Art buyer Heather Morton has provided some coverage of this year’s New York Photo Festival, and today, she talked about “controversial photographers”. Actually, what the post really should be titled is “Two shows that would have been controversial twenty years ago”.

I want to think that this points a little bit towards us having made some progress. Holdt’s photographs were first widely distributed and shown a few years back, and it’s harder to ignite controversy from something that’s known already. And I do think that there are only so many scandals you can construct out of photography of gay men having sex or being naked in front of the camera (or maybe Republicans are currently too busy defending torture to really care).

So this work can now be seen for what it is - which is great. We can finally talk about photography.

Or maybe I’m being too optimistic?