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Why I stopped writing about photography from Ag33 |
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I also taught myself how to take, develop and print black and white photographs, all serious photography then still being in monochrome: in 1978 even Martin Parr was taking black-and-white pictures of gurning northerners shuffling along cobbled streets in old-style hats and coats. I still consider it extremely desirable, though not necessarily essential, for any critic to understand by personal practice a medium (s)he is writing about. By the way, every one of my own photographs was either a cliché or a shameless piece of plagiarism. In the end, I stopped writing because I had been repeating myself for what seemed like years. As George Bernard Shaw, himself albeit briefly a writer on photography, had said, you can explain the essential character of photography in a couple of short essays. He was right. The rest is filling space, changing the name of the book, artist or exhibition. I went on filling space long after I should have had the courage to say ‘No more’ because I needed to make money and was young enough to be seduced by by-lines and the status of being considered ‘expert’. I now believe that no critic should hold down any critical position for more than a couple of years on the grounds that if they can’t say everything in that time they’re probably not worth reading anyway. The only sensible way for the newspapers to cover art or photography is by not employing a full-time art critic but instead by commissioning individually tailored pieces. My filing system is stuffed with pieces written by the same critic about the same artist every two years. Such a process of repetition is a charter for lifeless complacency. As the editor of an art paper I ought to read all the newspaper art critics, but many of them are not only uninteresting writers but ignorant with it. For the record, I read every word of Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard and Jonathan Jones in The Guardian because both are stimulating and original writers and there is always the possibility of learning something, either factual, or an approach to looking or thinking about art, which I haven’t encountered before. Their qualities are rare in art writing, a discipline which is habitually the most self-serving of literary genres. Next Page >> |
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