A Grant Competition

 

Trials of the Judiciary

The Photo Review, 1985

Views, 1986

 

This article was written over twenty years ago and today many less grant programs exist for individual photographers. The Artists Foundation no longer issues grants for individuals and it has been a number of years since the National Endowment for the Arts did anything along those lines. Nevertheless  I think the piece still contains pertinent advice for those entering juried  competitions so I post it in the hope it might be useful. I also retained the comments on the state of the art in 1985. For one thing the assessment might be useful for historians of the period and actually the photography we see in 2008 doesn’t seem all that different. 

ONE

 

The Artists Foundation in Boston asked me to be one of three judges for the dispersion of grants to photographers from Massachusetts. From the point of view of an artist who has been to the well a number of times myself  I found my experiences as a judge, besides being ironic, to be helpful in understanding the dynamics of the juried competition. The experience also clarified for me in a way that similar experiences had not, the role that biases play in my responses to artwork. 

The Artists Foundation is a nonprofit organization, which oversees the granting of funds to individual artists in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1985, two grant categories were available: four to six “fellowship” awards of $7500 and up to ten “finalist”awards of $500. 

 Applicants were encouraged to submit a maximum of ten original prints rather than slides although slides can constitute the work itself. Three judges were selected to choose the fellows and finalists. Judges arrived in Boston the day their work began and they had two full days to complete their task.

For 1985, the judges were Catherine Lord, a photographer, critic, former editor of Afterimage and presently Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts, and Julio Mitchel, a Cuban-born New York based photographer and teacher at Cooper Union whose work is documentary in genre and humanist in tone. I completed the trio: a photographer, writer and teacher at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. whose imagery is concerned with narrative and fictional elements.

According to the rules of judging, a judge who recognized either work or an artist was asked to disqualify him or herself from voting on the portfolio if he or she thought, after consultation with AF staff, that such recognition would constitute a bias. I thought I recognized work several times but was wrong on most counts. Where I was right my acquaintance with the work was so slight, and I didn’t personally know the artists, that I went ahead and voted anyway. This was not a problem for the other judges, either. 

Judging took place in a large room at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Portfolios were numbered and judges were not given access to names of submitters or biographical information about them. There were enough folding tables to hold about fifteen portfolios at a time. As soon as the judges were finished with one portfolio, staff and recent Artists Foundation Photography Fellows were already laying out another.

The judges recorded a YES, NO or MAYBE for each portfolio. For the first round, two MAYBE votes or a single YES vote were sufficient for an applicant to make the second round, and work was examined without discussion between the judges. By the end of the first day, 81 out of 363 portfolios survived to be considered again. 

In the first round and I suspect this to be true of most situations like this one merely looks for work worth seeing again. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff: anything we wanted to see a second time received a YES vote. In this case, we decided that 81 portfolios, or 22.3% of the work submitted, warranted a second look. According to AF staffers that percentage is slightly lower than the average for first round survivals.

Predictably, the next round was more difficult. Now two MAYBE votes were not enough for a portfolio to survive. Each photograph was given renewed consideration and the judges often discussed the work. As might be expected, the judges’ taste and individual standards became a significant factor. Quite obviously, I can’t speak for my fellow judges regarding their experiences. All I can report is my own struggle with my responsibilities although I think some of what I went through reflected what was going on in the hearts and minds of the other two judges.

 

TWO

 

Catherine Lord made an observation, which seemed quite to the point. She said to one of us, ”You’re letting yourself be seduced by that work.” Not long after, I realized my response to work is often a matter of seduction: that I allow myself to be seduced by work to which I respond on an intuitive, emotional, or intellectual level. It might strike a personal chord; it might be something I wish I’d done, it might conceptually or emotionally corroborate my whole notion of what photography should be. For whatever reasons, I am willing to be seduced, which means on some level, I hope minor, I’m tolerant of the work’s deficiencies. I’ll accept to some degree a compromise of my personal standards, or to put it another way, I’m relaxed about bending my standards.

 With work that is not within the parameters of my own philosophical or emotional preferences, another kind of seduction is involved. Now it’s more a matter of ethics, of fairness. Instead of being an indulgent collaborateur as a viewer, I became a stern parent; I am stricter with the work and less forgiving of its faults. But at the same time, a moral seduction tempers this severity. I assume a virtuous stance and the following internal dialogue might ensue: it’s not work I like or would go out of my way to see but it is done well and there should be work like this in the photographic universe. I might find myself forgiving faults in the work because of an ethical belief that work of this kind deserves exposure, or at the very least, toleration.

But this kind of moral rigor can only survive so long, especially when looking at a lot of work without the luxury of a great deal of time. Sooner or later, one becomes more and more willing to be seduced by what one likes and less righteous about what one think deserves a future. Fortunately, there are three judges, so that righteousness in one case might be personal conviction in another; or one judge might be so passionate about a choice that another’s distaste turns to tolerance, and even possibly into conviction. 

Quite soon it is apparent that passing judgment on your peers is a responsibility rife with subtle conflicts between taste and principle, morality and preference. For those reasons and others, decisions made by judges are compromises, whether the competition has one judge or three. The element of chance also unavoidably compromises the procedure to a certain extent. Because of this factor, competitions of this kind are lotteries in which many elements are unpredictable. The most obvious is the mix of the judges’ personalities, an unknown factor until the procedure actually begins. Other factors include timing: you might have a better chance as a contestant if your work is looked at in the first third of the viewings than in the last third when the judges are presumably exhausted. Your work might fare better after lunch than before. Reception of work depends in part upon context: to cite a fictional example, miniature platinum landscapes might easily be swallowed up inext to three-foot holograms. Or the holograms might seem overbearing next to the miniatures but splendid alongside a selection of computer generated images. Sometimes we tried to alleviate the role of context by regrouping work but context remained a factor, nevertheless. 

Sad but true: work that demands a long attention span tends to get shorter shrift. Complicated mixed-media work, sequential or other multi-image works, books with words, photos with words, collages or assemblages with many disparate elements entered this competition, and I suspect any competition like this, with two strikes against it. It’s a human factor: three people cannot look at three hundred and sixty portfolios and be expected to give a book with 50 pages of text and images the attention it demands.

But did we give the work the attention it deserved? My general feeling, despite the limitations of time, is that all the work did get the attention it deserved, although in the case of some of the winners I wouldn’t mind spending more time with them as a viewer. In other words, too little time (and I’m not convinced that two days is too little time for 363 portfolios) is less of an evil than too much time. John Ciardi once observed, “Anything significantly scrutinized becomes significant.” Work of real excellence stood out early and was never in dispute for very long. One of the winners received unanimous YES votes in every round and there was very little discussion of the work; the images were simply viewed with appreciation. Choosing the best work proved to be relatively simple. It was the deserving work that took all of our resources.

 

THREE 

Physically, the variety was awe-inspiring. There were five-foot square color prints, photographs that unrolled like oriental scrolls, and installation pieces, represented by slides, that were entire rooms. There were tiny prints, archivally matted prints (yards and yards of these) and loose prints in boxes (many of these, also). There were books ranging from the elegant to the primitive and snapshots crammed into boxes and envelopes. There were family albums submitted in toto, complete with leatherette covers and shiny plastic pages. Name a mode or a genre that has captivated the art public’s imagination in the last twenty years and it was represented.

Mixed media was well represented with painting/photo hybrids, collages of all sorts, multiple imagery in a variety of shapes and forms, and video stills. Words and images were popular; fictional/theatrical “film stills” were also in evidence, as were documentary and reportage work, some political, most humanist in tone. There were still lives and assemblages, the difference being that the latter look more contemporary than the former. Landscape photography held its own, too, with many examples and styles, including a number of panoramic images. Just about every process short of daguerreotypy was to be seen: infrared, Diana images, paint-on emulsion and a surprisingly small amount of nonsilver work. Color photography, almost all Cibachrome or Type C, was extensive, maybe comprising more than half the work. Also pervasive were portrait portfolios, a great majority of which were confrontational and class oriented. 

In general, the 363 portfolios might be categorized as follows. There was a small minority of naive work, color photographs by a few sincere amateurs or camera club members who enjoy taking pictures without much caring what has happened with the medium for the last half-century. Unfortunately, none of these naïfs turned out to be another Lartigue. An even smaller minority was work done by artists with an authentic vision. Admittedly, this is a difficult factor to determine from a maximum of ten prints. In future programs, I urge the Foundation to consider a maximum of fifteen prints for the submitted portfolios. 

I’d like to think that the five 1985 fellows are artists with a genuine vision; that is, they are artists who regardless of genre, speak with individuality, passion, and intelligence about their given subjects. And the finalists? Their work might not be as individual or as mature, but they were all artists who piqued our curiosity, who seemed worth encouraging. And without a doubt, their work stood out from the mass of imagery we considered. 

The great majority of portfolios we considered were academic, that is, technically superior bodies of work performed by artists trained by the Academy. Is this a criticism or an observation? At the risk of injuring the hand that feeds me, it’s an observation offered as criticism. It’s obvious to any semi-alert observer of the scene that art photography today like literature, poetry, and to some extent, the performing arts, is dominated by school-trained artists who make a living training other artists who more than likely become teachers themselves once they graduate. It is not surprising then that most contemporary photography takes on the character of the Academy. And characteristically, indeed by accepted definition, academic work combines virtuoso technique with content that is arid and imitative. Unfortunately, that is an apt description of many, if not most, of the portfolios we saw in the two days of our judging. Much of the work seemed curiously anonymous despite the polish of the craft.

Is it fair to expect emerging artists to meet our high expectations? I think so. At this level of competition, one that excludes students, that term “emerging artist,” which always reminds me of the newborn artist peering from the mouth of the cocoon should describe a career level more than esthetic development. Perhaps we can observe that mature artists give us visions and emerging artists promises of visions, but too often we saw technique instead of promise; sincerity in lieu of intelligence; good taste instead of passion. In many cases, other than those to whom awards were made, the work collectively demonstrated a remarkable lack of originality; in fact, much of it was imitative to the point of plagiarism. 

Several clarifications: there are numerous permutations of the word influence and many of them are beneficial to the artist. All work can be associated with other work or ideas without much difficulty. John Gardner points out, “the noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary,” and before making photographs became easier than dressing in the morning, Sadikichi Hartmann warned in 1905: “The craze for originality is really the curse of our art as it leads nearly always to conventionalism and mannerism.” 

Illustrating Gardner’s tenet is the relationship between Louis Faure and Robert Frank. Frank may have borrowed much of Faure’s visual iconography but the difference between Faure and Frank is visionary. Faure’s contribution to that genre known as “street photography” is in the realm of style; he used a visual idiom that was hip, fluid, and jazzlike. Frank took this syntax and with it expressed a mordantly ironic vision of our country and culture at mid-century: it’s an example of a wholly original vision whose visual antecedents are visible for all to see. The problem is not with associations, derivations, influences or interrelationships of whatever stripe. The problem is with imitation: when one image simply replicates another, or when an idea is presented without any significant variation from the original. Then there is a problem no matter how insistently ‘new wave” artists ingenuously claim their pillages to be art by virtue of conceptual intent. Parasitism is parasitism; no matter what name (”appropriation”) one gives it.

 It is my opinion that a great deal of the work we saw was imitative and much of that plagiaristic, that is, to quote the dictionary, the artist “used as one’s own, the thoughts and inventions of another.” The pity of it was that often the artist plagiarized was not (again, an opinion) a first rank artist. It was a case of the third-rate plagiarizing the second-rate! 

Solutions to the problem? Well, I’m hardly one to advocate the overthrow of the academy, as that would leave me in the company of the dispossessed. But less drastic steps might improve the situation. Not necessarily solutions, but at least starting points for discussion would include tightening up graduate school admission standards in order to give priority to artists instead of to good students. Institute separate educational programs and degrees for teachers and artists. Have a mandatory waiting period of several years between undergraduate and graduate school and have graduates of photography programs wait five years before they are able to apply for teaching jobs. Lessen the dependency upon the terminal degree when hiring instructors and at the same time devise a way of discovering the gifted teacher, a talent not guaranteed by the possession of a MFA. Tighten up BFA standards; as it is now, in most programs of which I have any experience, if a student works hard he or she is protected from all but the most flagrant failure, and thus assured of a degree. Which brings to mind another characteristic of academic work: it is work that excessively fears failure; it is safe to the point of extinction. What could be safer than to have your work look like that of an artist whose career has been judged successful?

 

 FOUR 

After a third round  (one NO vote and the work would go, but each judge was allowed a “passion” vote saving an otherwise lost portfolio) there were 29 portfolios left. The fellowships, $7500 each, were not the problem. We had decided we would award five and there were about seven left in contention. We also had to pick ten finalists, awards of $500 each, out of the remaining 29. Another round followed one of intense discussion, some reluctant NO votes, and a number of “passion” votes. We stood back from the carnage and realized we had picked five Fellows, towards all of whom we felt very positive. At that point we went out and collapsed on the lawn trying to clear our heads.

We still had to pick the finalists. Because we looked upon the finalist awards as an encouragement to “emerging” artists, we wanted to give the maximum number allowed, in this case, ten. It seemed very complicated when we staggered out on our break, but when we regrouped inside the huge room, the scales lifted from our eyes. It was only a matter of minutes before we agreed on our ten and the Artists Foundation’s awards and fellowships in photography were over for 1985.