Went to the bookstore this evening. Nice break from the clubs - quiet, with decent coffee and a world of books I can read without buying them. I guess they get paid for in the price of the coffee. As is my pattern, I strolled by the periodical rack, noting anything that might be interesting. First the foreign style mags, then the fetishy stuff, then photography and arts sections, then the fashion stuff.
Leaving the periodicals I wandered through the books toward the photography section, where I carefully traced the entire section for books I hadn't seen that looked interesting. In doing so, I noticed something I'd overlooked before. There were a bunch of books on The Masters. That's dead photographers, with work now in public domain. And there were a bunch of books by live photographers, with work probably still copyrighted. The Masters are sure to sell. They are well-known, taught in every photo school, and are recognized as having influenced photography. And they are cheap to publish. And they might be irrelevant.
The live guys always publish work that's never been broadly seen before. Natasha Merritt's Digital Diaries is an example of something not done before. There is no direct precursor to her work, to my knowledge. And this work is relevant.
Let me see if I can clarify my position on relevance. I'm a student of history. It's fascinating, and not only explains how we got where we are, but explains how things have worked in the past and are likely to work in the future. I'm in the middle of reading From Dawn to Decadence, a book by Jacque Barzun about the development of Western Culture. It is a review of the last 500 years of European culture including thought, the arts, politics and religion, and he does a nice job of weaving them together to make sense, without spending allot of ink on dates. But there is very little in the book that is useful in predicting how an information culture will work. There are general notes on how cultural changes have had effects beyond the presumed confines of the changed niche itself. Beyond that, the book is irrelevant to our day-to-day life.
Similarly, knowledge of the development of photography is interesting, and probably necessary, but you don't get it from a book of collected Man Ray pictures. You might get it from a book on the development of photography as an art form, or from Sontag's book. But nothing in any of that has much to say about where photography is now. Magazines are better, even. But better yet are books like Teller's Go Sees, a collection of snapshots he's done of models dropping by his studio to "go see." The fact that he saw fit to publish this as a body of work is also telling. The photographs are related, though, by themselves, nothing is particularly good. But the point is not beauty, but a commentary on culture. His publisher thought it was both a good idea, and would make money. And it is relevant.
(I must mention one other book, while on the subject. Boring Postcards is killer. It's not a collection of one artist's work, but it's a commentary to chuckle about.)
Back to the relevance part. Seeing what is being done now gives us a better idea whether we're just copying the past or are actually pushing the boundaries. Going beyond The Masters isn't anything terribly new. Heck, they didn't even have autoexposure or T-Max. Or C-41 B&W film. (Kinda takes the craft outta the art, doesn't it?) So what challenges do we substitute for the technical problems that have mostly gone away? Some are going to work that is mostly digitally manipulated, but for now that's something different than photography. Others have pushed the envelope on subject matter, like Serrano and Mapplethorpe (oops, he's one of the dead ones). Others, like LaChapelle and Terry Richardson are truly making stylistic statements beyond anything done before.
And these, and others also advancing the art, are the ones photographers need to be ahead of (or lateral to), to truly be said to be making art. So the live ones are the ones to study. Not just what the pictures look like, but why they are made and why they are published.
Then I refilled the coffee cup and went looking for some science fiction.
-Don