June 17, 2015
For a time I earned my living as a picture editor at a weekly newspaper, then at a magazine. I loved working with text and photo or, more precisely, with photographers. As a rule, they were interested in pictures and language, too—the ones I knew read a great deal, as a way of relaxing, no doubt, from the demands of producing visual work. The photographers with whom I became friends were, for the most part, fascinated by my writer’s way of looking at things, and how it differed from their own. But I never felt that the difference was immense; to me, they were writers in motion, finding stories with their cameras.
I don’t work with photographers as closely as I once did, and I miss the daily exchange. But sometimes I teach or critique up-and-comers, and that means a great deal to me: photography is still discovering its power and limitations as a medium. Last winter, I spent some time at Yale’s Graduate School of Art. The M.F.A. photography students were diverse, articulate, and excited about what they were doing, and their excitement had something to do with their freedom: they could make or remake photography any way they wanted. It’s been a long time since Henri Cartier-Bresson told us about the “decisive moment,” and since Robert Frank loosened that moment up even further. While interested, for sure, in the history of photography, the New Haven-based students I met leaned less to Frank’s documentary approach than to what is being called, just now, photo-poetics—picture-making that might include the “decisive moment” but eschews journalism. The moment that the students pursued was often real but did nothing to obscure photography’s surrealism or the history of conceptual and commercial art. (One student’s best work made a near still out of video.)
I spent several days, off and on, with those kids—who have now graduated from the program and are exhibiting their work this month in a group show curated by Jack Pierson at the Danziger Gallery—and I learned something exciting and new because of them. Just as literature is opening up to cross many genres in a single work, photography is opening up to incorporate many genres and ideas—portraiture, street photography, gender philosophy, advertising, and so on—the better to emphasize the falseness of anything as specious as a single truth. The students recognized that in the world, let alone in their pictures, there were many stories to be told, sometimes all at once. The point was to tell them as specifically as possible, and with something akin to love.
“Lovely Dark: Yale MFA 2015 Photography” opens Thursday at the Danziger Gallery in New York, and will travel to the Regen Projects in Los Angeles in July. A limited-edition book of the same name, designed by Michela Povoleri and with an essay by Hilton Als, is out this month from the Yale School of Art Photography Department.
The Freedom of Young Photographers
By Hilton Als
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-freedom-of-young-photographersFor a time I earned my living as a picture editor at a weekly newspaper, then at a magazine. I loved working with text and photo or, more precisely, with photographers. As a rule, they were interested in pictures and language, too—the ones I knew read a great deal, as a way of relaxing, no doubt, from the demands of producing visual work. The photographers with whom I became friends were, for the most part, fascinated by my writer’s way of looking at things, and how it differed from their own. But I never felt that the difference was immense; to me, they were writers in motion, finding stories with their cameras.
I don’t work with photographers as closely as I once did, and I miss the daily exchange. But sometimes I teach or critique up-and-comers, and that means a great deal to me: photography is still discovering its power and limitations as a medium. Last winter, I spent some time at Yale’s Graduate School of Art. The M.F.A. photography students were diverse, articulate, and excited about what they were doing, and their excitement had something to do with their freedom: they could make or remake photography any way they wanted. It’s been a long time since Henri Cartier-Bresson told us about the “decisive moment,” and since Robert Frank loosened that moment up even further. While interested, for sure, in the history of photography, the New Haven-based students I met leaned less to Frank’s documentary approach than to what is being called, just now, photo-poetics—picture-making that might include the “decisive moment” but eschews journalism. The moment that the students pursued was often real but did nothing to obscure photography’s surrealism or the history of conceptual and commercial art. (One student’s best work made a near still out of video.)
I spent several days, off and on, with those kids—who have now graduated from the program and are exhibiting their work this month in a group show curated by Jack Pierson at the Danziger Gallery—and I learned something exciting and new because of them. Just as literature is opening up to cross many genres in a single work, photography is opening up to incorporate many genres and ideas—portraiture, street photography, gender philosophy, advertising, and so on—the better to emphasize the falseness of anything as specious as a single truth. The students recognized that in the world, let alone in their pictures, there were many stories to be told, sometimes all at once. The point was to tell them as specifically as possible, and with something akin to love.
“Lovely Dark: Yale MFA 2015 Photography” opens Thursday at the Danziger Gallery in New York, and will travel to the Regen Projects in Los Angeles in July. A limited-edition book of the same name, designed by Michela Povoleri and with an essay by Hilton Als, is out this month from the Yale School of Art Photography Department.
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