By now, you’ve probably seen your fair share of reviews of the New York Photo Festival; here is another and very thoughtful one (by Tom White). Make sure to read the whole piece, since it gives you a very good idea of the many different aspects of the festival - incl. a lot of the photography.
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“My biggest complaint would be that given the fact that the festival is trying to bill itself as the go to photography event of the year, I think they are doing quite a disservice to many of the photographers on display by printing, mounting and framing a lot of the work specifically for the festival. […] I won’t even get into the strange hanging some work received, the standout being Simon Roberts in Jon Levy’s Home For Good exhibition. Robert’s work was hung in a corner and over the sofas. This will sound harsh but in my mind treating photographic work like this for an exhibition is almost pointless. I would almost rather look at the pictures online or on some poorly projected screen.” - Ofer Wolberger
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In many ways, there are quite a few parallels between what curators and art critics do, especially since ultimately, their success depends very strongly on to what extent they manage to apply their personal vision to what they do: The real meat of both professions is where we encounter the person’s mind at work, regardless of whether we actually agree with what the present us or not (even though our contemporary culture is increasingly moving towards the kind of infantile state where we see everything we do not agree with as “bad”). A good critic can write a very scathing review of a show we love - and yet, we would be admiring the criticism. In the same way, a good curator could present us with a show that we would never even have considered, and we would still walk away satisfied.
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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”.
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Those who were unable to come to the panel on blogging at this year’s New York Photography Festival can find a video of almost the whole discussion here (only the introductions in the beginning are missing), taken by my friend Michel (merci!). Also, Laurel has posted a full audio recording.
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One of the many nice side effects of attending the New York Photo Festival was to run into some people whose blogs I was very familiar with. Bloggers are often accused of being too self-referential (which might strike some as a somewhat curious accusation, given the context of the art world), but it is now a pretty simple fact that the network of bloggers has created an extremely lively (see Andrew and Michael above!), diverse, and, yes, democratic community - and I still hope that the spark will finally ignite the same kind of fire (read: passion) in those parts of the world that hasn’t quite learned what is to be gained from blogs.
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Billed as the “Future of Contemporary Photography”, the New York Photography Festival just ended, and since I had the chance to attend the festival, I thought I’d compile my own thoughts about it. You’re probably aware of the coverage at foto8, with lots of day-to-day posts and more details that I can provide here. Given the Festival also served as some sort of photo-blogger summit (albeit unofficially), you can find snippets on lots of other blogs - there are too many to list them here (and I’d probably forget to include some of them).
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It’s really just a coincidence that the man in this photo is holding his head while walking through Tim Barber’s “Various Photographs”. I could not have staged it any better, though. I think “Various Photographs” might be the worst photography show I have ever seen; and from what various photographer friends told me, there are lots of people who share this sentiment (see, for example, Robert’s post).
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The upcoming New York Photo Festival is being widely anticipated as… well, nobody really knows, since it’s going to happen for the first time - which, of course, makes it all the more exciting. Here’s a nice introduction to the people behind the festival, plus some sample images from the different shows.
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