I'd like to thank everyone who commented on Thursday's question (if you could recommend one book, what would it be?). I was a bit surprised the post didn't get more comments (76 so far) and I admit I was hoping for a few more recommendations of more recent, digital-photography-related books. In part to educate myself.
I chewed on that for a while this morning, and I guess the bottom line is that I have to accept that photo culture is changing.
A long time ago, when I was strategizing how to become the kind of photographer I wanted to become, I remember scrutinizing the resumés of art photographers to determine what was expected of them. Mostly these consisted of five categories of items, not necessarily in the following order: teaching positions, grants and awards, work in collections (i.e., the artist's work has been acquired by the named institution or famous private collector*), gallery or museum shows, and publications (either of the artist's work or about the artist.)
Debbie Fleming Caffery, The Spirit and the Flesh book cover
If it was a full CV (curriculum vitae) these lists could be formidably long, bespeaking persistence and long and diligent practice. (Don't think that art photographers aren't trying to please clients—they're just after a very different kind of client than professionals or assignment photographers, in a very different kind of way.) Exhibits, whether in a modest community center or coffee shop or a major museum, soak up lots of time and money. And it used to be that the main way that art photographers of less than superstar status got into museum collections was to drop off your portfolio at a museum (well, I guess first you'd have to have a portfolio, which used to be a central task of preparation for a career as an art photographer) on an appointed day, and come back around to pick it up a week or two later. The museum might "accept" you into its collection by offering to buy a print or two at a much reduced rate—if you were really lucky, that is. All that required effort and diligence too.
I dropped off a portfolio once—one time. At a gallery. "These are...competent," the gallerist said when I returned to pick it up. She did not literally have her nose in the air and she did not actually sniff (or drip contempt, however one drips that) as she spoke, but she might as well have. Of course I was partly to blame: the portfolio contained not the work I liked best and was most passionate about, but rather work that constituted my best attempt to second-guess what I thought the gallery would want to see.
What most of these CV accomplishments spoke of, apart from the aforementioned long, diligent, effortful and expensive persistence, was that you had the chops, the cred, or the cool to make it past a variety of gatekeepers: hiring committees at Universities, museum curators and gallery owners, editors, the granters of grants, etc.
Right from the start, this didn't look appealing to me, and not just because, psychologically, I have trouble asking for what I want. What stuck out most prominently as borderline masochistic was having shows. You'd work to create your work, then you'd work to get accepted for a show, then you'd work to print the show, then you'd pay to have your own work framed—and then, after all that, the total throughput for the gallery space for the month your show was up would be 81 or 119 or 362 people or some such number. If the show was at a public space like the rotunda of a building with shops in it, or a hospital, you could stand there and watch person after person walk past every single one of your pictures without so much as glancing up. (I did that experiment once, but with someone else's show.) If it was a "successful" show, three people would contact you with a comment, you might receive a notice in a local (or even the local) paper, and four people would buy one of your prints for $650. Of that $2,600, the gallery would keep 40%, or $1,040, and, with the other $1,560, you'd cover the $875 you paid for framing and the $240 you spent on photo paper and other supplies and, with the rest, award yourself a princely 97¢ an hour for the time you put in—but just for the time you spent printing, framing, and hanging the show, not counting the time it took to make the pictures in the first place.
Now, of course, things have changed: galleries keep 60 or 70%, not 40 or 50%, and you'd be lucky to get $500 apiece for those four prints. /sardonic mode
I did exactly one show, too. I both curated it (six photographers were included) and participated in it (I was one of the six), and it was well attended, well received, and even reviewed in print. You'd think that this would have encouraged me, but it had the opposite effect. It seemed a long way to go for a line-item in a resumé. Of course there are advantages to shows—they can be fulfilling and satisfying, they impress your friends and relatives, they can serve as a deadlined inspiration for getting things finished up (several of my friends used them this way—as a goad to getting work done or serving as an endpoint to one project and the beginning of the next). And of course the work does get seen.So why didn't I continue down that path? I don't know. I guess you just know what your work is supposed to be, and that didn't feel like "it."
The beauty of beautiful books
But now books—books were another story. In those days a smallish printing might be 3,000–5,000 copies (now it's 1,500–3,000), and all those books were released into indefinite careers in the world, where they might get seen by many people, or seen by one person (who was literally "invested," that is, he or she bought the thing) over and over again—studied, contemplated, enjoyed. And, unlike a show, which went up for a month and then atomized like a mist in the wind, a book retained a corporeality that could slumber unmolested and then be rediscovered later, born into a new life of being looked at and appreciated, for instance when I bought it out of a cardboard box at a giant used book fair in a high school gym or something. My nearly pristine copy of the original The Decisive Moment (which really isn't that great a book...I'd rather have Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer if I could have only one book of his) slumbered for many decades in a cabinet in my grandparents' house, for example. It was better, not worse, for having hibernated for so long.
I don't know, books just seemed like better odds. Moreover, books seemed like the way that photographers communicated, not only with their audience, but among themselves.
Of course, "book" meant something slightly different in the photo culture of my youth. It didn't always mean big, lavish coffee-table type books. A number of 1970s photographers made a name for themselves by putting out little paperback books of B&W photographs, sometimes with reproductions of indifferent quality. But they put out one after another and pretty soon found their audience. If you've ever seen Charles Harbutt's Travelog or Garry Winogrand's Women Are Beautiful or Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations you know what I mean. There are hundreds if not thousands of other examples.
It's not like photo culture itself is in decline. It's just that the old photo culture is in decline. The way it was in the 1970s and '80s—the old SOP (standard operating procedure) of the five things I mentioned at the outset, holding teaching positions, amassing grants and awards, getting your work in collections, having gallery or museum shows, and putting out publications—is changing now. And has been changing for a while, even though, as T.C. Lin said yesterday, "the veneer of the old structures persists in an attempt to retain their aura of legitimacy."
...Changing into what? I guess none of us are quite sure yet, unless me poking around on Flickr is supposed to mean something. We're in the middle of change. Things are volatile, dynamic. Heck, even static websites with portfolios of JPEGs are already going the way of the dodo. In the first half of the 1980s I received my favorite compliment—a guard at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress saw me leaving yet again, after spending hours looking at original portfolios of historic photographs, and he blurted out, "Jesus Christ, do you live here?" I was quietly a fanatic. To paraphrase what Thomas Jefferson said of reading, I had a canine appetite for looking at photographs. I sometimes wonder what "young me" would be making of the photo scene today, and what my younger counterpart might teach me about whatever new photo culture is taking shape.
So anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe books are simply no longer the primary way photographers communicate...and that's why Thursday's post didn't draw more comments. Or, er, interest. There are more photobooks than ever being created, but they're published in ever-smaller numbers, they come and go more quickly, and they make it into fewer brick and mortar bookstores (which are fewer in number themselves) where people can pick them up and look at them. Older ones get expensive and thus less obtainable (note the price of the copy of Twentysix Gasoline Stations at the link above). There's less "shared experience"—ever even seen a copy of Peter Hugo's Permanent Error or Stephen Shames' Bronx Boys or Debbie Fleming Caffery's The Spirit & the Flesh? Probably most haven't, but all three made "best of the year" lists in 2011, 2014, and 2009 respectively. Even major publications seldom break into public consciousness out there in the big broad world, beyond the photo village. You can name exceptions, I'll bet, but any way you look at it, the big hits are smaller, the average publication gets less attention, and little guys get pushed off the back of the table pretty easily.
Young me from back when wants a young me from now to explain: which, where, and in what form are the new classics?
Mike
*Here's the list from Keith Carter's bio:
Carter's work is included in many private and public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, George Eastman House, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
Special Collections: Elton John, Ralph Lauren, George W. Bush, Michelle & Barack Obama, Michael Stipe, Vanessa Redgrave, Diane Keaton, Elle MacPherson, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Gere, Horton Foote, Hallie Foote, Julia Roberts, Robert Duvall
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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Featured Comments from:
Tom Hassler: "I think it’s too soon to know what the new classics in photo books are just yet. It’s certainly true that the landscape of 'career' photography in all its previous incarnations has changed much in the last decade or so. Seems to me the five categories you mention still apply for art photography, and getting established in that world is more difficult than ever thanks to the proliferation and popularity of picture taking in general.
"One exciting side benefit of the digital age is 'short-run' book printing a la Blurb, etc. Photographers can now get all the enjoyment of having work in print by self-publishing. Previously you needed enough of a reputation to get a publisher interested (or deep enough pockets to print books yourself to the tune of some thousands of dollars).
"Now it’s possible to have that gratification on a book-by-book basis. With a little practice the books can be quite beautiful, very rewarding in that tactile sense that only books have, and relatively cheap. They also make excellent marketing tools for photographers still looking to climb that mountain...."
Mike replies: But making a Blurb book, fun and satisfying as it might be, isn't really what I mean by "a book." Printing 3,000 copies that go to bookstores and libraries and get listed in catalogs and offered to reviewers and listed on Amazon is the point of publishing a book in the sense I'm talking about—it encompasses the possibility of meaningful, widespread communication. Just printing one for yourself or a handful for a few friends and family members doesn't serve the same purpose.
An analogy, in terms of exhibiting, would be like putting up a few of your pictures in the living room and going in to sit in your stuffed chair and looking at them, maybe inviting your wife and the neighbors to come have a look. It might be a small-scale version of the same thing we mean when we say "a show," but it doesn't serve the same purpose.
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
