a more marketable commodity.

6. Problems of geographic diversity. Who’s your favorite Colombian photographer? Favorite Israeli? Favorite Egyptian? Favorite Brazilian...that's not named Salgado or Rio Branco? Ironically, in the digital era of information-sharing, there is far too little work being produced outside of the US and Europe being seen internationally. How many photo blogs focus on South America? On Africa? On South Asia?

Living in Colombia, I can say first-hand that it’s to a degree about volume and quality of production, but that the bigger problem is that what is being produced is not being distributed. The last true barrier in photography is geography.

Sadly, I also believe the aforementioned moat theory, to the degree that it's true, also has an unintended consequence. The line drawn between art photography and the digital masses also largely cuts off the international photography world who works digitally and in 35mm, resulting in a more homogenized photographic vision. Photographers from parts of the world beyond the US and Europe are frequently cut off from medium and large format as a possible mode of working by a lack of ability to purchase and use supplies. As a case study, I live in a Latin American city of over two million people and there is not one lab in the city for me to develop medium or large format film. I believe this results in work from these areas being seen by some - but absolutely not all - venues as less serious.

7. The Hustle. Photographers are being increasingly asked to pay for promotional materials by galleries, pay to publish our books, pay for portfolio reviews, pay for contests, pay for the chance to have someone look at our work, rent the gallery space...all of these expenditures may be making us more conservative in terms of what we produce, especially in combination with the idea of the limited number of guardians of the gates. Given how expensive photography is as a medium and how more and more expenses are being shifted to photographers from galleries and publishers, it makes sense to make your expenditures count by looking at present models of success and producing work you believe a gallery will be interested in showing or a publisher in publishing.

8. The Watered Down Theory. It’s possible that there is just as much imagery being created that is pushing against trends and creating visual progress, but that today we have to sift through so much material that it feels like stagnancy.

This is a starting point list of possible ideas; I'm sure that there is more to be added. This post has gotten long - I will cut this off here, but will make a summary post taking into account all three of these other posts hopefully later this week.

Progress and Problems, Part II

In part one of this post, I began an argument that progress still matters in art photography. Today I’m going to give that argument a little more context and tomorrow I'm going to take on questions and statements about the “digital revolution” made by Joerg Colberg in an article published on Conscientious entitled “The digital revolution has not happened (yet)?” in which he asked for responses to his writing.

Last month I wrote a post in which I agreed with Colberg that I feel a sense of crisis in contemporary photography - at least to a degree. (As an aside, stating a “shared sense of crisis” means I do not feel “all is fine” with the situation, as Colbeg suggests that I do in his subsequent post.)

I wrote this because I perceive a tension between on the one hand the legacy in our cultural psychology of living with an artistic social contract for over 500 years that calls on "progress" and unique individualism as a model for judging art and, on the other hand, historic realities - the end of the modernist avant-garde and the era of revolutions followed by the (perceived) end of the postmodern questioning of hierarchy and progress. Compounding the tension of this situation is that it is playing out against a backdrop of a number of complicating trends in contemporary photography that I will discuss tomorrow in the third part of this post.

I think there are at least three potential responses to resolving this tension between our contemporary historical moment and our cultural psychology in regards to the idea of progress.

One would be to maintain a modernist line – look for revolution, look for a singular movement, look for a rupture with the past that would signal a clear “advance” of photographic history and allow us to continue a faith in unlimited progress and the unstoppable human march defined by the modern era. Colberg’s article on the digital revolution pursues this line of searching for a way forward: “digital photography might simply be too young for us to see something that is truly revolutionary.”

A second response would be to accept the postmodern questioning of the “grand narrative” of progress in Western culture and accept an end to the idea of “progress” completely. A follow-up to Colberg’s article by photographer and writer Lloyd Spencer, for example, does just that: "Does any art need a sense of direction anymore? We are curious about change. We admire innovation but I am really not sure that the very notion of a 'forward' has not itself past its sell-by-date."

I see issues with both of these responses. With the modernist response, I think we can fairly say there’s been a wide, consensus that the age of movements and revolution is over – and the last 40 to 50 years have proven that out. This is despite the fact that in many ways Postmodernism has allowed the narrative of progress to continue for several more decades by building a contrasting position to Modernism. Ideas of “anti-progress” have been – or felt like – a continuation of the narrative of progress.

Yet backing the postmodernist anti-progress position doesn’t seem to fit the contemporary condition either. Some images remain fresh, remain aggressive, and combine existing elements to break into new visual territory. Others rehash tired visual clichés. Discoveries and evolutions in new combinations of technology, form, and content continue and do so in an ever-changing context. A skepticism of ideas of hierarchy and progress leaves us lacking a way to differentiate between these images and trends. “Does art need a sense of direction anymore?” is a great question, but I would argue the complete destruction of progress and hierarchy by postmodernism leaves us with a soup of undiscerning equality.

My proposal for a solution is what I see as the third possible response to the situation – modify the idea of progress itself to assimilate the idea that photography has become a “mature” medium while moving back from the extremes of modernism and postmodernism to swing back to a middle position between the two. This potential solution stays with the paradigm of progress and individualism, but applies that paradigm of progress to a photographer’s - not a movement's or revolution's - ability to present fresh visual conversation flowing from the creative combination and balance of technology, form, content, and a consideration of the context in which its made.

This model moves beyond the singular narrative of western progress and hierarchy, while avoiding the postmodernist credo “anything goes” which negates a sense of direction, progress, or hierarchy while providing a potential excuse to remake (and remake with irony), not innovate.

This proposal gives us a way to maintain optimism in the medium and in its future. In the same way the “anti-progress” of postmodernism can be seen as part of the narrative of progress, I think a model of “hybrid progress” in which we can accept movement forward along many visual fronts while retaining the idea that there are areas of photography more explored and exhausted than others, images more explored than others, and images better made than others strikes a balance that demands new ideas in visual creation without burdening our psychology with the idea we need revolution for progress.

Photographers can and should pursue everything. Asking how fresh and original a vision is remains a valid and fundamental question - it's just that we no longer have to ask if its following a certain mode of making images as part of the question. Ironically, after leading a ten-week discussion on Gerry Badger's book "The Pleasures of Good Photographs" on Flak Photo recently and frequently disagreeing with the author, there is a quote from the book that states what I'm saying well: "I know all art is a reassembling of preexistent signs and modes, but there are imaginative and fresh ways of doing it, and there are stale ways of doing it." (243)

Colberg wrote that my framework lacks passion and that it is “free of ambition” – I would reply that passion has no place in this – this is about assessing what’s going on objectively and proposing a way to non-cynically address the idea of crisis. And that - I would say - is easier to call too ambitious rather than not ambitious enough.

Part III will be published on Tuesday, July 17th.

Progress and Problems, Part I

A couple weeks back Joerg Colberg published an article on Conscientious entitled “The digital revolution has not happened (yet)?” fototazo promptly went on a two-week summer hiatus and I haven’t been able to sneak in time for a response this week until now. I’d like to engage the conversation he raises, especially given his article comments on and takes a few cross-jabs at a previous post I published called “What Is Progress in Photography Today? (A Response).”

This will be a three-part post. Part II will be published Monday, July 16th. Today will take a look at the importance of progress in western art history and will set the foundation for the second post which will explore questions and statements about the “digital revolution” made by Colberg.

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Before I get into this, let me say two things to hopefully head off some potential criticisms: first, that I would openly substitute another word for “progress” that conveys the same idea with less of a Manifest Destiny/colonialist overtone, but I’m going to stay with it for this post; second, this is obviously a post, not an art historical text, so the historical information is going to be necessarily fast-tracked and condensed and is being sketched in just enough to serve as a background for arguments made in the second post.

That being said, I would like to defend a notion of progress as ingrained in western art history of the last 500 years and argue that this has its merits.

As a contrast to the western tradition in the arts and in order to give it a counterpoint for definition, let’s relate it to the artistic tradition of Southeast Asia. Progress is not part of their historic art tradition; what's important is fidelity to existing models. The goal is to replicate - to the best of your abilities - the Buddha statues of the masters of the past. The judgment of your efforts and abilities rests in faithful reproduction, not innovation.

In contrast, going back to at least the Mannerists in the 1500s, we can argue innovation has always been a vital part of the tradition in the west. The Mannerists figured there was no way in hell they would be able to draw or sculpt the human figure any more naturalistically or realistically than a young Michelagelo, Raphael, or da Vinci so they started to play with form, to elongate necks and arms, to collapse perspective, and to use evocative lighting in order to differentiate themselves and their work from the masters of the High Renaissance. For the ensuing 500 years we've continued to build from our predecessors by challenging them and by looking to speak in relation to them and differently from them, not by repeating them.

I think this largely has to do with ideas of visual communication and the sense of the individual in our society - whereas Buddha statues are remade endlessly as an act of reverence in a society with a greater emphasis on the communal whole, in the west we have developed an artistic tradition to communicate ideas and as a method of individual expression.

Along these lines, in order to communicate ideas, I would argue progress is important. If I've seen 100 variations of an image conveying the same idea, I'm not interested in what its telling me anymore. It has no visual spark left because it communicates ideas in a method that I'm familiar with and, in turn, it teaches me nothing, or close to nothing.

Something that has a sense of visual difference about it will capture me. I'll flip through 100 35mm images of dead soldiers and bombed out towns in a newspaper because I have become – sadly - numb to them by seeing similar images ad infinitum. I see Richard Mosse's "Infra" images and I stop and look again at images of war. I pay attention to the event and the people and the horror of the content because my eyes are drawn in by a sense of something new to how the content is being communicated to me.

Do we need progress to have art? Absolutely not, but it’s part of an artistic social contract our society has constructed. Many artistic traditions, those of Southeast Asia to cite an example, but also many other traditions, show incredible art can be created with different prerogatives and different artistic standards for judgment and appreciation. We can make lots of photographs, endlessly, that are similar and they will still move someone, no matter how familiar the photograph. Additionally, making the well-known image for ourselves for the first time gives us a personal experience and brings us an excitement that have personal value.

But because - here in the west - our visual language and fine art have long been tied into the individual and visual communication, and to make an individual expression and to have communication we need to say something and say it in a way that's not repetitive, we can only hear the same story so many times before it's lost it's power, and we can’t expect by repeating well-known formulas for making images to have an impact on those beyond ourselves.

Of Interest 4.15: "What Makes a Great Portrait?" on Conscientious

The 12 on Portraiture series is half-way through. The next group of photographers responding to the question will start with Anastasia Cazabon, Jen Davis, and Shen Wei.

The midpoint seems like a perfect opportunity to recommend reading an article on Joerg Colberg's Conscientious from 2008 entitled "What makes a great portrait?" Colberg's article is both an expansion of and complement to the discussion generated by the photographers who have responded to the question here on fototazo. The combination of readings will hopefully further the collaborative effort of getting to an understanding of the topic, as Colberg writes as the goal of his article in its introduction.

Colberg sent an email to a large number of photographers, as well as curators, gallerists, bloggers and others involved in the photography world and then published their responses as a collective article. Respondents include Doug DuBois, Colin Pantall, Amy Stein, Brian Ulrich, and Dylan Vitone among many others.