I regularly attend art college graduate shows and I find it most intriguing that the level of painting and drawing exhibited comes reasonably close to reflecting the potential of those mediums, whilst the art of photography seems to be the most difficult, or perhaps I should say the most allusive, for the students to advance in.

If informed art deserves informed viewers, how do we photographers go about promoting the finer points of our images when the likes of William Carlos Williams’s “No Ideas but in things” has been our paradigm for so long? A paradigm that says the artist should never employ words to explain the image. After quoting Williams in his book, Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams also adds “Generalizations are impermissible unless they emerge before our eyes from specifics, from concrete evidence, from things.” A perfect thought for an imperfect world, but a little too stringent for a young and poorly understood art form. And such rules do not extend to critics, or anyone else for that matter. This seems somewhat unnecessarily limiting to me, that the artist should remain silent about his art while a stranger applies his wisdom, or lack of it, to make sense of it all. It might be argued that if the average critic can’t make sense of a work of art then the artist has failed to realize his obligations to the image and the viewer. But we’d only argue this in a perfect world, one where every critic, able to make or break an artist, is infallible and free from things like prejudice, academicism, and self serving agenda. A world where every viewer is prepared to receive the deepest and most profound spiritual vibrations. AD Coleman, writing in BorderCrossings Magazine, pointed out that the (famous) writer/critic John Berger made a poor judgement call while assessing the work of a photographer; I won’t go into details but Mr.Coleman’s position seemed impossible to refute since he had the photographer in question to corroborate the facts. My point is, if Berger can get it wrong, or not so right, what chance does the rest of the world have? AD Coleman’s advice was : if in doubt, talk to the photographer. Since the critic is no less flawed than the artist, there should be room enough for a middle ground. The photographer must find a way to discuss his art without destroying its potential. For me, and I’m sure most of the world, this language hovers around Form, Color, Allusion, Metaphor, and is informed as much by music and literature as it is by photographs. When I’m engaged in making an image I am as likely to consider Kasimir Malevich’s overly optimistic words in his “Victory Over the Sun”, or William Blake’s “Time is a Man, Space is a Woman”, as any technical aspect of the craft. And even if the resulting image has all that is required of it to set off a vibration in the viewer’s soul, I still feel justified in revealing my sources and intent. I think a great part of art has been lost to the interpretations of the critic and the expert. I would prefer to hear more from the artist.

I agree wholeheartedly with your life experience, like mine, telling us that straight prices are lower in the market, which makes Winkleman’s assertion that they are not seem like he doesn’t know what’s going on, which is not par for the course with him and which may be due to him not exactly specializing and obsessing over photography as much as the rest of us.

Tangentially, we should note that the contemporary “bigs” don’t show work at PHOTO fairs and aren’t repped by PHOTO galleries – they go with big contemporary ART galleries alongside the likes of Koons and Murakami and go to the contemporary ART shows. They also tend to be conceptualists.

A quick look at Gagosian, for example, yields:

Ballen (who pretends to be documentary to take the piss but is actually a conceptualist)
Crewdson
Maier-Aichen
Prince
Sherman
Simon
Sugimoto
and the exceptions, though I’ll go out on a limb and say they command lower prices than those above, Mann and Soth.