Heros and slobs

There are those who dichotomize and those who don't. I like to. For a long time it's seemed to me that there are two basic schools in photography (just the "art" of photography, maybe all of art -- who knows -- don't confuse me, dichotomies have to be simple): small, simple and often sloppy vs. big, heroic, operatic. When I learned the craft it seemed that the most interesting work was done by the first group: Cartier-Bresson, famous for overexposing and underexposing and basically not giving a git about the technology so long as he got the image; Robert Frank, who outraged many critics in the 50's for his harsh grainy "sloppy" technique as much as for his dystopian vision; Gary Winogrand, who shot so much that visiting his own work must have made him feel as if he were exploring the archives of an unknown photographer. The primary venue for photography was publication, although that had long been on the wane, but gallery shows were few, photography majors in the art schools were few and most photographers were poor, shot black and white and didn't/couldn't make/afford huge prints.

In the 1970's this started to change and by the mid-80's the dominant forces in the art of photography were the galleries and the art schools. Galleries like things that are impressive on the walls, and art schools like to have something to teach. Unfortunately, you can't teach someone to be a Winogrand or an Arbus or a Friedlander -- where talent like that exists, it emerges gradually over time - usually more time than it takes to earn an MFA - and the level of craft needed to make that kind of work can be picked up in a one semester photojournalism class. Moreover, while that stuff looked great on the printed page and lent itself to essays, it was too intimate for Really Impressive Gallery exhibitions. As art school photography programs really got going, the aesthetic drift seemed to veer more and more toward the craft, and hence the physical object, than the image depicted on it.

While some really great photographers emerged during this period, the results of this sea change were usually (from where I sat, anyway) depressing. Novelty (excuse me, "innovation") became the most important characteristic of one's work. More often the innovation was technical or studio oriented. Photographers reinvented old technologies, used odd cameras, dressed models in curious things in odd places, made books, mounted images on weird substrates. Everything began to seem more important than the image and it was only by separating the image from the photographic object, or making it smaller, that the vacuity of a lot of these images became apparent.

To be sure things got better in the 90's when social content started leeching back into the practice, but the heroic school remains dominant in the art world. Shore, Meyerowitz, Nixon, Stein -- all still around doing great stuff. New folks like Brian Ulrich, Alex Soth and even newer folks like Amy Stein, are doing really wonderful stuff and even crossing back into journalism in some cases. But the gallery predominates. No self-respecting art photographer would shoot in smaller than medium format and wouldn't go digital unless they could use something way beyond the reach of the average citizen. The stuff looks fabulous on the wall (the recent Richard Misrach exhibition at the National Gallery is mind- bogglingly beautiful), and is almost impossible for someone not steeped in the craft to pull off.

But if, for a moment, we take the image off the wall and look at it as a non-physical artifact; if we shrink it, print it in a magazine, post it on the Web, the game changes again. Negative size won't buy you anything at 800 by 1200 pixels. Will a growing interest in social issues and mass distribution push the aesthetic back toward the small and simple? Will everything just descend into cheap effects -- a visual equivalent of top-40 with big hooks and no continuity or sense of being part of a body of work? I don't know, but it's an interesting thought. If the non-corporeal image viewed in small format (a book; a screen) is what you care about, then there's a stunning amount of great photography out there and no one in particular in a great position to capitalize on it, including the photographers.

So one thing I know is that I'm a troglodyte. I missed about 15 years of shooting while raising kids and creating a non-photographic career in a non-digital age. My knowledge of current work is hopelessly dated, so my dichotomy is probably easy to shoot full of holes.