Foto3 contest and traditional/conceptual divide

[Stephen Willard]

[By consideration for the personal situation of the author, I am moving here the discussions that were not directly relevant to the original post of
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=37470 Tuan]



Its worse than you can imagine. It has nothing to do with the creation of a great photograph and everything to with being a professor on a tenure track who needs to have their work published. There is a whole industry built around this to ensure professors are published and all us losers who make pretty trinket art unknowing subsidize this industry with our entry fees for these competitions.

The art that oozes out from the plastic towers of our great universities is called conceptual art which is a mix of esthetics and content. I can assure you the esthetic part is most likely to be pathetic, and the content part is always small ideas wrapped in big words like a stinking onion. The threshold for making conceptual art is much lower than creating images with esthetics that take your breath away and beyond the capability of most of these professors seeking tenure. Jennifer Little was one of the tenure track "emerging" professors that presented her conceptual art at the landscape forum at photo 3. Many people got up and walked out halfway through her presentation. Her work was exactly what I expected, and as I described above.

So if you are non tenure trinket art kind of guy who makes esthetically pleasing images then your stuff is thrown into the losers pile. It lacks content and is not worthy. Only professors who must publish and embrace coneptual art get put into the possible winning pile. How big is this industry. Well have you ever wonder why art in public places is so bad? And that is only the beginning. I can assure you if the judges are afffliated with any university you better be a tenure seeking professor to win.

So when I went up to Steve and asked him if he was going to display the winning photographs at the photo 3 conference he said "NO". Right then a there I new that the overall winner produced "junket" conceptual art and was a professor seeking tenure, and the judge was a professor from some university. If Steve Simmons hung the winning prints at the photo 3 conference, people would have been pissed off and for good reason. They were mislead! I was mislead!

Steve, if you are reading this, I would like my $109 entry fee for the competition refunded, and my fee I just paid to subscribe to your publication refunded as well.

[steve simmons]

The Grand Prize winning photo was done by a dentist from Florida and was on the conference program guide that was available at the conference. It was a quick grab shot that he took from a hotel window. He is not a professor anywhere.

Jennifer is not a great public speaker and she knows it. However, her work is very interesting, it is getting a lot of recognition and it was quite different than some of the other work shown at the conference. View Camera will be showing a series late this year that is quite unique.

The judges were a professor from CSU and the new Curator of Photography and New Media at the Denver Art Museum.

Many photos from the contest were displayed in the lounge area off to the side of the trade show. This was done both Sat and Sunday. Many of the attendees also showed their work in this informal gallery.

steve simmons

[Kirk Gittings]

The art that oozes out from the plastic towers of our great universities is called conceptual art which is a mix of esthetics and content.

Stephen,

I understand your point of view but disagree with how broad you are painting this. It is not that rigid or simple. I am a product of the university art system with an MFA and have taught at two of the top academic art schools, University of New Mexico and the School fo the Art Institute of Chicago for 19 years combined (these schools have been ranked 1&2 in the country for many years). Granted I am not tenure track, but I never wanted to be either. My work is very traditional and I have enjoyed the respect of my "conceptual art" colleagues throughout my career, many of whom I have been invited to show with and who hang my work in their homes. Many university museums have snubbed my work, but quite a few have bought my work for their personal collections too. It is not some evil monolithic conspiracy against traditional work. While it is useful strategically to know the prejudices of juries, you can't take rejection personally. If I did I would have slit my wrists or gone postal along time ago.

[Stephen Willard]

Kirk, you are correct I am hurting. Everywhere I turn it seems that tradition art forms are snubbed by the art community at large. Conceptual art is pervasive, and yet in the market place it would not survive.

Jennifer Little, in another presentation, came out and said this has nothing to do with profit and encouraged people to seek out nonprofit places to exhibit and public places to exhibit. The implication is that they would be more inclined to take work that is not sellable, but "interesting" which for me is a code word for conceptual art. Yes, I know that conceptual artist due achieve national recognition, but only through a highly biased industry, and their work begins to sell at high end galleries. However, at that point you are selling a name and not the work, and if I were to take one of their pieces and put my name on it, then it would never sell for the very reasons I outlined above.

My work is selling very well in the market place, but ridiculed in the art community. There is a huge contradiction between these two worlds. So where does a guy like me and perhaps a significant number of Steve Simmons readership go where there is a bias for traditional photographic art forms? I suspect there is a very large community of people like myself who are total frustrated with this foolishness. Most, if not all, of the work displayed on the tables at photo 3 conference was traditional in nature and yet conceptual art took the prize. There is something wrong here. If you know of such places, please tell us. I have been unable to find such respectable competitions or even publications. We have been subsidizing these misleading competitions for too long. There are all stacked with crusty university type judges or publishers who only accept "interesting work" and to hell with "great work".

[gr82bart]

So where does a guy like me and perhaps a significant number of Steve Simmons readership go where there is a bias for traditional photographic art forms?

Luminous Landscapes and your local Camera Clubs?

Regards, Art.

[jnantz]

so what exactly is a "traditional photographic art form" ?
created with camera and film?
or more specific than that --- "landscape photography" ?

whose tradition you are talking about ?

john

[jdc]

Stephen,
FWIW I love your colour technique.

[steve simmons]

That is why he did not announce nor present any of the winning work at the photo 3 conference.

The Grand Prize winner was on the conference program guide and there were 500 copies given out at the conference.

We had several very traditional photographers on the program.

View Camera shows a lot of traditional work.

steve simmons

[steve simmons]

FWIW

the grand prize photo was made with a 35mm film camera and printed traditionally.

as selected by the judges

steve simmons

[clay harmon]

I dug out the Foto 3 conference event brochure from my briefcase. Fortunately, there had not been enough time for the xerox toner to turn itself into glue. So here is a scan of the winning photograph from the conference materials. The scan is reasonably representative of the xerox original handed out to everyone.

Here: