“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”—Alan Kay
Last night, on a beautiful, balmy, breezy September eve in New York City at Tribeca Rooftop, Blurb.inc hosted the awards ceremony for the 2009 Photography.Book.Now contest. As lead judge not only did I MC the evening event, but I got to give a very deserving photographer by the name of Rafal Milach from Warsaw, Poland $$$TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-U.S.-DOLLARS. Not only did it make him happy but it made me very, very happy.
In many ways, Blurb is inventing a part of the future, and their support of books and photography is phenomenal. So, one more “Thank You” to Eileen and the Blurb crew (Robin, Lori, Brenna, Mike and the rest of the team + Wendy and the NYC collaborators for putting on an amazing evening).
Below is the text of my prepared statement for the evening:
There has been a lot of news of DEATH, DYING and KILLING in recent times and I don’t just mean the dozens of wars and armed conflicts worldwide. When we listen to the media we hear that newspapers are dying and photography is dead. They say that digital killed analog, bloggers killed print-journalism and any number of magazines are listed on deathwatch websites.
If you believe it there is carnage and unprecedented global upheaval from which we’ll supposedly never recover.
Personally I think all of that is a load of bull.
I’d like to suggest that this “is what real revolutions are like,” to borrow the words of Clay Shirky, a brilliant social commentator. They involve slippery and exciting change that cannot be controlled by the usual methods.
I fully agree.
“The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”
And so it is with us assembled tonight. We are here not because one technology has killed another, or because some set of industries are in danger of dying, real as that may feel. We are here to celebrate newness, innovation and the glorious creativity of the human spirit. And yes, CHANGE. Whether we know it or not, we are living through revolutionary times.
When someone demands to know whether print-on-demand will kill publishing and whether newspapers and magazines will die “they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution.” As Shirky says: “They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be lied to.”
I cannot tell a lie.
But I can say that books are ancient vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and resonate with us as objects even today. Photography, by contrast, is no more developed than a toddler in the scope of human history. It is a gift of modernity and it is changing rapidly before our eyes … and all of that is as exciting as anything I can think of.
To be attached to old ways and outdated systems in this new day is foolhardy and naive, for who can any longer believe that technologies won’t change radically every six months or more. And who cares!? Change is inevitable. Has anyone mentioned we are living in the 21st century? I don’t know how all of these changes will affect the larger industries many of us work in; no one really does. But I do know that we are the future—we are the architects and the builders and there are more and more powerful tools at our disposal every time we blink our eyes.
So let me remind everyone to please take out your cell phones … and make sure they are on. Please Tweet, Blip, Facebook, Blog and Qik video anything and everything you want. We are witnessing changes the likes of which previous generations could never dream.
The Photography.Book.Now contest was not just another “photography” contest. This was a photography-book contest—and specifically, one that celebrates print-on-demand technology. Many thanks and shout-outs to all the photographers who submitted, attended the party and decided to participate in something fresh and exciting, without really knowing where we’re all headed.
[Posting this entry from 34,000 ft & the future. Here is the full text of Clay Shirky's talk on the state of newspaper publishing. Follow me on Twitter @dariushimes]
All of the judges have been chosen, confirmed and posted on the Photography.Book.Now 2009 contest website. It’s an amazing line up of critics, curators, gallerists, photo editors and photographers. If you have ever thought of producing a book and have wanted to show it some of the best names in the business, this is your chance!
I have long admired Vince Aletti’s writing on photography. Who, in the photography and publishing community, hasn’t eagerly looked forward to his year-end list of Top Ten photobooks produced annually for a number of years for The Village Voice, where he was editor of the art pages up until just a couple years ago?And what photographer, established or unknown, who has mounted a show in New York City, hasn’t anxiously awaited the arrival of the weekly New Yorker, praying that their exhibition was reviewed in 100 words or less in “Goings On About Town”?
The chance to become deeply familiar with Aletti’s style and tone over a series of essays was first deliciously served up in 2001 by Andrew Roth’s magical tome, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the 20th Century. Roth, a rare book dealer, collector and photobook connoisseur based in New York had decided to publish a very personal list of just that: photographic books he considered to be the most seminal of the century that had just come to a close. He enlisted a handful of essayists and artists to contribute to the volume, including Daido Moriyama, Shelley Rice and Jeffrey Fraenkel, but he conscripted both Aletti and David Levi Strauss, another prominent photography critic and writer, for the brunt of the work. They evenly split the list of 101 books, and set about writing summaries of each artist’s life, work, publishing history, as well as the contents and salient features of the book in question, all within the space of 300-600 words.
In short, these reviews are nothing short of brilliant for their lucidity, expository nature, and sheer brevity. I’ve been recommending it as a concise history of the medium to photography students (and who of us aren’t students?) since the book first appeared.
I can only imagine, as a writer, that the project must have been daunting at first; constraining oneself to a limited space is generally more difficult than an open-ended assignment. But the mini-essays that were eventually published reveal no traces of the difficulty I imagine. By the end of the task, the discipline required to begin, and the discipline surely gained from having written 50 reviews spanning two-thirds of the entire history of the medium of photography, I can only imagine had a lasting effect.
Aletti now not only writes brief reviews of shows in “Goings On About Town” (among contributing essays and interviews to various books and journals), but he is one of a half dozen critics charged by that magazine with covering the performing and visual arts in a regular column entitled “Critic’s Notebook.” These columns appear scattered within the “Goings On About Town” section and are briefer than anything from The Book of 101 Books, weighing in at roughly 150 words each.
But they are masterful. Below are my own notes made in studying one of Aletti’s recent “Critic’s Notebook” entries, (Nov. 19, 2007).
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: Art and Soul. Vince Aletti, writing about Fazal Sheikh
November 19, 2007
[Full text] The photographs in Fazal Sheikh’s first exhibition, in 1995, were portraits of refugees who’d fled civil unrest in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia and found shelter in Kenya. His most recent works, currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, depict Indian widows and girls who have found themselves to be outcasts in a culture where female infanticide still regularly occurs. In between, Sheikh has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, and the Netherlands, documenting the displaced and the persecuted—people whose basic human rights are at stake. A compact, engrossing survey of this work at Pace/MacGill couldn’t look less like photojournalism. Sheikh’s subjects are not anonymous victims; all but a few are identified by name. At once descriptive and loving, and warm rather than cool, the photographs are extraordinarily moving portraits in the classic mode (think Julia Margaret Camera and Irving Penn), whose aesthetic weight is multiplied by the power of their maker’s concern.
[I've broken out each sentence and then summarized it.]
1. The photographs in Fazal Sheikh’s first exhibition, in 1995, were portraits of refugees who’d fled civil unrest in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia and found shelter in Kenya.
[1. A beginning point of some kind.]
2. His most recent works, currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, depict Indian widows and girls who have found themselves to be outcasts in a culture where female infanticide still regularly occurs.
[2. The current exhibition being reviewed.]
3. In between, Sheikh has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, and the Netherlands, documenting the displaced and the persecuted—people whose basic human rights are at stake.
[3. The range of work that has been produced since the aforementioned beginning and the current show in question.]
4. A compact, engrossing survey of this work at Pace/MacGill couldn’t look less like photojournalism.
[4. Back to the present with mention of a second current show, and a short but powerful description.]
5. Sheikh’s subjects are not anonymous victims; all but a few are identified by name.
[5. The subject matter and approach of the work being shown.]
6. At once descriptive and loving, and warm rather than cool, the photographs are extraordinarily moving portraits in the classic mode (think Julia Margaret Camera and Irving Penn), whose aesthetic weight is multiplied by the power of their maker’s concern.
[6. Summary of the attitude of the work. This becomes the kicker sentence, where one uses the most glowing terms one wants.]
6 sentences, 154 words
What these brief columns provide is a chance to hear the voice of the critic as ‘guide,’ one of the most useful roles a critic can play. They guide one into the landscape of a genre, a medium, and in this case in particular, a truly gifted artist and his exhibition.
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney