A Rant and A Modest Proposal

“I can admire a well-made essay, but I’d rather follow a narrative than a thought, and the more abstract the thought the less I comprehend it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading Le Guin’s comment makes me think of some photobooks today. There are photobooks that offer comprehensible narratives and accessible content and there are others that border on the abstract and leave one puzzled. What are they trying to say? What are they about? 

Publishers’ blurbs and explanatory texts offer guidance on what the viewer is supposed to see, but I imagine that without the texts the viewer might be clueless. And even with the texts the viewer is often lost. How do the photos embody what the text says they do? What do some of the words in the text even mean? How would you know if you are seeing photographs “metabolizing the influences of neorealism and postmodernism in search for new forms?” What does metabolizing an influence look like? Is it the same as foregrounding an anti-document?

And what about photographs that “negotiate surface and interiority and welcome tensions between contingent reality and archetypes?” What the hey does that mean?  If you saw that, would you recognize it? How would you know you were dealing with “tensions between contingent reality and archetypes” and not instead exploring performative cultural intersectionality in post-colonial power dynamics? How is contingent reality different from regular reality anyway? Isn’t all reality contingent in some ways? 

Have pity on us poor mortals. Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell a story?  Wouldn’t the viewer appreciate something simple that didn’t require a post-graduate degree in semiotics? Not every viewer comes equipped with a brain capable of digesting the writings of Alan Sekula.

Here is my modest proposal, a suggested activity for a photography workshop: 

1) Find four or five examples of pseudo-academic artspeak and images. 

2) Separate the images from their descriptive texts. 

3) Remove from the texts any obvious references that identify which images they describe.

4) Scramble texts and images.

5) Try to match texts and images, justifying your choices.

Enjoy and good luck!