Worlds Apart
I was just reading a review in the Financial Times of two new gallery shows featuring William Eggleston, viewable here…
It begins, “To his army of fans, William Eggleston is a photographer who can do no wrong.” Now I don’t count myself a fan of Eggleston. There are many things I admire about his work, but I’m not committed to liking it in the way the reviewer was talking about, so I was particularly interested in seeing how he commended Eggleston’s images. He did it well and admiringly, describing a couple of the photographs in a thoughtful and interesting way, although as in all but the top level of art criticism, the conclusions went no further than pointing to “the artist’s skill to make something much richer”, which is just a pleasant way of rounding off a sentence when you don’t have a clear analysis. He rightly pointed out that the photographer “sat at a fascinating intersection where pop art and a kind of documentary and art photography all met”, and moreover, pioneered colour in fine-art photography.
What interested me more, however, were the two statements “Eggleston has also been admired by practitioners in every discipline of photography as a liberator, because he showed that they could get huge credit for doing very simple things if only they could do them well enough.” and “Entire genres of subsequent photography take their DNA” from his banal subject matter and apparently unconcerned compositional style. My first reaction to both of these was “not me, and not many people I know”.
My second reaction, though, was that within the world of contemporary fine-art photography, and in particular among those who subscribe to mainstream fine-art judgments, these remarks are perfectly valid. Even so, what impresses me most is the certainty of all this, and I’m confident that the reviewer really is capturing the mood of Eggleston’s ‘army of fans’.
Equally valid is that many more photographers, from other worlds, do not find Eggleston particularly rewarding. The issue is, of course, the separate worlds of photography. Not just genres, but worlds. And they are? If we exclude such completely unpretentious photography as record-taking (crime-scene, medical and so on), to my mind we have fine art, advertising, reportage, and one that I hadn’t given much thought to until last month — the world of photographic societies. I’ll justify this last one in a moment, but suffice to say that each of these worlds is largely self-contained, refers hardly at all to the others, and at its core has a great deal of certainty and self-confidence about what is worthwhile and what is not.
The Eggleston review may have sparked this article, but it really began last month in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where I had been invited to attend the prize-giving at one of the most notable amateur competitions in the photography year, the Al-Thani Award. At the time, I knew little about it, but it is well-known among the world’s photographic societies. I was there as the honorary professional. The other non-competitor attending was Martin Barnes, the Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert, and we spent a considerable time talking about the differences between the three worlds: his, mine and the hundreds of images in front of us. The organisers were eager for suggestions as to how to maintain and develop the competition which, by the way, was at a high level. Photography, as well as other arts, has been a beneficiary of this oil-rich state, and the Sheikh has built up an impressive collection, hence Martin’s involvement. The annual competition, the awards ceremony and prizes are well funded, with a book produced in time for the event.
The entries, from all over the world, divide between general subjects and the year’s chosen theme, which in this case was wildlife. Entries were strong in portraiture, sports and landscape, hardly any in social documentary. There was also, surprising to me, a significant amount of digital post-production, much of it manipulation.
What intrigued both Martin and I, from our separate viewpoints of fine art and reportage, was what defined this photographic-society world of imagery. What we agreed on was that it was very much its own world, and completely clear about what it wanted. Lighting tended to be strong and dramatic. Moments were exact, the sort of split-second timing that we would all say caught the cusp of the action. Certainty again. Both wildlife and sports are perfect subject material, requiring as they do the four qualities which seemed to me to be the most prized. These are skill, timing, perfection, effort, all according to a general consensus, and all of them self-evident. Ambiguity has little part to play here. One of the winning images was of two wolves in snow sparring, and it was the exact moment and expression of bared fangs on one of the animals that secured the prize. It takes dedication and luck, as well as the equipment and skill, to take prize-winning wildlife shots. Indeed, wildlife photography is the province of dedicated amateurs with a passion for their subject — it is extremely difficult to make a living from it.
The element of perfection here is the perfection of the single image. This was brought home to me on the last day when all the prize-winners gave slide presentations of their work and ways of working. The presentations were all, as I’d come to expect over the previous three days, highly polished, with music and graphics. Immediately before these I gave my slide presentation, and I chose to show work in progress on my new Tea Horse Road book (silently thankful that I’d taken the trouble to add music). The theme for this was telling a story, which I thought might be interesting because the competition was all about single images, not picture essays. One of the members of the audience afterwards said that one thing she had found particularly inspiring about the slide show was that I hadn’t minded that not everything was perfect and had concentrated on the overall flow of the narrative. I think it was a compliment.
