Photographers on Photographers: Freed's Black in White America

© Leonard Freed, Through the slats of the boardwalk above, the sun shines upon the figures
below, and self-imposed laws operate to segregate the people at this great city beach.
Coney Island, New York

Post by Nick Vossbrink

When I was a kid—junior high and high school—I used to look through my father's high school yearbooks. He grew up in Oakland in the late 60s. His yearbooks hinted at a very different world than what I saw in his family photos. The war stuff and the race stuff were both heavier than anything I had to deal with as a kid and suggested a different side of my dad than I'd ever known.

I've come to realize that I'm also unlikely to ever know this side of him. And while there are parts of our parents that we can't ever expect to know, not many of them are so well documented as their high school years.

At the same time I was looking through yearbooks, I was also looking through my parents' photobooks. They had what I'd consider to be the usual suspects for a liberal California couple: a few Sierra Club books, Family of Man, America in Crisis and Black in White America. Exactly what you’d expect from a liberal household. Yet, also not something that was common among my peer group growing up.

I've been looking through these photobooks again now with adult eyes. It's interesting, I never really paid attention to the dates when I was young. I recognized, roughly, what time periods they covered but never really put together that everything was happening at the same time. Re-viewing them has helped me understand the books, and my parents, a lot better. I'm also figuring a lot out about myself in the process.

In this post, I’m looking at Leonard Freed's Black in White America.

I even read the text this time; when I was a kid, I only looked at the photos.

Absorbing the images was enough to make me realize there was an alternate reality, and an alternate history, in my country. I grew up in the suburbs, not just without all the turmoil my father experienced in his schools, but totally insulated from it. In particular when it came to race stuff. For all the "diversity"of the Bay Area, it’s remarkable how non-diverse it really is. I grew up without having to really interact at all with black people.¹ As a result, most of my sense of things came from media.

Black America was outside the standard story of "American" society which I learned in school. The only time it came up was in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in The South. Freed shows how the Jim Crow South and the suburban white flight in the North resulted in parallel, oppressed societies all over the country.

What's shocking is how much of the book still feels relevant today. The struggle between choosing to submit to the politics of white respectability—with its resulting acceptance of second-class citizenship in exchange for supposed safety—and choosing the struggle for more rights even though that struggle carries greater risks. The ease at which it was possible to be, and desire to be, a white moderate.² How technology—really information (via TV in the 1960s and the internet now)—impacts society by eroding the ignorance between them. How the narrative is always blaming Black America for its ills rather than recognizing how White America created Black America to begin with.

I can't look at this project and think that we've made a lot of progress in the 45 years since it came out. Do things suck less than before? Yes. But that's not something to be proud of.

This is another of the reasons why I have such a low tolerance for looking at photos where there's a huge privilege difference between photographer and subject. A lot of those projects, in addition to being exploitative, only serve to show our lack of progress on addressing the structural inequalities in our society. That so many also appear to have their only goal be portraying the photographer as a savior just for being there and taking the photo is even more infuriating.

Freed though is an example of how to do this kind of outsider photography really well. He's aware of how privilege works in granting access and providing safety.³ And while being close to a white-man-explains-the-world sort of thing, it's not a quick superficial dip into the other world. No poverty or suffering just for cheap grittiness. He shows how pervasive the different world is and how it's closely related to our own world.

As per the title of the book, many of the photos include White America someplace in the frame. Maybe it's leaking in via the television. Or through the gaps in the boardwalk overhead. Or the unplugged acquired-via-surplus refrigerator being used to store food. Or the absent landlord of the falling-apart house. Etc. Etc. The photographer, and his world, is constantly present in the photos. Despite much of the subject matter being foreign, it's still anchored to the mainstream cultural narrative of the increased equity and comfort that occurred during 1950-60s US history.

And there is a lot of joy depicted. Weddings. Kids playing. Music. Families. Life is normal even if it is very different from the "silent majority" lifestyle that we supposedly want to return to now.⁴ Nothing is trivialized into a cheap storyline about suffering or poverty or a lack of virtue—narratives we still hear all too often.

Looking at Freed has reminded me of the way National Geographic in the 1980s was looking at US cities as if they were foreign countries. In the same way I'd see images from abroad, I'd also see images from our cities. Only those images didn't inspire me to want to travel there. When I was a kid cities were scary. Not just the busyness. They just didn't feel safe. Black America was scary and foreign to me.

I know now that part of that feeling is embedded and absorbed racism from society. I also know now that another part was the recognition that the entire system had failed there.

I look through Freed now and try to distinguish between what's unchanged and what sucks less. I better understand the barely-contained anger and frustration I see on Black Twitter as each successive Stand Your Ground trial reëmphasizes how little society values black lives. I see how liberal whites' insistence on being recognized for our progress as a society feels false when things are still horrible. And I wonder what kinds of things my father talks about with his classmates when he attends his High School reunion.

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¹ I had maybe a handful of black classmates total in my 13 years of schooling.

² From Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: "I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

³Albeit not as much safety as one might think. The ways that southern whites attempted to intimidate any out-of-town whites who fraternized with blacks is indeed intimidating.

⁴Something I alluded to when looking at David Goldblatt and Ernest Cole's work.

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Nick Vossbrink is a photographer and blogger who recently relocated to Princeton, New Jersey after spending the first 35 years of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The White Stuff

Nick Vossbrink of njwv announced an allergy to "white guy photography" this week and the online photography world went, well…as crazy as a bunch of generally well-mannered and considerate people that don't want to upset each other too much go, some in defense, some in attack.

I'd like to use his posts to engage a few thoughts on how vision works and about the contemporary ethics of photography, because his main points – which become clearer in his second post – I agree with and I actually find it more shocking that he had to write these posts at all rather than finding something shocking about the content of them.

Before I get into my points, I'd like to explain why I say that. I think part of the negative side of the responses to his posts comes from this paragraph in the first post:

What I'm having problems with is the approach which entails traveling, or moving, someplace with the intent of documenting and photographing so as to "explain" or "capture" it for others. And the amount of privilege required to start such a project and make those kinds of claims is generally limited to (but not exclusively the domain of) white guys.

It's a problematic paragraph because it seems to essentialize a vast range of photographers and reduces their intents, awareness and sensitivities to context into one type and labels it bad. Stopping there would provide fodder for a seven-part response, but he connects the dots himself in his second post:

Being aware of your privilege is usually enough to avoid abusing it. But if you want a primer on avoiding it, it’s almost all about the framing of the project…Present it as personal as you can and acknowledge that it's your point of view. Collaboration is not the colonial viewpoint. And don't treat people like animals or objects.

In short, here he limits his argument to a plea for self-awareness in people photographing from a point of privilege (i.e. white wealthy men) and a reminder to those people of the importance of sensitivity to context and knowing your subjects (unless, perhaps on this last point, you are doing traditional street photography).

He attaches these points onto a pronouncement of boredom with projects that don't do these things – boredom is a generous word to choose – and that are subsequently thematically rooted in capturing a superficial sense of otherness in people or place who bring those photos back as, basically, trophies. Not going to argue against that.

______________________________

So let's dig into points beyond – but related to – Nick's two posts. I'd argue that it's natural to photograph difference. If you put me in a green room filled with green objects for two weeks, then reveal from below a green box a smaller red one – holy shit! - I’m going to stare at it for the next two weeks. If you give me nine sunny days, then one with some evil overlord Armageddon clouds, I'm going to stare in a way I wouldn't if every day I saw clouds like that. How many photos of a white picket fence with one broken slot have we seen? If we travel six months in the Andes, seeing another snow-capped Platonic ideal of a mountain won't impress us like the first one did. Visual "difference" attracts our attention. Repetition of the same visual elements does not.

I’ve lived outside the country for three years in a city that has a very small population of foreigners. The first time I returned to the US, I remember standing in the transit lounge in Fort Lauderdale and thinking – man, people are really, really white. And really large. This is funny because I’m really, really white. The large part's not funny though.

I had become conditioned to a visual container. Suddenly being put into a different one meant a lot of visual stimuli. I stared at people. No matter that I looked just like them. They were different from people I'd been looking at for six months, a large change in my visual fabric. Absurd, but true. What mattered was what I was seeing, not who I was.

Why do rich white suburban kids wander around the city photographing black people or poor people or urban decay? There are all sorts of reasons I won't even attempt to figure out, among them previous photographic traditions, a sense of transgression against their upbringing, to be connected to something they perceive as more vital or authentic than the suburbs, to flirt with identity, but also because it's visually different from their normal visual container. Photographs suddenly appear everywhere out of that difference. I'm not saying it's THE reason, but rather one reason, and it's one that benefits the conversation to come in a moment here.

It's the same thing when a someone from the US travels to, say, Thailand. Kayan Lahwi women with elongating neck rings? PHOTO! People squatting on their heels while they talk together or eat? ANOTHER! The old lady with no teeth smoking a pipe that looks like the photos they've seen in National Geographic of an old lady with no teeth smoking a pipe? MEGAPHOTO!

Here's the crucial point, however. While an understanding of the importance of visual difference in terms of generating visual/photographic interest can be understood as coming from a response to natural processes of visual conditioning, let’s remind ourselves that what's natural is not always good.

We also have natural instincts to kill, fight, rape, steal, and cry out "Free Bird!!!" at concerts that ethical and community shaping forces have brought into line so that we can live together in a way that provides a degree of harmony to our communal existence.

Likewise, while a visual, biological root to "staring" at people with the camera might be there, as a society we have evolved an ethic that states that that type of basic, unsophisticated, unconsidered, unfiltered looking is socially and historically problematic. We call it exoticism or Orientalist or sexist or colonial or imperial or a host of other words depending on who is staring at whom.

In short, vision has ethics and we are responsible for our vision. We have socially evolved the concept of photography beyond our natural instincts of leveling our camera at "difference" and bringing those photos back to show off or display. We have arrived at a higher visual sophistication and expectation that it is our duty to understand – especially as photographers - in terms of how to look and how to approach photographing. That doesn’t make photography that stares or doesn't respect those ethics transgressive or exciting. Nick's right. It's boring. It's what people did for 100 years or more.

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The writer Annie Dillard gave me my greatest of my many great personal rejections, all of which I have sworn to avenge, but none of which I have yet.

Ms. Dillard, in addition to being a fantastic writer, was a professor of creative writing for many years where I went to university. I applied for one of her classes with a short story based in my high school experiences. She read submissions and selected a few of the applicants. I got my essay back with a note of rejection that said, paraphrasing, part of the duty of an artist is to look beyond yourself.

What did she mean? I've heard arguments that basically have said, "How dare anyone speak about others. How could you depict them with any authority? How can an outsider understand another reality?" Frankly, and this will possibly make me sound a little pretentious, I think this is an unsophisticated argument, one that misunderstands some basic ideas about art, and ultimately it's a damaging line of thought.

While we photograph from our perspective unavoidably and by definition, the camera needs to be allowed to engage a complete range of potential subjects. Ourselves and our experiences are part of that range, to be sure, but we need photography to be capable of being a tool for knowing and resolving curiosities about what's beyond what we currently know, as well as being a way of speaking from the strengths and certainties of what we know well from our experience. We need it to go beyond solipsistic projects and situations where photographers are doing things like reverting to abstraction because they aren't allowed to photograph social environments. (That's what happened to photographers in the McCarthy era and it wasn't great.)

Why? Because as important as it is to be able to provide self-definition through images about one's own country-religion-race-community-neighborhood, and as lacking as many communities have sadly been in their ability to do so visually given the economic realities of photography and some very complicated and troubling history, to say the opposite - that photography of community can only be about self-definition - is a line of thinking that radically reduces the arena for creating art by tightening the delineation around creating it. Trying to limit what subjects can be explored through art is damaging.

There are other equally important reasons as well. Unchecked self-definition is not good, witness the use of art as propaganda by Fascists. In addition, reflections on other people or cultures or countries have produced great work that has been important in terms of conversation about and within that culture when it's done at a high level - Frank's The Americans to name a handy example that I think we'll all agree on. It can also help make art more a conversation than a monologue. Navel-gazing isn't a better cure for boredom than exoticizing. The ability to reference the broader world also, perhaps, maintains open a traditional street for engagement with art's great universal ideas and themes by showing commonalities, not differences; see the writings of Joseph Campbell.

We continue moving beyond photography of the past and beyond some base visual instincts to think at a higher level about how we frame, compose, and create. We are responsible for our vision and how it is going to be read by eyes that understand historic and contemporary context. Photographs not created within agreed upon ethical guidelines should rightly be given the labels it will be given.

Moving beyond the ethical standards we continue to evolve about the language of photography, however, not only is it important to defend against limits placed on who can create what types of images, some might even raise the argument to agree with Dillard: that it's part of our responsibility as artists to relate our art to the world beyond just ourselves.

Reading Shortlist 12.4.12

© Charles W. Cushman, Albion, Ill., April 1941. From NPR Picture Show, Lost and Found: Discover a
Black and White Era in Full-Color

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended 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.

On the shortlist:

Evan Spencer Brace, ALEC SOTH: An American Photographer. A short video with Soth on his process, the meaning of a portrait, and inspiration.

© Evan Spencer Brace, still from ALEC SOTH: An American Photographer

Ryan Linkof, Unframed, The Controversial Act of Taking Pictures of Children. This essay accompanied the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's show Young. It explores the cultural tensions around photographs of children, and exposes the attacks for what they are: a misunderstood conflation of sexuality and nudity, a double-standard for the role of images of children inside and outside of museums, and a potentially dangerous attempt to culturally promote and highlight the "purity" and "untouched innocence" of children by repressing images of them. The essay ultimately asks what - if anything - is wrong with viewing children as the objects of visual interest and visual pleasure?

Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, Photography: an ever-evolving art form. O'Hagan manages a nod to a broad cross-section of pressing issues in the medium today in one tangled article that serves as a sort of "State of the Union" of photography.

Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, William Klein: 'I was an outsider, following my instincts.' An engaging interview with Klein about his career that provides a good sense of his iconoclastic character.

Claire O'Neill, NPR Picture Show, Lost and Found: Discover a Black and White Era in Full-Color. Multi-media piece on the Charles W. Cushman Photographic Collection at Indiana University. Cushman was a talented amateur photographer working with color starting in the 1930s whose images were saved from the trash by a researcher at Indiana. Some of the images are fantastic.

© Jonathan Torgovnik, Clare and her daughter Elisabeth

Elīna Ruka, FK, Interview with Jonathan Torgovnik. Conversation on Intended Consequences and Torgovnik's Foundation Rwanda.

Thomas, BreakThru Radio, Art Uncovered - Flak Photo's Andy Adams. Extensive audio interview with FlakPhoto.com's Andy Adams on the background of his website, the short history of online photography and blogging, his personal history in photography, Web 2.0, and a short part about an image by a strapping young Midwestern photographer based in Colombia.

Nick Vossbrink, n j w v, Editing and Art. A meditation on the impact of editing - and who does the editing - on the meaning of a body of photographs. Make sure to follow the link at the top right of the article to link to Part II.

And non-photography recommended reading:

Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth. Brainstorming, the popular idea-generating strategy employed in schools and business since the 1940s, produces less ideas than individuals working in isolation. I'd like to host a group conversation in which we try to come up with ideas about why this might be together in a freewheeling, non-critical environment.

Nathaniel Rich, The New York Times, Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? We might not be as far away from living forever as we think, renewing my hope that one day I may actually catch up on keywording my images in Lightroom.

Review: "Looking at the Land"

© Kate Greene, untitled, Massachusetts, 2011

BASICS
Looking at the Land is an exhibition of twenty-first century landscape photographs made in the United States curated by Andy Adams of Flak Photo in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art. The museum contracted Adams to produce the exhibition as a projection installation currently on view in their gallery alongside the show America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now. The gallery exhibition is up until January 13, 2013 in Providence. Adams has also released the exhibition as an online video of the projection alongside an online gallery of the same images with accompanying texts.

The exhibition has also taken physical form for the first time at FotoWeekDC with a selection of 20 images from the exhibition being presented. FotoWeekDC runs from November 9 - November 18, 2012.

Looking at the Land has also been reviewed on PHOTO/arts Magazine, American Photo Magazine, NPR's The Picture Show, New Landscape Photography, n j w v, Time Magazine's Lightbox, and other sites.

© Joshua Dudley Greer, Imperial Sand Dunes, California, 2011

SNAPSHOT OF THE WORK
Looking at the Land is a group exhibition containing images by 88 international photographers made from between 2000 and 2012. The images were culled from over 5,500 submissions received after an online call for work as well as from the Flak Photo Collection, an online archive of images Adams has curated since 2006. The exhibition crosses the boundary of online / offline as well as presentation concepts, being simultaneously shown in Providence as a projection, online as a video exhibition and gallery, and at FotoWeek DC as physical prints. The project includes photographer responses to four questions Adams has asked them about their practice and landscape photography generally as part of the online gallery and via URL links posted with the physical prints in DC.

© Nicole Jean Hill, Highway 14, Ucross, Wyoming, 2011

CURATION AND INSTALLATION
Unfortunately, I have not - and will not - be able to get to Providence or Washington D.C. to see the projection or the installation of prints. The online exhibition consists of a gallery and video of the same images as the Providence projection. Both are straightforward, professionally produced presentations. The gallery is click through, image-by-image, with the photographer biography and their responses to Adams' four questions posted below the photograph.  The video passes through the 88 images at 10 second intervals, clocking in at just under 18 minutes long. The photographer's name, image title, and location and year the photograph was taken appear to the left of the image.

© Rachel Barrett, At Low Tide, Bolinas, California, 2009

COMMENTS ON THE EXHIBIT
There are too many images to really discuss photographers or images individually, so let's pull back and look at the exhibition as a whole.

In his essay about the exhibition Adams talks about the trends and dynamics in the work. He writes:

This survey is by no means exhaustive but it does signal the beginning of a fertile new era in the ever-evolving landscape photo tradition. It studies a cross-section of current landscape photography in the documentary style...We live in a post-New Topographics landscape where an entire generation of photographers was born and raised in suburban sprawl. Wilderness is a foreign concept. Our environment has been significantly altered. We keep nature at arm's length. Photography describes these things. 

And yet, these images are subjective interpretations, not objective facts.

As a whole the photographs included in the exhibition do indeed give a sense of a changed, evolving contemporary landscape photography. As curator and historian Alison Nordstrom writes in the NPR Picture Show review of the exhibition, many of these photographers focus on the integration of a hybrid constructed landscape and nature. The images feel collectively – but not all of them individually – like an acceptance of, maybe even a fondness for the "man-altered landscape" in this generation of suburban-spawned photographers as the landscape they grew-up in ages and matures. This fondness manifests itself in more overtly subjective, personal lens work as well as more space for beauty.

While a handful of the images stop at being merely visually clever, the majority have more sincerity and warmth in their approach to their surroundings then the critical indictments of Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, and others of the New Topographics photographers. In fact, many of the images in the exhibition seem to move beyond criticism to take stock of the poetry in the odd constructed / natural spatial juxtapositions in suburban and urban areas - the formal connection of a cloud and shadow of a tree, groups of birds taking flight from different phone poles at the same instant.

Wilderness seems less "foreign" and "at arm's length" in these images to me than reflecting, perhaps, the role of wilderness in the suburban-dweller's contemporary narrative: an element of power to respect and preserve, even while manipulating and containing what’s around us for our needs.

Adams writes that this is a cross-section of contemporary practice, but by no means exhaustive, which I agree with; his acknowledgement of this blunts what would be my main criticism and suggestion for the exhibition – a wider visual range in the edit while not necessarily increasing the number of images. While knowing he was beholden largely to submissions and images already in the Flak Photo Collection, a broader aesthetic range could be provided without compromising the thesis, providing more visual variety and play while maintaining visual coherence; a number of the images say the same thing and a sense of visual sameness pervades a section of the images. I would briefly add that while Adams overall presents a consistent vision in terms of the exhibition theme and, at the same time that I would suggest of wider variety of image-making approaches within the show thesis, a handful of images fall outside the coherence of the thematic argument he's making with the work.

A second point of critique: just based on the small sample size of photographers I’m familiar with, there is a lot of work based solely in the natural landscape still, work that could be molded by a different editor into an argument we have reconnected with or returned to nature in contemporary landscape practice. In that way, I question whether this idea of suburban-focus and nature / man-made landscape hybrids is really a singular thesis that unites much of contemporary landscape practice in the documentary style or, more likely, a particular thread that Adams identifies. If it’s the latter, I would argue for a change in the exhibition statement that moves it away from the idea that it presents a survey or cross-section and instead focuses on linking this particular work to that specific thread.

Let’s go back to New Topographics for a moment as it’s been a major topic of conversation around the exhibit so far by just about every reviewer. As written above, I believe there is generally a distance in terms of tone in this contemporary work from New Topographics. I do see, however, a technical and formal debt: both shows overwhelmingly present clean, straight, direct, frontal, 4x5 aspect ratio images. The only real large difference between the two exhibitions in these terms is an exact reversal of the role of color and black and white. While Stephen Shore was the only member of the New Topographics Ten to use color, the same percentage of those included in this exhibition (9 of 88, or basically 10%) are represented by a black and white image. The percentage similarities also roughly play out between the two exhibitions in terms of the relatively small amounts of 35mm images (LAL 8 of 88; NT 2 of 10), square formats (LAL 2 of 88; NT 2 of 10), as well as what I’ll call conceptually-lead work which is hard to define, but let’s just say it’s when the idea of the image strikes you first when looking at it, even while staying within the "documentary style" (LAL maybe 5 of 88; NT 2 of 10, i.e. the Bechers).

This common ground - beyond suggesting a technical and formal relationship between the two exhibits and a lineage to the current exhibit - raises the question of whether an issue that the curator of New Topographics, William Jenkins, labeled "a problem of style" or "stylistic anonymity" in his exhibition is also an issue with Looking at the Land, but let's discuss that down below as part of the wrap-up.

Before doing so, let me add that in a critique in graduate school, Larry Sultan talked with us about the specific difficulty of working with the landscape – it’s simply such a rich tradition to work in relationship to. That being said, I really appreciate Adams’ edit and the photographers individually for providing a large number of visually fresh images and, beyond my suggestion above of a wider edit, the editing itself is almost uniformly strong, with impressively few weak points in a 88 image line-up. I also appreciate - while perhaps not completely agreeing with - the idea that we are in a "fertile" moment and the show left me with optimism about contemporary landscape work and a new understanding of the themes presented.

© Brad Temkin, Hanging Deer, Laporte, Indiana, 2005

WRAP-UP
Lots to consider. I'll start with a couple of smaller points and questions the exhibition raises.

Let's first go back to the question of the previous section about Jenkins and "stylistic anonymity," a term which I am admittedly taking completely out of context, distorting its original meaning of an "absence of style" and using to mean "tight stylistic similarity" for my needs in this review. To what degree are we looking at a fine-tuned editorial vision that provides stylistic consistency and how much should we see this as a large number of photographers all coming from the same background and going to the same types of schools producing relatively - considering the broadest range of ways of making a photograph - similar work?

Is the issue of "stylistic anonymity" Jenkins raised about New Topographics an issue here – even if it's applied to work that's warmer and more personal, not the cold anonymity he was originally referring to?

So many photographers today are making strong, but related images in terms of aesthetics and production methods. I'm actually building to a point that’s not critical or dismissive around the point of originality, a point that's back on the conversational hot plate in articles like this one. I've felt more questioning recently, personally and by others, of the idea of photographers in the 21st-century as individuals. I'm coming around to the idea that all of what we're doing is a collective project, its group research into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes. 5,500 submissions? Hundreds of them most likely interchangeable? The common approach seen in much of the work – but by no means all of it – to the landscape in Looking at the Land leads me to wonder just how valid the individual really is in photography anymore, assuming it really ever was valid. We are in some sort of photographic Golden Age – the number of photographers today and the quality of images produced, as shown in this exhibition, is unprecedented, even if finding truly new and fresh ideas and territory to explore is increasingly a limited proposition as the medium enters adulthood. I'd just as soon do away with individual names, contests, and the fetishism of certain work. What does it serve beyond the market and egos?

Another question this exhibition raises: what does it mean to take images from their original context and present them together in the 21st century? On the point of curation and authorship, Nick Vossbrink of n j v w has written much of what I would like to write here and I would recommend reading his review of the exhibition. In essence, he points to the exhibit as part of the trend of curation being increasingly viewed as a creative act.

What exactly is Adams' role? Photographer Mark Powell has been working on a project curating images from the Spanish-language equivalent to the website "Hot or Not." Photographer Paul Shambroom in an interview with Pete Brook, revealingly titled "In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them," recently explained why he’s giving up actually making images, instead working on projects in which he’s culling the images from Flickr. Isn’t Adams' role sourcing images very similar, besides the fact he’s generally working with better images by photographers who would like a "name"? But is this really any different from the role of the curator mounting an exhibit fifty years ago, any different from The Family of Man? Is the exhibition a work of art? Are we moving to the idea of a hybrid photographer-curator? I need a drink.

Another point I won’t attempt to answer here: it seems to me to suggest any number of issues that the suburban-born MFA photographer is generally defining contemporary landscape practice and our collective artistic vision of the landscape. This speaks quite loudly about the limited voices present in contemporary photography practice and suggests a distorted emphasis on certain spaces and their cultural importance because of the personal familiarity of fine art photographers to them.

Moving towards a conclusion, Looking at the Land excites me about the future of exhibitions. As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t think enough has been made quite yet of Adams being at the forefront of the movement of online editors to offline roles to produce exhibitions such as this as well as 100 Portraits (which Adams curated along with Larissa Leclair). I think this presents a turning-point in the relationship of online editors and bloggers to more traditional, brick and mortar spaces.

Finally, most importantly and interestingly, Adams has presented a vision of the future of exhibitions – flexible and nimble, shifting between various iterations of form between offline and online, between physical presentation and Internet video exhibition, between 20 or 88 images. In fact, this should really be referred to as the Looking at the Land Exhibition...s. As the work shifts from the screen to being projected on the wall to a physical print and the number of images included changes, the meaning of the images included changes and, therefore, the exhibition itself.

Adams’ new model also creates a change in the time relationship between the observer and the work. It’s a shift towards a multiple relationship with the work, allowing the images to be digested in parts, in the case of the online iteration, and at one’s own pace. I have about an hour in me, tops, when I go to galleries or a museum. Here online I can take a half-hour one day, ten minutes the next, digesting the work in parts, going back to and reinforcing my understanding of the exhibition instead of trying to consume an entire physical show at once. The format also allows Adams to include more elements to the multi-media presentation with the accompanying texts, enriching the experience. The online version also allows for Web 2.0 interactivity to play a role in the experience, creating an exhibit that all can refer to, facilitating comments, inter-linking reviews, and generating public conversation about the work between people on different continents.

This update of the concept of the exhibition for the contemporary audience is Adams’ pioneering gift with this exhibit, which I say even while appreciating the strength of the work and the photographers he’s selected for it.

© Todd Hido, #6097, 2006