The work I do specifically involves investigating common themes in contemporary art photography and pulling photographic work from a variety of vantage points to help. If Humble is hosting an open call, as we just did for the “31 Women in Art Photography” exhibition, I’m never simply selecting 31 photos I think are great, but instead, 31 photos that are great, AND have some kind of linear, aesthetic, and/or conceptual relationship to one another. It can be difficult to do this with seemingly disparate works, which a defining task of certain curatorial work.

I think you raise a number of interesting points. Over the past few years, with the advent of crowd sourced media, a variety of words/terms etc that originally had significant meaning in their fields seem to have been diluted by a general desire to belong, or to follow the crowd–to grab a hold of what appears to be significant artistic or creative culture and lay claim in one way or another. As mentioned by others in this thread, this has come up quite a bit over the past few years with the cliche-ification of terms like “emerging” for marketing related purposes. Words like this that sought to define burgeoning talent, are now being overused to a degree of meaninglessness. We have also seen the over saturation of online photo galleries, blogs, JPG magazine style galleries that may seek to expand photography to a wider audience (which is great) but ultimately, dilute the medium by including too much, and “curating” less than they pretend to. It’s much easier to use a buzz word to define one’s self without being called to task.

I do think it’s completely legitimate to expand the definition of “curator” beyond the physical realm. I don’t think it is a requirement to have “technical knowledge about a great many things: temperature, humidity, materials, lighting and how things react to lighting” in order to define themselves as curator, but more-so a solid understanding of the medium, the aesthetic and conceptual merits of the work at hand, and, while many people may scoff at this, an innate sense of taste. As much as I hate the idea of the “tastemaker” I think that “taste” is just as important as knowledge of the history of the medium.

Thank you.

The direction blogging is going is more like “scrap booking”. Is there a French term for that? What gets the curate label this days is more like collecting a stream of semi-related ephemera, sometimes on a theme but mostly not. The Web is like a infinite Hobby Barn and we’re just pasting little bric-a-brac into our digital scrap books. Rarely would I say it is as thoughtful in practice as is its portrayed in theory.

I agree, it’s a tricky word and not one I typically use to describe the work I’m doing with photographers online – Editor / Publisher seems like a better fit.