dispatches

Photo Lucida aftermath

I am back from Photo Lucida. It is the most successful review event I have attended in my decade of putting myself through these meat grinder critique marathons. I have a commitment for a show, and, probably, a photo editor for the book project. Here is what I learned about my work:

The contra dance project has legs. But I need to cast my net wider to give it more context. Whether I throw the net into my archive, or back out in the field, I have yet to determine.

It is useful to be working in an arena untrodden by others. Nobody’s looking at what I’m looking at, subject-wise. Even though I am shooting in a style not unfamiliar to any decent editorial photographer, I would not have gotten this degree of attention if I had continued to show my brushy landscapes or my European panoramic silver prints.

Other opinions count. But they shouldn’t account for everything. No decision I make based on this intense look at my work should be considered firm until it has settled in my thinking for a few weeks.

What have I got myself into

It’s nice to get agreement. The consensus I’m hearing is that I have a bigger story to tell than I thought.

Everyone wants more still work. The motion-blur thing is great, but it doesn’t tell enough of the story. As a photographer, a lot of my interest in contra dance has been the challenge of extracting visually compelling images out of a complex, dynamic environment. That’s where I get my jollies. As a storyteller, and that seems to be the larger point of this project now, I need to expand my range. Some of it is in the body of work that spans 20 years, some of it I will need to shoot. Perhaps it is portraits. Perhaps it is dance venues. Perhaps it is the details and elements that tell you that you’re at a contra dance, besides the blurry bodies and joy-infused faces.

Rusty Freeman was close to apoplectic when he saw the work and heard my stories. "You’ve got a tiger by the tail here. This is going to be big." I need scholarship to accompany this project, and I need to expand my team. This is going to take some time to sink in—just what kind of project have I gotten myself into, and who else has to be included? Do I have the ability to actually pull this off?

It’s the best outcome from a good review event—support and fulfillment from what I have accomplished, and terror about how much I have yet to do.

What else I could do

Timing is everything, and it rarely coincides with what you want. Every reviewer said this would be the perfect project for Chronicle Books. When I met with Chronicle I learned they already have a global dance book in progress, by Brian Lanker. Silver Eye Center just did a show with a music theme, and probably won’t program another one for some time.

This kind of thing happened repeatedly with my Ireland book project. Everyone had just done an Ireland book, or was about to. One publisher said, essentially, "This one’s so much better than the one we just signed a contract to do. Too bad."

One has two choices in response to bad timing. You can beat your head against the nearest wall and curse the universe, or the bad judgment of those who are overlooking your genius. Or, you can change the expectation. Alan at Chronicle wants to help me place this book elsewhere. Linda at Silver Eye suggested an approach to text that I hadn’t thought of, that could be a great solution to a particular dilemma I was facing. People want to be helpful. I want to do everything in my power to aid them.

There is another alternative. I had a long talk with a photographer/roving reviewer, James Lerager, who told me to forget the publishers entirely. He said that print on demand is robust enough at this point to do my project that way, and that I’m way ahead of most people in that I have a built in audience for the project, the dance community. There’s about 18 new skills I’d have to master, and I’d need to shell out for an editor and a designer, but it’s a possibility. I’ve been working a ton this spring. What else am I going to do with my money? Replace the 50 year old single pane windows on the house? What fun is that?

How we print now

At the portfolio walk we get to see the work of our fellow Camp Lucida attendees, or rather half of them, the ones whose last names begin in the half of the alphabet not your own. My highly unscientific poll of the print types yielded this. Of the 80 or so portfolios I saw (or more accurately, glanced at), about a third to a half were black and white. I sussed out one silver print portfolio in that group, one ambriotype, and a half dozen platinum/palladium portfolios. The rest were digital prints.

Among the color, 90% or better were inkjet prints, way up from two years ago. The small pool of C-print portfolios were more likely to have been printed with a digital C-print machine (LightJet or Lambda) than in a color darkroom.

Regardless of mono- or multi-chrome, most people appear to be inkjet printing on matte papers.

Getting good reviews

Finally, I have some reviews under my belt. I feel so much better.

My first reviewer was number one in my priority list, which I first thought would be unfortunate. I wanted some starter reviewers so I could get my spiel down on my contra dance project. But she was perfect—the exibitions director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Exactly who I needed to see. She was highly encouraging, could imagine it fitting into her programming, and had some great suggestions for how to pull the project together in editing and supplementation with text. We’re to keep in touch.

My next great review was with Harris Fogel, who, at the last Photo Lucida, was my personal Shiva, God of Destruction. He decisively put the nail in the coffin for my pretty panoramic work. He showed how I was being absolutely safe in that body of work, making unchallenging middle of the road images that didn’t match my ambition for them. This time he was thoroughly encouraging and excited to see the work, and had a ton of suggestions for finding an editor, for seeking editorial placement, for how to make something happen with the project. He saw it as a mature body of work with great depth (I let him leaf through the box of 200 work prints), and that it could go in any number of directions in execution.

Which, of course, is precisely my problem. I’m starting to understand why I’m here—to find the collaborators for this project who can share a vision for what it can be. Someone here is going to be the one who connects me.

Dread and anxiety

Oh the poor organizers. The computer system broke down. We had new software this year for choosing reviewers. All evening we waited in line to get to a terminal and make our choices. The system would take our collective picks and spit out our individual schedules, instantly.

Except that it didn’t. The staff has been working all night to compile 160 individual review schedules, by hand. We will get them 15 minutes before the first review.

I woke up this morning with a concurrent sense of anxiety and dread. Not about computers though. About the Why and What For. I’ve been to what feels like a gazillion of these events, and have spent a lot of resources to do so. Without a lot of return. Back at the beginning of the decade, so much seemed possible. The work was well received. A book was happening. I was making some great contacts, and I was starting to get shows.

Then 9/11 happened. As they say, Everything Changed. My big New York debut was four months after, in lower Manhatten. There was no big splash, not a single photo sold. The gallery was gone by the end of the year.

My career and my fine art life were in suspension, then in slow rebuilding for years afterward. Even though I am showing a dramatic new body of work this round, I am anxious and uncertain. Nothing has happened yet, I have no data. Therefore my anxieties can run through my mind unimpeded.

I shared my state of mind with Robin. "I couldn’t face the crowd in the lobby. I had to run back to my room. I can’t do this yet."

"Oh, that must make you an introvert."

"And I don’t know why I’m here. Whats the point?"

"Oh yeah, grief and anxiety. You? Anxious? Big surprise!"

"That was fast. How’d you know?"

"I’m a trained professional. I know you. And I got you laughing. See, your affect has totally changed."

"And I know why your mother wants to hit you all the time."

"I just think it around her. But she knows I’m thinking it."

It’s 8:50. Maybe the schedules are out.

Latest update: the Reviews are delayed an hour, until 10am.

Camp Photo Lucida

It’s summer camp, and I’m seeing all my fellow campers from years past. We’re embarking on four days of intense relationship with our work, with our reviewers and with each other.

This is the fifth time I’ve been here. It was called Photo Americas for the first three rounds, starting in 2000, and it changed its name to Photo Lucida in 2005 after a split in the organization. I’ve been to Fotofest in Houston, and the Santa Fe Reviews, as well as to smaller events in LA and NY. I've been a reviewer at our local Seattle review. This event is the most well organized, and the most thoughtful and consciously kind of any of them.

Chris Rauschenberg sets the tone in the orientation speech each time. "In the photo world, there’s a level of team play at work. When I was a reviewer at Fotofest, a photographer might start the review by saying to me, ‘See that woman over there? She’s really good. You should look a her work.’ If I were reviewing at a ballet competition, that wouldn’t happen."

It’s still going to be intense. Referring to the need to re-prioritize our reviewer choices over the coming days, Chris said, "In a four day event, you're not the same person two days later. If you are, see me later and get your money back."

Doubletake

Photo Lucida jitters

Oh, it’s going to be another challenging Photo Lucida. I can feel it. I just spreadsheeted the list of reviewers for next month’s portfolio review in Portland, trying to decide which ones I want. Most reviewers have a line about the kind of work they want to see. There is an alarming overuse of the adjectives "conceptual," and "experimental, and frequent variations of "pushing the boundaries of what we know photography to be." Oh boy.

There are 60 reviewers on the list, over half are repeats. I’ve seen some of these people at every review event of the last 10 years--I call them the "photo mafia." Many of them have been supportive of my work, and have been following what I’ve been doing all these years. But there is a shrinking acceptance, and opportunity, for what we would call "traditional" styles and processes, and more attention to photography in the context of contemporary art trends.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s the way this world is going, and I’m not about to change the direction of the tide. I am organizing my portfolio this week, as it’s about the only time I have at home before I go on the road again. I’m changing course with what I’m showing (I had a rather disasterous Photo Lucida two years ago—it’s in the archives here), and I’m going with my contra dance project, which is what has much of my attention these days. The black and white silver print panoramics are staying home this time. That work is way too old school for this crowd.

Sothebys does Weston

The room was crowded at 11 in the morning. That morning there was an article in the SF Chronicle about the Sothebys auction of works from Maggie Weston’s collection. Two days only, at Charles Campbell Gallery. On one wall was a group of Westons, an Oceano Dunes (blessedly matted to show the whole image this time), a very early work, one of his attic portraits from 1921, and a portrait of Tina Modatti. Second from the left was a Paul Strand work from the Gaspe Peninsula, an absolute modernist masterwork of light and dark triangles, and stunningly printed.

There is no replacement for seeing work in the flesh. Some of these images we’ve seen reproduced over and over (a Diane Arbus "Twins" hung in a corridor, opposite a nude Charis on the Oceano dunes by EW), but there are two things going on when the show is live. One is obvious: you can see the real tones in the print. You can get your nose up to the work (if the museum or gallery will let you—they were peculiarly uptight about people doing this to glassed work at LACMA) and see the details and the flaws. There’s nothing so refreshing as seeing where Ansel Adams missed spotting out a dust speck. The second aspect veers into the spiritual and woo woo: the work has presence. You can feel something from a real live work of art, an original painting or photograph, that is never going to happen in an offset reproduction. I have been overcome with goosebumps and been brought to tears more than once in art museums. I step back a foot, out of the zone of the painting, and the sensation goes away. I step back, and I’m wrought all over again.

Something of the sort happened to me with a group of early French primitive landscape photographs, also at auction. I’d never paid much attention to this body of work in reproduction, it never spoke to me. In this room, it was shouting out my name. Weird, evocative, moody, these works had resonance big time. Cuvelier couldn’t bring color to the work like his contemporaries, but he could bring a melancholy to the image like no one’s business.

Link to the Chronicle article here. They've got photos of some of the works I mentioned (but they cropped that Oceano Dunes shot!)