Arbus is an icon but her work doesn’t wear too well for me these days. She dipped pretty deeply into the social margins, but then everybody was doing that in the 60’s and early 70’s. Thinking out of the box wasn’t a cliche. But she had talent, no doubt. And a zero sense of humor. That probably tripped her up.

These days I rather spend my time enjoying Strand, Kertez, Steiglitz, Frank, Freidlander, Koudelka, Sudek, Cartier-Bresson, and Smith, even Steichen, and some of Evans. For the most part I can’t get into color, except for Haas and of course Nan Goldin.

Goldin seems to be the only one still shooting on a Mission from God. Too bad she only shoots her friends–she could do a great book on the porno industry. And of course James Natchwey is in a class by himself, but his images are almost too intense.

Our good host has an excellent eye and the knack to find the interesting detail. But I’m afraid I just can’t get into Atget, Sanders, and Shore. A little too static for me.

Photography gets at something in the human experience that no other art form can. But now we seem to be too taken with technique and bad surrealism. And all this money is sometimes a mixed blessing.

There’s no static point on the line of assimilation of art.
You start with whatever you got coming out of the womb, take it in as it comes to you, as you find it, as you seek it out, and then, after a lifetime of doing that, you die.
Nowhere in there do you hit some platform from whcih to view the artistic object impartiall, without the bias of your experience – and your experience never stops.
Get a job at a photography magazine vetting submissions and see how long your current phtographic aesthetic stands unaltered.
Check your criteria after a year and see how they’ve changed.
Arbus made her bones uncovering the hidden grotesques of everyday reality. Once uncovered it never goes back, not without cultural upheaval large enough to render the whole discussion moot. The critic’s experience and Arbus’ coincide, but the critic assumes something universal out of her particular trajectory. It’s megalomania with a professional bio.
The trajectory’s real arc is the human.
Cave paintings to Monet to Warhol to Banksy.
It doesn’t stop, and neither does your model of it, the internal personal art history that you’re writing with your eyes and your judgment.
It’s profane, a critic’s chauvinist arrogance, to pretend to the assumption there ever was or ever will be a universal aesthetic contract against which any object can be held to agreement.
By us.
There should have been established long ago a parallel occupation to the critic, an appreciator, with all the difference the names imply.
I never read stuff like Myers’ article, unless someone like Joerg calls my attention to it, because I don’t have time.
Too busy looking for good photographs.

There seems to be some good work being done, but galleries and magazines prefer to show the high concept, “thinking” stuff.

If HCB was starting out today, would he get shown? Just a bunch of pics taken in Paris? Not high concept enough… How about a series of abandoned shopping trolleys instead, Mr CB?

“Yes, I recently took I workshop with Chris Boot down here in Mexico and he said that he hasn’t seen any worthwhile “street photography” in twenty five years. I thought it was a bit of an exageration, but also got me thinking.”

But the scene surely is more diverse than she claims. You can do anything today, right? Landscape (a la Robert Adams), portraiture (Goldin), set-up stuff (Casebere, Crewdson)– pomo work, straight work, whathaveyou. It’s not like there’s some photo version of Clement Greenberg out there, enforcing orthodoxy and keeping work from the public.

And jmgiordano’s right: it ain’t like Arbus came out of nowhere. She was a Lisette Model pupil, no?

While I think Myers simplifies an awful lot, I don’t think she’s totally off base with her “thinking over looking” idea.

I don’t know if anyone’s been to the photography permanent collection at MoMA recently – I walked away from it extremely frustrated. The older stuff is divided into simple categories, like Things, Individuals, People, as if photography was simply a matter of categorizing things, rather than something much more complicated. It’s the MoMA’s collection, so there were masterpieces all over the place, from all eras, but the way it was arranged – as if to say “These photographers took pictures of People, of Things, etc…” – seemed incredibly dumbed down and ultimately weakened the work on the walls. Once the categories are figured out, the viewer can move on without giving the photographs much more thought.

The new photographers room features three artists who, to my mind, also value “thinking” over “looking” – Jonathan Monk, Barbara Probst, and Jules Spinatsch. With the partial exception of Spinatsch, I think each of them create work that have more value as ideas then as things to look at. As artists I think each of them has value, but once you “get” them, their pieces become less interesting as photographs.

Tillmans seems to be a reaction against both concept and typology – sometimes it works (his 2000 Turner Prize show at the Tate), sometimes it seems just a random assemblage (this years show at Interim Art).