It looks like I’m not the only one who was made a little queasy by Tim Barber’s “Various Photographs.” Others include Robert Wright, who also felt the depressing implications of authorlessness in the show, and Jörg Colberg, who was simply disgusted. (According to Wright, even Barber shrugged off responsibility for the thing.)
While I think it was a bad show, I differ from these two in a couple of respects. First, I think Barber can’t be accused of not curating. Curating badly, sure. But as I said before, the individual works in the show were far better than any random Flickr sampling (I wonder if they’ll be better than the Brooklyn Museum’s “Click”?), so Barber clearly picked and chose. The layout may have been poor, but it WAS a layout. Maybe it would be better to call Barber an editor than a curator, since his attention to the works seemed to barely extend beyond choosing them, rather than designing a coherent means for them to be viewed. But again, he was aiming at a certain lack of coherency, a labyrinth through which the viewer would have to design his or her own path. It’s not a bad presentation of his idea–it’s simply a bad idea.
I also think that Wright, while he’s fairer to the show than Colberg, is a bit idealistic in blaming the show for what may be a fault of photography itself–namely, that photographic authorship is a bit flimsier than the authorship exerted in other media. As I wrote Friday, “Various Photographs” diminished that authorship to a depressing extent…but that doesn’t mean that the fault lies only in the show. It may lie in the medium. To my knowledge, Susan Sontag was the first to point out (in On Photography) that photographic “styles”–the way we recognize a photographic author–were essentially artificial, manufactured attempts at a signature that helped individual practitioners gain notoriety. I don’t want to believe that, but I think there is some truth in it. Why would this be the case? Well, for one, photographs can be made with much more ease than most other artistic products. I know, I know, that’s a simplistic statement. But at the most fundamental level, a simple “click” produces an image, whereas drawings, paintings, writing, etc. require a longer time investment in any single product. Over the course of that investment, certain limitations and pre-occupations of the artist are more likely to be imprinted into the work, resulting in a kind of organic or natural style. Later editing, market feedback, etc. may influence that style and make it more artificial, but it still has an opportunity for an organic base that’s at least deficient, if not wholly absent, in photography. So, as odious as Barber’s show may have been, I found myself more disturbed than hateful because it (accidentally?) brings up a point about photographic practice that I think deserves to be addressed.
In other news, I was disappointed to read at Wright’s blog that Simon Norfolk is something of an ass. When faced with tired but viable questions about, say, the aestheticization of horror in photography, it appears that he prefers shutting them down with scare tactics over attempting a frank or even-handed answer. As noted, I enjoyed his work a lot…but did get a whiff of thoughtless rage from his artist statement, which included the sort of peremptory war cry against “Imperial greed” that’s become annoyingly comme il faut. For the record, I do think that the aestheticization of suffering inures the viewer to the gravity of that suffering, and generates conflicted emotions about whether or not that suffering should be allowed to continue. And I see that in almost every beautiful work that deals with suffering. I’m not sure I would have had the guts to be the lone hand in an auditorium listening to a famous photographer, though–which is exactly why Norfolk’s tactics seem so bizarrely, viciously defensive.
