'At What Age Do You Have the Most Free Time?'

Little Brown Mushroom asks the age-old question—does it matter what age, or how old you are? Is photography a young person's game?

Seems to me that how you frame the question has a lot to do with the answer (LBM's framing concerns "most influential work"), and that the bell curve of most such data tends to merely follow the bell curve of greatest vigor in the human lifetime. Note that link they provide for philosophers, and how the curve flattens out at the ages of 60 and 70—isn't that because a fair number of humans throughout history simply didn't live that long? Putting it another way, how much did Archimedes accomplish as a geometer after the siege of Syracuse?*

Over the years I've seen various claims relating to this question; one such claim—I forget where it came from (I'm too old to remember, clearly)—asserted that great artists' peak periods last approximately ten years. When I taught high school, I did have the feeling that if I collected the best pictures from ten years' worth of teaching, I could have put together a book that would have been a masterpiece by any standard. I never made it that far as a teacher, as it turned out.

In any event the quote from the New Yorker article about fiction writers needing to be young seems blatantly wrong to me. Fiction writing might merely share with photography a simple expedient—that it tends to be one of the things people try when they're young and hopeful, before they get practical and more seriously pursue the demands of living. You know, like being a musician or an actor. It's not that young people do better, it's that young people feel they have plenty time to waste working on impractical things like art photography even in the absence of any material encouragement. I might frame a different question...the way I put it in the header to this post.

Generally, though, I do agree with Alec Soth when he says, "Of course I’d mention the exceptions, but taken as a whole, photographic greatness seems to me to be a young person's game." Seems that way to me too—as a generality/stereotype. One thing that's always struck me is that young photographers in the flush of a youthful period of activity and production always think they're ramping up to an even greater future, when for most of them the "future" is right then—that is, the period they're in then is their most productive period. The problem more than anything is getting people to take themselves seriously and work harder at what they're doing, whatever age they are. That hasn't been the problem for Mr. Soth, but he's the exception there.

It's still an interesting question. Check out the post at LBM.

—Creaky Old Mike
(Thanks to Creaky Old Oren)

*"Noli turbare circulos meos!" Reputedly the last words of the great mathematician Archimedes—"don't disturb my circles!" According to legend, he was engrossed in solving his problems on an abax, a device used for drawing in sand, as the soldiers of the invading Marcellus were ravaging the city around him. Annoyed at being interrupted, he uttered his last words when a soldier burst into his study. The soldier promptly killed him (against Marcellus' explicit instructions).

According to an old joke, it's the only time a Roman ever figured in the history of mathematics.

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Featured Comment by Michel Hardy-Vallée: "I don't know how Alec Soth defines 'youth,' but if I look at the photographers whom I admire, their major work was published when they were at least in their thirties, which is at least a decade and a half older than the age at which pop musicians produce their magnum opi:

• William Eggleston's Guide came in 1976 (age 37)
• John Max's Open Passport in 1972 (age 36)
• Robert Adam's New West in 1974 (age 37)
• Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places in 1982 (age 35)
• Lynne Cohen's Occupied Territory in 1987 (age 43)
• Alec Soth's own Sleeping by the Mississippi in 2004 (age 35)

"And even though that's the work that broke their fame, what they did after is even more interesting if you look at people like Lynne Cohen, William Eggleston, or Robert Adams. Likewise, Yousuf Karsh's, Edward Weston's and Ansel Adams's most famous pictures were taken when they were in their forties and after.

"There are plenty of artists who hit the wall of creativity once the energy of their youth is gone, but I don't think it has to do with genius. It has more to do with whether they work in an art form that allows them to produce works tinted with maturity. Pop music has forbidden that since forever; in contrast, the visual arts allow for incredible works of maturity (the so-called 'late period' pieces).

"One would be remiss to consider that photography is a young person's sport: perhaps for certain genres it is the case, but there are plenty of talented photographers who hit their prime well beyond their twenties or even their thirties.

"Sad to say, I don't find what Alec Soth did after Niagara that interesting. Perhaps he was referring to his own work when he lamented the loss of youth's greatness, but I don't think his generalization is accurate."

Featured Comment by Bill Vann: "I think this is errrrr bullhonkers. Statistical manipulation of minimal facts to suit a predetermined outcome."

Featured Comment by Andreas Plath: "Well, someone once told me that life is divided in three parts: at first, you have time and inclination but lack money. Then, you have money and inclination but lack time. Finally, you have money and time but lack inclination. :-)"

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Brooks Jensen a few years back commented on the link between age and artistic accomplishment, but he took the opposite tack, noting with relief how many great photographers did some of their best work at ages equal to or greater than his at the time. Certainly there are numerous energetic young photographers doing fabulous work, and plenty of older luminaries resting on their laurels and cranking out predictable rehashes of past glories. But there are also plenty of folks like Elliot Erwitt, Lee Friedlander, Albert Watson or the late Irving Penn turning out fabulous photographs at ages more commonly associated with rocking chairs and shuffleboard. I'm not quite ready to hang up my camera yet."

Ctein adds: Were this notion not so widespread and pernicious, I would simply ignore Alec's essay because it is so profoundly wrong and flawed (not the same thing).  The notion that people do their best work when they're young is a persistent myth that is rarely backed up by the data. For some reason, people want to believe it, I don't know why, and then selection bias comes into play, where they think up all sorts of examples that support their case and ignore the ones that don't. It just doesn't hold.

That philosophers' plot that Alec presents as evidence doesn't even support his case. I binned the incidents by decades: there are 6 in their 20s, 13 in their 30s, 11 in their 40s, and 12 in their 50s. Aside from the fact that it appears people don't write great philosophy when they're very young (that doesn't seem like a profound surprise) it's pretty close to a flat distribution. It comes out a bit differently if one chooses the bins differently-- if I throw away the handful of events below the age 25, between 25 and 35, there are 9 hits; 35 to 45, 17; 45 to 55, 12; and 55 to 65, 9.  Which is a modest peak. If you were a gambling man and placing a bet with someone about when some would-be future philosopher were to make their major contribution, you would do best betting on the 35 to 45 group. Except you'd still lose that that two thirds of the time! That particular decade has more than any other, but it is still only a modest plurality. It's a statistical bump, but it is a terrible predictor of individual performance.

Do this in almost any field that doesn't require extreme physical prowess and you'll find similar results.

As you note, age also biases the historical results In ways that have nothing to do with individual creativity. I pulled out my American mortality table from circa 1940. It's instructive to note that between the ages of 20 and 50, 25% of the population dies. Not a very high mortality rate per year, but it adds up.  If you haven't done your work relatively young, you may not be around to do it at all. After that is another story. If you were 50 back then, you had a 1/6 chance of dying  by the time you hit 60.  If you were 60, you had a one third chance of dying before you hit 70.  If you were 70, you had a two thirds chance of dying before you hit 80, and if you were 80, the odds were very very low that you would make it to 90.

Since then, that has moved forward by almost exactly a decade. Now, the mortality rate between 60 and 70 is around 1/6. Around one third between 70 and 80, around two thirds between 80 and 90, and don't plan on making it to 100.  Even more significantly, that ineffable quality of life that has gotten much better. At age 62, I'm in middle age. And I don't mean that in the “oh my God I'm a baby boomer and I couldn't trust anyone over 30 and now I'm getting old and can't admit it”  denial-of-mortality sense.  I mean that I'm healthier, more active, and by just about every metric more youthful  than my parents were at age 50. Even more important, I simply haven't started slowing down. My body and my brain aren't exhibiting many of the changes associated with old age yet. I'm still in that broad amorphous group called middle-aged.

I don't even look particularly old. Don't let the nearly white hair and beard fool you; if I chose to dye them black, you'd be very hard-pressed to figure out what age I was within that broad group. (I wouldn't do that, although I have considered purple.)

Looking around of my contemporaries (which I think of as anyone between about age 45 and 70) I'm a bit more youthful than the norm, a little luckier that way. But not anomalously so. I don't stand out like a freak, I'm just a little more towards that side of the bell curve.

As for my work, I made some of my best work  (arbitrarily defined as oh, say, my 20 greatest photographs) when I was in my early 20s. I made some more of it in my early 30s. And some more of it in my early 40s. And some more of it in my early 50s.

I lack sufficient data after that. It's possible I have run out of steam and the rest of this decade will turn out to be a total waste. I wouldn't make any assumptions.

Mike replies: And that's not even the half of it. First of all there's the problem of definitions. At one point Alec talks about "the best creative years for a photographer." Well, that's a very different thing than "at what age to photographers do their most influential work," because you can be trace the creative peak of many individuals who are not at all "influential." So you'd have to frame the issue very carefully to even begin collecting data about it.

Another thing nobody's mentioned is that artists don't work in a vacuum. It depends a lot on what society values (and rewards) at any given time, and how much encouragement people get (or need) for doing their work. Many people don't know this, but, in Shakespeare's time, theater was absolutely the rage. Something like one in six Londoners went to the theater every week. It was the hottest art form in Elizabethan society, and consequently it was the coolest thing for creative people to be doing. So naturally there's going to be an efflorescence of accomplishment during that time—and sure enough, there was. A handful of decades later, Cromwell closed all the theaters down—so how many great English playwrights were there during that era? I don't know, but I doubt there were very many.

In photography, there was a huge boom in the 1960s and '70s. Many photographers who came on to the scene during that time were lionized when they were young and many of them are still famous. But then there was a big bust in the market in the early '80s, and photographers who came of age later than that have had a much harder time breaking in. To demonstrate this you could analyze the demographics of photography teachers in academic programs. Virtually all college and university photography programs were started during the boom years—and photographers who were qualified to fill the many teaching positions were highly sought after, and locked down many of the available jobs. The result was that in the '80s and '90s, it was much more difficult to get a college-level teaching job. Not only had the earlier generation snapped up most of the positions—and weren't budging from their perches—but successive waves of their MFA graduates were all competing for the few teaching positions that did open up! Not until the '90s and early 2000s did many of the now-diminished positions begin opening up again, as the original teachers aged, retired, or died.

Next you have to look at how much reward there is available for people to do creative photography. In the 1960s and early '70s, pop music ("rock and roll") was in a renaissance: there was lots of attention being paid to those musicians by society, lots of money to be earned, and it was a great way for creative people to be cool. Over the years the field has been flooded with competition, even as the art form itself has steadily declined in popularity. In the past decade the paradigm has finally changed, with the advent of Napster and file sharing and iTunes and the constriction of hard-copy sales. It's going to be far more difficult for musicians to make it big in the next fifteen years than it was for them to make it big in the 1960–75 period—regardless of their innate talent.

Right now, for an internet-based digital photographer, there's almost no encouragement available—it's very difficult to get any kind of recognition, still more difficult to earn any money, and far more difficult still to make a living as a photographer. And there's just a huge amount of competition. Those who do succeed do so by becoming professionals and serving a market—portraits, weddings, commercial advertising. And while that might earn them a living, it's not creative work that will make them famous as art photographers. Nor is it work that's going to be "influential." (Except possibly to others in the same fields.)

I still remember how crestfallen I was when I saw a list of all the photographers who are independently wealthy. It's a lot. I just used the example of Linda McCartney as an example in my "naturalism" post the other day—well, she was an heiress of a significant fortune and married a very wealthy man. Few would deny that Eliot Porter was an important and influential photographer, but he was able to quit a promising career as a medical doctor and devote himself to photography because he lived on his trust fund—he even threw a small party to celebrate when his income from photography finally equalled his income from his trust fund—and he was in his 50s when that happened, if memory serves.

If there were some social mechanism for rewarding young photographers to do creative (not just commericial) work and get both material support (wealth) and positive reinforcement (fame) for it, you'd see a renaissance of creativity in photography. It wouldn't have anything to do with how young they are; it would have more to do with the milieu in which they happen to live and work.

The bottom line: way, way too much noise in the data for any trend about mere age to be reliably extracted. Even though I don't want to discourage young people from trying, Or from believing that it's possible for them to acheive great things...because I think it is. There's never a guarantee of success, and it's also never impossible.

Featured Comment by mark lacey: "I wish I could find the quote but I recall one of the National Geographic editors saying that many of their photographers were middle aged because "a lot of photographers don't get traction until then." I don't see why wisdom and experience of age should not mean you just keep getting better, but some just run out of puff I guess. Being 52, I reckon I've my best years to come. Well, hope so anyway!"

Comments

[alex]

Each artist blossoms at a different age. Lampedusa, the greatest Italian writer since Dante, starting writing at 58, died at 60 without seeing his masterpiece, The Leopard, published. Another famous Italian intellectual, Christopher Colombus,at the age of 56 was taken off the street, pennyless, and given shelter in an abbey. He convinced the prior that his idea of "sailing west to reach the east" was worth an investment. He went on to discover America and became a millionaire along the way. I found a very interesting statistic from the English military. They discovered that older men survived more shipwrecks than younger and healthier sailors. The reason? The older guys had wives and kids so survived longer in the icy water because they refused to die and "leave their families fatherless". My 2 sense. Cheers.

[yunfat]

To my eyes, no one has really achieved photographic greatness. Perhaps in a few years, as we are in photography's golden age.

You see, photography has yet to invent someone bigger than itself. You and I know great photographers, but if you ask someone on the street, "who is the greatest photographer?", you get a lot of blank stares. Ask the same person, "who is the greatest painter?", or, "who is the greatest composer?", and a litany of responses ensue... Van Gogh, Picasso, Beethoven, Mozart...

All of the names I mention transcend their medium, they tap into the human condition (whatever that may be) and expound upon its myriad possibilities.

I think, because of the new tools, and because of the proliferation of ways for photographers to distribute their work in a variety of ways, we will soon see real photographic genius emerge, people who are completely unhindered or burdened with the technical challenges of the past.

[Paul Van]

Stuff like this is the reason I keep coming back! 'Stuff,' of course, being things that make me think.

I think the reason it tends to work out as a young person's game has more to do with the excitement that comes with youth.

A young person tends to still be learning and trying new things. There is an excitement that comes with newness, as well as desire to master a new skill. There are also fewer demands on time, either from necessities (food, sleep), or personal (family, responsibility).

As people age, we tend to settle into routines, priorities change and so do interests. The people we associate with are those who have similar opinions and interests. We may become better at our work, but the feeling of doing something new has dulled.

If you accept the idea that art is supposed to engage your emotions, then it is easy to see that a young person's work (while their emotions are still set to 'boil') would stand a better chance of engaging an audience than the work of an older person (whose emotions may be closer to 'simmer').

Which may go a way to explaining why some forms work better at different ages of the creators. Or even the age of the audience. Think of the music you listened to as a young adult, which still resonates with the 'younger you,' versus how your tastes and appreciations have evolved.

At least that's the way I think of it...

[Robert S.]

This is an odd coincidence, coming on the heels of the post I made in the naturalism thread that referenced Galenson. Galenson doesn't address photography in his book, but he does apply his theory to novelists, poets, and directors. I don't see why it wouldn't apply to photographers as well.

Annie Leibowitz seems like a good example of a conceptualist: she creates works rather than finding them and most of her best known stuff is from the early stages of her career (early to mid 80s). Same with Ansel Adams. I believe he felt that his creative peak was in the 1940s and 1950s, and he's another example of an artist who had a very clear vision for what he wanted to create rather than relying on serendipity.

I can't think of any great examples of experimentalists/late peakers at the moment. Maybe W. Eugene Smith?

[Tom Brenholts]

As someone who wrote when he was younger, but doesn't write any more, the reason is pretty simple: I don't feel like doing it now that I'm older. When I was younger, it was important. Now, it's not such a big deal.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I think it's simpler; I think greatness is a young person's game in general. Some carry on doing new great work longer than others, but it's terribly rare for the FIRST great work by somebody to be later in life. (And some professions give more scope to carry on being great; actors and musicians have perhaps the best chances there.)

Possibly the definitions of "young" and "later" are also kind of fluid. Seems like truly great work before 25 is fairly rare, and doing your FIRST great work after 35 is quite rare. ("Rare" doesn't mean "nonexistent", either.) ("Fairly rare" is less rare than "quite rare")

This seems to me to apply across arts, sciences, and business, too.

I suspect it comes from single-minded obsession. And that youthful bodies tolerate that better; perhaps youthful families as well. And that, if you have it, it makes its mark fairly early, and if you don't have it, you can't really develop it.

[sneye]

Interesting discussion. I believe this is one of the cases where there are only two kinds of, shall we say, artists: those who are most prolific when they are young and those who need decades to refine their art and gather experience and wisdom. Picasso vs. Cezanne to mention only one example. The problem with the first kind is the painfully futile years of repetition after the peak. The problem with the second is the relatively short period of joy before old age and illness. Curiously, I can't think of a single artist who became great in their thirties or forties.

[Bob Blakley]

I think Alec Soth's statement is just weird, Mike. Until the advent of digital, photography required both more technical expertise and more money than most young-uns could amass.

Look at Adams, Weston, Sexton, and all the other "darkroom greats". Learning technique and craft took them into their 30s or 40s.

And most really good photographers seem to me to produce excellent work pretty steadily until they die - especially if they do magazine work; look at Avedon and Penn. Galen Rowell's work was spectacular up until literally the day he died. McCurry and Salgado are still doing great work - as are most of the Magnum shooters. Mapplethorpe's very last self-portrait is one of his greatest works.

[Brian Miller]

"... photographic greatness seems to me to be a young person's game."

Bull----! No, we have a youth-obsessed culture, a culture of "the new," and the truth is that a lot of these "great" photographers were producing garbage from the beginning. Once the shinola of the garbage wears off, the art clique says that they are past their prime, and ignores them. But nobody pays attention to the pertinent part: were they ever really great to begin with?

Artistic productivity doesn't stop until a person is physically unable to continue, i.e, dead. An idea starts in your head, either "make this" or "find that." You know what you want. You have an idea of how to get it. What prevents you from getting it? Nothing. Except for death.

Look at Vivian Maier. She stopped photographing when she couldn't do it anymore. Plenty of people laud her, even though she'll never hear a word of it. She photographed because she needed to do it, needed to do it like breathing, eating, and sleeping.

What prevents anyone from doing that? Seriously, now? Nothing. You have no roadblock. There is nothing in front of you. Pick up your camera.

Go forth and photograph.

[Dave Kosiur]

The writing world sounds just like the art (i.e., painting and sculpture) world. I just finished reading Sarah Thorton's "Seven Days in the Art World" and it seems obvious to me that both genres are operating on an accelerated mode. Collectors are buying contemporary art pieces without any idea whether or not they'll become time-honored masterpieces, and often "flip" their collections based on trends (fads). Sounds as though both writers and other artists work to become businesses as soon as they can, so it's the pace of business, not art, that matters.

BTW, I had a successful career in writing for about 20 years and now that I'm 60, feel even more creative as I pursue my hobby of photography in earnest!

[Ed Hawco]

Mike, no need to publish this comment, but if you edit your link to LBM to remove "#comment-3395" from the end (i.e., end with "...work/") the link will go to the top of the LBM article instead of jumping to the bottom, where that comment is. (Unless there's something specific about that comment that you want to highlight.) Just a little usability tip! :-)

[Ken White]

Assuming that you are not about to die you can't know whether you are in your most productive period. You can only know what came before the current moment. Anyone is free to radically change the terms of personal productivity at any time. What you are anyone else may view as productivity may have almost nothing to do with how the individual you are evaluating sees productivity in their own terms. Testing and measurement of things like productivity is about standardization not about personal achievement.

[Bill Mitchell]

Can you name any great photographer whose best work came after they were 70? (Besides me?)

[Mike Johnston]

"(And some professions give more scope to carry on being great; actors and musicians have perhaps the best chances there.)"

David,
Really? I'd say the exact opposite. Youth is currency in music and acting. For every Barry Manilow or Ozzie Osbourne who manages to carry a career into middle age, there are a hundred if not a thousand flash-in-the-pans who have a few hits or careers with a short arc in their youths, and have to do something else for a living for most of the rest of their lives. Just consider all the truly great musicians who lose their recording contracts later in life. And you could practically count on your fingers the number of interchangeable ingenues-o'-the-moment (of both sexes) who bridge the chasm into lifelong acting careers.

Mike

[Jeffrey Goggin]

I'm 52 and by my reckoning, I'm doing my best work right now, today. Of course, taking a long-term perspective, being 52 would have once qualified me as an old fart, but today, I'm merely considered an old fart in training...

[Emmanuel Huybrechts]

I'm surprised by the results. I always thought that artists would improve with age. I studied a lot classical music and great composers almost all got better when aging. There were some notable exceptions but they were just that, exceptions. Almost everybody think that Mozart would have been better past 35. Even Shostakovich died too young at 69. I'm sure that if an analyzing chart was produced for composers it would be skewed towards the end of their lives for most of them

But I can imagine some reasons why photographers would peak earlier. It's easier to learn than music composing and even easier than painting. It also needs some physical endurance; it's not as bad as professional sports but still. And it may ask for artistic risk taking that suits younger people better in general.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Mike, I'd suggest that most of those 'flash-in-the-pans' were never great in the first place. Meanwhile, both theater audiences and movie directors continued to benefit from Laurence Olivier until he died, for example, and are continuing to work with lots of other people of considerable age.

Similarly, Richard Thompson recorded some remarkable music in his teens, and is still doing remarkable music today. For that matter, most of the bands I liked in the 70s are still recording and performing today (along with many of the ones I didn't, like the Rolling Stones).

Athletes have the shortest "great" periods of course.

[erlik]

Mike, Barry Manilow? Really? :) And in the same sentence as Ozzie Osbourne at that...

I do think that it depends on what you want to say. If you don't find anything to say anymore, it's over, regardless of how old are you.

Of course, there are some things that younger people do better. Or at least are physically more suitable for those things. All of photography is certainly not just for younger people.

[D.C. Wells]

"Noli turbare circulos meos!" Reputedly the last words of the great mathematician Archimedes—"don't disturb my circles!"

This reminds me to ask an unrelated question: Why do digital sensors disturb the circle of light? Why are they rectangular (including square) and not round? Wouldn't a round sensor capture more of what the lens transmits and allow for more freedom to crop?

[ctein]

P.S. here's another way to look at the misunderstood philosophers' table. The median age is 45. HALF the philosophers listed did their influential work when they were "over the hill" by Alec's logic. They were much less likely to do it during what he called their "peak period" than later in life.

So much for the predictive power of age/youth.

Or, as James Taylor put it:

"Never give up

"Never slow down

"Never grow old

"Never, ever die young."

pax / Ctein

[Jim Hughes]

Mike wrote: "...one such claim—I forget where it came from (I'm too old to remember, clearly)—asserted that great artists' peak periods last approximately ten years."

I suspect you are remembering something John Szarkowski wrote about the creative 'lifespans' of photographers. Of course, he had his blind spots -- Kertesz, Haas and Smith, to mention just three.

Bill Mitchell asked: "Can you name any great photographer whose best work came after they were 70?"

To name just one: Milton Rogovin, who didn't begin his serious work until McCarthy and HUAC hounded him into retiring from his optometry business.

Jim (still photographing at 74...)

[Jack]

I'm sure that mentioning exceptions is not what this post is all about ... but how about Bill Brandt as an example of a photographer who did a lot of his most interesting work later in life?

[Jed]

Mr. Soth says 25-35 is the peak. Well, I turned 25 on Saturday. I haven't shot any photos since Friday, but I can say I certainly don't feel any different. If I take any pictures today after work, I better be blown away by my own greatness. Of course, I'll probably just get distracted by video games and forget to shoot at all.

[Kwasi]

I read an old article (2008) about on this topic in the New Yorker. I think their treatment of it is more on target - it seems a matter more of having access to the right tools to create the vision. I don't think youth or its passing has anything to do with it a priori. One thing that should be considered is that Western societies have a bias towards lionizing youth. Others may as well, I sadly haven't had as much experience of them :)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell

Really worth the read.

[kirk tuck]

Now is all we have. I've never felt more creative and alive. Damn, jinx.

[Alex Kus]

I think it's easy in some ways to confuse greatness with popularity/success. I would think that many of us would agree that most of those current pop stars and ingenues are not great musicians/actors, how many will we remember in 10 or 20 years or will our children remember?

If we are going to talk about great artists' works, we need to limit our supporting arguments to great artists.

Quantity of work, quality of work and success are all separate in my mind.

[Crabby Umbo]

I agree somewhat with Andreas Plath...

...certainly as an 'older' person, it's almost impossible to find the time to do anything, but also the money to do it...if you aren't making a living in photography, it's a hugely expensive enterprise, even digitally. It's pretty tough to keep the wolf from the door, even in old age, and especially for many of us that have whole, long, commercial photographic careers with meager incomes. It's tough to be in your late 50's and be worried about every expenditure you make taking away from your ability to pay the rent.

Much of the photographic subjects I see on all the sites and in small galleries, are also youth oriented subjects. Is that because that's what the public wants to see, or is that because young people unencumbered with family responsibilities and more responsible positions in businesses are just out there grinding it out and sleeping five hours a night. The young and fearless rarely pay medical insurance or try to put away money for retirement either (just got a letter from my insurance broker raising my health insurance another 30% after the first of the year, there goes that new lens); they devote enormous amounts of time, and large quantities of their small salaries, to artistic endeavors that have little chance of paying off from a financial sense. When you get older, it's tough to carry on with that sensibility.

After working in high stress corporate media management for a while, I realized it's far better to have spare time than more money, even if it's used to just sit on a park bench and smoke a cigar.

Someone mentioned Vivian Maier, but that's a different case altogether. Limited time responsibilities, no personal family, and just photographing in all her spare time, but it was almost like a personal mania. Few will refute her genius, but she basically took care of kids, and then photographed to the exclusion of almost everything else in a 'normal' life; and never marketed herself to the art market or seemed to interact with peers. It's certainly one way to do it. But is that the definition of the life we want for ourselves?

[Matt P]

My inherent distrust of economics and art collectors makes me want to call bollocks on any assessment driven by auction prices (such as the survey Soth refers to).

[MJFerron]

I hit 57 two weeks and still I'm waiting for the time to do my photography right. After 10 years of trying and progressing from Landscape/Nature to Street, Abstract and a bit of documentary I finally feel I'm settling on a style. Or maybe a style is settling on me. Anyway age be damned and big middle finger to Father Time. I'm not done yet.

[Ed]

Photography needs seeing not looking. Seeing is a proces that takes experience. Some achieve that goal young but most of us take time, a lot of time. Some of us think they can see but they are only looking. I think mr. Brautigam summed it up quite nicely. When photographing Wisconsin he wanted to photograph HIS Wisconsin. Not Mike's not even mine but HIS Wisconsin. When you achieve that you are at the peak of your powers and for that independence can be tought by good teachers (as Mr. and Mrs. Becher seem to have been). Without such gides, it takes time and for some a lifetime ain't enough to reach that state of intelligent awaraness needed to depict what you want to see not what you see.

[Kerry Glasier]

Surely most of us believe that our next series of photos will be our best,no matter what our age is.
Kerry Glasier (71)
Cornwall
UK

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Are we looking for an artist's "peak", or are we looking for when they first do great work? At least some of the time, people recognized as "great" keep getting better, so these aren't the same.

Also, it's not at all obvious that "minor" artists would have anything like the same curve as "great" artists in this regard. So the fact that some of us (me, certainly) think we're doing our best work "now" doesn't necessarily even provide a data-point about how that works for great artists. (Not to say I'm sure nobody here is a great artist; I don't know everybody here, etc. But I'm confident, statistically, that few of us are great artists, and certainly do not consider myself of that stature (art isn't my big photographic interest, it's something I do with the camera for fun).)

[Richard Newman]

By your "youth" criterion, I am well over the hill, still there is hope-I may soon be entering my second childhood. Will thamake me a better photographer? Somehow I doubt it. The basic problem to me is:
What are your criteria for greatness???
In pop music, it is popularity. And its largely the young who buy/download/attend concerts. In other art media, such as painting, sculpture and music, there are fads as well. One decade Miro is great, a few decades later he's 'eh'. Yes there are a few constants -da Vinci, Mozart, etc, But in photograpy, with less than two hundred years of total history, we haven't reached a point of consensus. Perhaps Ansel Adams, Elliot Erwitt, and some others will eventually reach the consensus of "great". Perhaps not. In the absence of objective and testable criteria, which we lack, it is really only an idle time debate without a crear winner.

[Robert S.]

Malcolm Gladwell had a terrific article about Galenson's theory in the New Yorker a couple years ago.

One thing to keep in mind is that Galenson's book is about more than just the age at which an artist peaks; it's also about how the different types of artists approach their work. The early peakers, conceptualists, seem to have a very clear sense of what they want to accomplish, use studies and drafts, and produce a few really well known pieces. Some classic examples are Orson Welles, Herman Melville, and T.S. Eliot. The late peakers, the experimentalists, often don't have a clear sense of what they want to do and have to feel their way through each piece. And instead of creating a few great works they tend to produce a very large body of work that needs to be viewed as a whole. Some examples are Cezanne and Hitchcock.

Galenson also argues that he's describing a spectrum, not hard and fast categories.

[robert e]

The thesis may be true, statistically and in a practical sense, but it doesn't mean that anyone has to take it personally, does it?

"the period they're in then is their most productive period."

Whether this is true or not in general, the fact is that this could be potentially true for any fresh photographer. Best reason to be scrupulous about technique and process no matter what.

I wasn't young when I started photography, but I screwed up a lot of good photographs with a very unserious attitude. (On the other hand, I got some good shots because I had a very unserious attitude.)

--

Regarding flameouts vs longevity in artists, it seems to me that the artist's personality has at least as much to do with it as anything else. Some artists simply give up on pushing their boundaries and horizons, or burn out, and either turn away or milk their early achievements. Others keep striving and reaching. Sure there are one-shot wonders, but there are also the likes of Edward Weston, Tom Waits, Helen Mirren, etc.

Of course, economics, health, luck and other factors have their impact, but no one who isn't driven to keep evolving as an artist is going to evolve as an artist, and drive can be hard to sustain.

Attrition is natural, and some fields are more difficult to stick with than others. In most creative professions, the field is going to thin out rapidly as we look at older age groups. That may not speak to any particular individual's potential.

--

There was a cute book that came out in the 80's called "The Brain: A User's Manual" which was more or less a compendium of interesting facts about the amazing brain and humans in general. I remember a dubious table of average peak ages for various professions: 40's for opera singers, early 20's for mathematicians; those are about all I recall. I don't think there was an entry for photographers.

[Markus Spring]

The title question 'At What Age Do You Have the Most Free Time?' can have only one answer, me thinks: NOW.
The past free time is not at my disposal any more, and about the future free time can be completely unpredictable anything between null and 100-age years.
As I am a big procrastinator myself, I try to make the insight about NOW penetrate my brains, with mixed success however.

[don giannatti]

I think there may be something to the hypothesis, but more from a practical situation. Young may not have kids, mortgages, spouses, life insurance... Young have less baggage from failure/success.

But I do not believe at all that it is endemic, I know of too many older (50+) photographers who are kicking butt, and being very creative.

There is less of a tendency to stay up to wee hours testing models for the book - but maybe that comes more from a 'been there, done that' world view than being less creative.

I am also a musician. I once heard a comment about a composer who was "young" and would be maturing in a couple more decades. The composer was 44.

In all things art, there are tremendous young people with amazing skills and talent... life weeds out the ones who may not want to work as hard, even though the talent could be enourmous.

[Sean]

I'm a better photographer than I ever was as a kid. I do share one thing with my earlier self. That's my ever abiding love of the craft of photography. I've seen old super 8 footage of myself as a child. In it I'm standing with a slr at my confermation dinner chatting and snapping guests. I never knew I'd make a career out of photography at that stage. Later on in my youth I devoted more time to playing guitar to photography. I haven't stopped playing guitar and at 41 years, my passion for photography hasn't ceased.

Maybe some folks with much talent and a little luck get to somewhere in their careers that they spend the rest of their lives figuring out. But raising two beautiful children tells me where my choice really lay. The most consistent body of work I have is that of my children growing up. All my paid work has shrunk in comparison. Now when I go on a tramp with my kids into the hills, they ask to photograph me, each other and whatever they fancy. It's a beautiful thing to be snapped by your kids and see the face which smiles at them and recognise it as your own. So, my most influential photographer, would be either of my kids. Especially when they hold up the mirror to me, and that mirror says; 'keep up the good work.'

[phil]

Hi Mike,
My impression from reading science books is that new discoveries/theories are generally made by young people, especially in mathematics. Whether this is due to the brain still developing into your mid-20s and hence being receptive to new ideas or a willingness to query the older generations mind-set I don't know, but Einstein and Stephen Hawkings had their best ideas while young. As people get older they can use their increasing knowledge to build and expand on ideas, but not necessarily have radical new ideas themselves. I'd be interested in Ctein's take on this.

Translating this to photography I'd expect that younger people have more creative ideas and so experiment more creating new techniques, whereas older people are more proficient by using their increasing store of knowledge, but in more limited aspects of photography.

all the best phil

[Steve Jacob]

Popular culture has icons that burn brightly and fizzle out. Those forms of art that define popular culture have trends with a very short sell by date. If you are "surfing the zeitgeist wave" you will eventually wipe out.

But there are many other artists and writers who never attempt to shape culture, only to comment upon it. This is a lot less stressful and can support a long and prosperous career picking over the flotsam and jetsam that each breaker washes up on the beach.

[Steve Jacob]

Mike said "Youth is currency in music and acting."

Mainly I think for the female of the species. We never could forgive women for getting old and wrinkly.

But there are many MANY men whose acting careers blossomed in middle and older age, from Jack Nicholson to Paul Newman. Even dear old Arnie will be back.

Where are all the female equivalents?

The same is largely true for music (if one discounts the obviously short lived popular trends).

[Stan B.]

I'm not sure which decade will win the photographic creative output award- nor do I really care. I am forever grateful however, that IMHO, Lee Friedlander has probably produced his greatest work, in terms of both output and creativity, while in his seventies.

[Bob Keefer]

I write (for a newspaper) about regional art here in the Northwest. Most of the NW artists I know who are doing very good work are in their 50s and 60s, with a few young folks still in their 40s. Visual art, as a profession, seems to take some time to mature into, even for the very talented.

Once upon a time I set off to do a story that would be headed, roughly, "10 local painters in their 20s worth knowing."

I worked at it for some time but never got beyond four on my list at any given time. By the time I found No. 5, No. 2 had turned 30, No. 1 had quit painting and No. 3 had moved on to a bigger city.

[Jeff]

Many of my favorite, albeit now dead, photographers dedicated much of their lives to photography, and were productive for long periods throughout. This includes folks like Strand, Kertesz and W. Evans. A common thread among them was a singular dedication to the craft. Each sacrificed a great deal, and each was able to shift photo gears along the way.

These are exceptions to be sure. Most of us have 'real jobs' and photography fills some gaps. For others, including these greats, photography was the only real job. Commercial work helped in many cases to fund the personal work.

Time helps. And so of course does talent. But neither is sufficient without putting in the requisite work. Most of us aren't willing to do that; time is just the excuse.

[Jeff]

Answer: not when you have young kids to care for (whatever age that is). Gotta go...

[Pascal Sauvé]

I got started in photography at 37 and i'm about to turn 42 and I keep getting better and better. I feel like i'm just getting started so age is a state of mind.

Anyways, I figure I should peak at about 65 - just in time for "retirement" :)

[Robin Dreyer]

This is a great discussion and all I can say, Mike, is that you are in your peak as a blogger.

[clay]

Some people are just busy with other stuff until later in their life. Cervantes was 57 or 58 when he published "Don Quixote", which is still considered his masterpiece and one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. It was a post modern novel before there was even a modern. And one that could not have been written by a young man.

Of course, this is yet another anecdotal piece of evidence. But I always think of Cervantes as a great inspiration whenever I start falling into the trap of thinking that I am too old to be creative.

[Michael Bearman]

I have always had a theory that age and originality are inverse constants. In my teens and 20s I naturally thought this was because old people were, um, old. Late in my fifth decade, I think that the greater a persons' sphere of knowledge of others' works (in whatever field of endeavour), the harder it is for that person to create anything outside that sphere. The tendency is for one to copy or derive from what one knows rather than create afresh. Hence, I define genius by an ability to create continuously. Or maybe I'm just getting, um, old.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

As someone who knows a bit about art, and photography's history, I'd say that there is far too much variety to make generalizations. Off-hand I'd say that young people do tend to produce the most creative works, probably due to being unfettered by most of life's burdens and "teachings".

But many artists who continue to be (able to be) productive use life's experiences and revelations that come with age to ignite new creative spurts. In photography the artist that immediately comes to mind is Barbara Crane. She's a genuinely remarkable person who has been, and remains, a veritable explosion of creativity for 60+ years. You'll have to Google her name to even get a glimpse of the span of her work.

I have met Alec Soth. He's a very earnest, driven, creative fellow who lives and breathes his work. Whether or not his association between youth and greatness holds stats is irrelevant. He is absolutely accurate in suggesting that old fart photos don't sell. The art world continuously courts and grooms every year's batch of "talented" new MFAs in its insatiable appetite for new product to sell. Just visit the upcoming Paris Photo if you need verification. If you're 35 and are not yet "great", or at least noted, in the art world...

[Richard]

alex wrote,
Each artist blossoms at a different age

David Dyer-Bennet wrote,
Possibly the definitions of "young" and "later" are also kind of fluid.

Reminiscent of thoughts I had many years ago, at which time I concluded, Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't pay any attention to the mortality (chronological timeline) of us humans, and just focus on and enjoy what we create!

Regards,

Richard

[raizans]

keep in mind that LBM's audience is on the younger side. maybe he's just trying to be encouraging.

[Jim]

While my sons were in college at CCS and Hampshire, nothing excited me more than seeing exhibitions of student work - they lack the inhibitions
they will develop when they grow more sensitive to commercial or societal expectations..
But I offer two examples of creative youths, Einstein and his friend Kurt Godel. Godel started in math and moved to philosophy after proving what I use as a slide in my lectures: "All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false!"

[Vincent Ismail]

I know another myth:

The best achievements are made when you are still a free single guy.

[Trevor Small]

As a general principle, and valid only as far as general principles ever are, the human mind tends to peak in "big picture" imagination early, and "detail" imagination later. So, different strengths for different ages.

[Richard]

Is there also not a case that if people achieve success when they are young - maybe they just get lazy, and sit on their laurels. I'm not specifically thinking about Alec Soth here....

Edward Said's "On Late Style" might be wirth looking at

[latent_image]

I never got past the "free time" part of Mike's question. Forget the age part. A few minutes before I read his post, I was in my parlour looking out at the absolutley stunning late afternoon light raking across the autumn scene outside my window. And I was wondering why I wasn't rushing out the door, camera in hand, the way I used to twenty years ago.

The answer: less time. Even though I was working full time twenty years ago and doing a lot of the cooking, cleaning, and child rearing, what I wasn't doing was spending a couple of hours every day browsing/shopping/banking/emailing, nor was I doing a complete restore of data and programs on two computers as I had to this past week, nor did I spend a morning trying to get a glitchy inkjet printer to work as I did today, nor was there any need for me to work my way through a 250-page camera manual as am now doing for my latest digital camera, etc., etc. Computing may be the greatest boon to mankind ever, but in my life it's soaking up way too much time.

As I sat there in my parlour I imagined what it would be like if I simply unplugged. I think I'd be rushing out the door towards the good light like I used to...because I'd have the time again.

[THElmo]

I think we use the wrong "rules" for evaluating "Best Work." When I was much younger (20's-30's) I exhibited in the international salons and was successful enough. Prints were submitted based on who would be judging them not on what I considered my best work. Now I am in mt 70's and am producing my best work as it is my true expression not based on the rules of others. THElmo

[Robert Roaldi]

It gets even more complicated if you move away from chronology and instead measure based on mental age. Hard to define, I know. Even though I'm 58, mentally I'm stuck at 33 or so. That'll skew the data big time.

[Tom Kwas]

Mike, I think you've hit upon another possible story/blog that has been needing to see the light of day for some years. In your comment to Ctein above, you refer to how disappointed you were to discover how many photographers have independent wealth. My crew has been talking about that for thirty years!

Whether the person is an 'artistic photographer' or a commercial photographer, the amount of people working in this industry that rely on, as we always said, "income from another source", is staggering. As far as I'm concerned, any story in any magazine or on any blog, that talks about a photographer regarding their career or work, and does not cover how they are financially able to accomplish that work, is fabricating a total false view of the persons life.

The ability to not have to worry about money in any sense, and just concentrate on improving your photography, or spend inordinate amounts of time out on the street 'seeing' and shooting, or even, as a commercial photographer, to have the luxury to turn down assignments that don't showcase your strengths, is of incalculable value. The amount of truly good photographers beat down to exhaustion by having to take horrible assignments for poor money, just to make this months rent; well, it's probably wrecked more photographic geniuses than I care to remember.

When I was living in the Chicago area, it's almost like every Chicago Board of Trade guy had their little artsy trophy wife, with her converted carriage house studio up in Kennelworth, hanging with all the alt band guys down in Bucktown and picking up the hipster shooting assignments. I once heard one of these 'photographers' bitching about another one of these 'photographers' because her husband was able to finance her to a higher degree!

Lets put it this way, if you subtract those totally financed photographers like the ones I mentioned above, and the trust fund babies, then you subtract photographers that are relying on some aspect of their spouses income and health benefits, and you subtract those who make their income from another job and are basically shooting pick-up assignments when they can; how many are left?

How many people are solely engaged in the business of photography for a living, solely supporting themselves or a family with no additional outside help and only on the profits of that business? And then how many of them are self-assigning months long photo stories with no chance of ready remuneration?

[greg g]

I suspect there certainly is a statistically relevant correlation between innovation and age. Which causes the sleeping Ezra Pound rubric of "make it new" to raise its tired head and howl.

As against that, current research suggests that it takes some ten thousand hours of dedicated practice to attain a level of mastery at anything. So when you start and how diligently you practice matters and might lengthen or abbreviate the time line for any individual.

And two last points: 1) statistics? bah humbug! and 2) I'd pay (not much, mind you) to see Ctein with purple hair (and beard, of course)!

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Markus, you've certainly nailed the situation with regard to what plans I can sensibly make for myself. I've been telling people for years that you can't "do something tomorrow"; all you can do is not do it today.

In terms of discussing why people find the time for things when they do, though, how things change at different stages of life is an important factor, I'm pretty sure. Statistics on groups show patterns.

[Mike Johnston]

Phil,
I've heard various things about "peaks" over the years, one of which is that our brains reach peak ability around the age of thirty, so that many accomplishments that rely on pure mental horsepower are made by people near their 30th birthdays--including those of many great scientists and mathematicians. But experience, knowledge, and especially wisdom/judgement can continue *potentially* to improve even into old age (although many people get hidebound, bigoted, and inflexible in old age). Science appears to be good training for a flexible mindset in old age; I've known a number of people of a scientific/technical mindset who were still very open to new things and technologies into their 80s. Some, more so than I was in my 40s.

Mike

[Gary Brown]

Re National Geographic photographers, mentioned in a preceding comment, see 60 Minutes With Chris Johns: A conversation with National Geographic's first field photographer editor. A couple of quotes:

“Our new director of photography, David Griffin, and assistant director Susan Smith are making a much stronger push than we have in the past to identify young, emerging talent. They're not necessarily age-specific either. Often photographers start to find their traction in their 50s.”

“To quote one of my best friends David Allen Harvey, ‘the cream rises to the top.’ I know that a photographer has breaks in his or her career, but the best photographers keep doing great work and getting better all the time. It's up to us to identify that talent.”

[phil]

Hi Mike,
Definitely agree that experience, wisdom etc improve with age and I'd hope that we are all still improving photographically as we age - I'm more aware of telegraph poles growing out of heads! - but I also find that I stick more with what I know and sometimes find myself thinking 'that won't work', rather than 'I'll try and see what happens', which means some of the spontaneity is lost.
I tend to be (slightly) anti-authoritarian so I do like new ideas and alternatives, which means your recent B&W posts have got me thinking more about B&W rather than colour which I normally do.

Where maturity in science might soon have an edge is cross-over ideas where people fuse ideas from different disciplines, for which you need years to learn several subjects.
It must be tough to spend years building a reputation and career on an idea and then have some young whipper-snapper come along and overturn it with an intuitive leap; even Einstein couldn't get his head around quantum mechanics.
(As an aside it niggles me to see the recent dinosaur programmes with multi-tonne theropods walking with bent legs - I'd expect them to be straighter to better support their weight. They might be related to robins but they're still built like elephants...)

best wishes phil

[John Camp]

After reading the comments, I hoped perhaps Ctein could figure out the distribution of people who think either youth or age is important in creativity, by age group. My instinct is that old people think age isn't a big problem, while young people do. Duh.

There's also the possibility that photography just isn't particularly creative, but is sort of a "casual art," like really good whittling. (You don't see much really good whittling anymore, but there's a whole museum dedicated to it in Shell Lake, Wisconsin.)

One test of the "casual art" proposition might be Death.

Ask, "Who can be judged a great artist (in photography) fifty years after he died?" So, right now, what photographer who died before 1961 is generally recognized by the public as a great artist?

In painting, of course, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of them, going all the way back to the Renaissance. Who hasn't heard of Leonardo? That's even true with Americans, like Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Grant Wood, Jackson Pollock, etc. Where are the photographers? When you say 'Stieglitz,' how many people jump up and shout, "Love those cloud photos!"

So might not a two-axis age/greatness distribution in photography be rather flat -- because nobody is exceptionally great? Is it possible that "great" photographs are simply a random collection of snaps, with temporary greatness favoring those who snap most?

Kirk Tuck took a shot of half of his morning coffee today, and wrote a blog about it...That could be in MOMA tomorrow, but I bet not in fifty years.

JC

[Mike Johnston]

"Ask, 'Who can be judged a great artist (in photography) fifty years after he died?' So, right now, what photographer who died before 1961 is generally recognized by the public as a great artist?"

That's a disingenuous question on several levels. First, the medium was only 122 years old in 1961, and the original generation of practitioners were considered technical innovators. Second, the requirement "by the public"—how do you define that? What percentage? Any qualifiers? The undifferentiated hoi polloi probably can't name any photographer period, living or dead. Third, photography hasn't been accepted as an "art" for most of its history. The fight for legitimacy happened in three waves--first in the 1890s, second in the 1930s, and finally in the 1960s, when it was finally admitted permanently in the galleries, museums and art schools...at which point it promptly bifurcated again, into a small subset of "photographers" who were acceptable to those institutions, on the one hand, and all the rest of the medium's practitioners on the other, who were mostly still left out in the cold.

In a sense, the individuals who died before 1961 who are considered "great artists" had that approbation conferred on them retrospectively, in or after the 1960s. Ask most art scholars in the 1870s or 1920s or 1950s whether Southworth and Hawes, or Timothy O'Sullivan, or Julia Cameron were "artists," and the question probably wouldn't even have made sense to them...and it would have made even less sense to members of "the public."

Mike

[Shotslot]

Hahaha brilliantly controversial. And brings me much hope. Cheers!

[William Porter]

@Michel Hardy-Vallée: Just FYI, the plural of magnum opus is not magnum opi, but magna opera. Opus is a third-declension neuter.

[John Camp]

Mike, said (in reply to a previous post):

"That's a disingenuous question on several levels. First, the medium was only 122 years old in 1961, and the original generation of practitioners were considered technical innovators. Second, the requirement "by the public"—how do you define that? What percentage? Any qualifiers? The undifferentiated hoi polloi probably can't name any photographer period, living or dead. Third, photography hasn't been accepted as an "art" for most of its history."

Okay, I'll take that on. Call the public the "typical, college-educated, engaged businessman or professional who is not an art professional." I would suggest that I could name a minimum of ten paintings that the person would recognize -- might not be able to nail down the name of the artist in every case, but would recognize the painting. They could do so because the paintings are part of a typical educated persons' cultural heritage. Many of these paintings would be from well after photography was established. Could you do the same with "art" photography?

You might be able to with *news* photography (the little burned girl in Vietnam, the execution of the Viet Cong, the Challenger explosion, the flag at Iwo Jima, the assassinations of JFK and RFK and MLK, and a few others...but those are news photos that nobody ever claimed for art. Is it possible that some form of news photography IS the photographic "art?"

[ctein]

Dear JC,

"Recognized by the public" to me denotes "famous," not "great."

But putting that aside, my nominee for someone whose work has withstood the test of time (and death) as great work would be Prokudin-Gorskii.

http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-praise-of-prokudin-gorskii_17.html

pax / Ctein

[Mike Johnston]

John,
The way you've got it parsed now, you're putting at lot of emphasis on "art" photography vs. "all other" photography. Again, the answer really depends on the phrasing of the question, doesn't it?

You're also rather arbitrarily cutting out a lot of people your defined public WOULD recognize as "art"--Weston's Pepper is allowed because Weston died in 1958, but Adams's Moonrise is out because he died in 1984, even though "Pepper #30" was taken in 1930 and "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" was taken in 1941, so both are more than 50 years old.

And what member of your public wouldn't recognize Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"? Taken 75 years ago, but disqualified because she died four years after your cutoff. And is that picture "art"? Or is it news, or documentary? Or propaganda...or a portrait? Is Gardner's Lincoln a portrait, or a PR photograph? Or art? It seems to me that if Rene Dykstra's girl in the bathing suit standing on the beach is art, then Lincoln gets to be, too.

If you're just saying that more people who don't care about art would probably recognize a smattering of random paintings than would probably recognize a smattering of random photographs, then you're probably right. I guess I don't get the point of all the distinctions, though...maybe I've just lost the thread, and need to go back and reread your original comment again. [g]

Mike

P.S. Also, how many people in your public would know paintings that meet the same criteria photos have to? I.e., made after 1839 but the painter died before 1961? Picasso is out, Matisse is in. Photography might do a lot better in the comparison (even limited to photographs somehow assignable as "art") if all the Old Masters were declared ineligible too. No Rembrandt, no Mona Lisa, no God touching Adam on the ceiling. (And if you show someone a Braque and he says "it looks like Picasso," does he score +1 or -1? lol....)

[CN]

Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell: "Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (I mistakenly originally posted this article under the Quote 'o the Day. It more properly belongs here.)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell

[Liquidator]

I don't know. I'm still young.

[Ben Rosengart]

The plural of "opus" is, of course, "opera".