Last week, a friend who’s running for the Charlottesville city council as a Democrat brought me in to do some campaign portraits. After the shoot, she told me that she’d just met somebody who was in town for Look 3, the Festival of the Photograph. He’s black, she said, and shares some of my concerns about the exclusion of photographers of color from the Festival. He wanted to meet me, but she didn’t have his cell number and wasn’t sure how to hook us up. I had to laugh. Look 3 wasn't likely to be overflowing with black folks. I told her that I’d introduce myself to the first three black men that I met at the Festival; he was sure to be one of them. I was right.
I was deeply ambivalent about the Festival of the Photograph, after the first two, and, now, after the third, I’m just as torn. One the one hand, the photography--and there was plenty of it--ranged from very good to brilliant. On the other hand, Look 3's continuing failure to embrace the innovative and challenging work being done by photographers of color around the world and by racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is unworthy of a festival that aspires to world-class status.
But let’s start with the good stuff.
There was more photography at the festival than anyone could possibly absorb--hanging in galleries and from trees; projected onto giant screens, indoors and out; bound into books that were on display. Powerful, gut-wrenching photo essays rubbed shoulders with images that ranged from the dreamily poetic to the crassly commercial.
(By the way, I was tempted to call this blog entry "Fun with a G10 at Look 3." I made all of the snaps below with a Canon G10, which is indeed a lot of fun to use. Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)
Photos by Platon. A wonderful juxtaposition of images.
The photographers’ talks were mostly terrific. Eugene Richards and Janine Altongy presented excerpts from their project, "War is Personal," in which they combine words and photos to document the lives of severely wounded Iraq war veterans. This visually devastating work forces us to see what we would rather ignore, provoking anger at the politicians who lied to us and led us into the war; anger at ourselves for believing the unbelievable; anger at the wasted lives of these men and women (and the wasted lives of many thousands of others, in the US and Iraq). This is photojournalism at its very best.
Unfortunately, "War is Personal," was part of a program that featured another Richards project and the work two other photographers. As fine as these presentations were, I can’t have been the only person in the audience who wanted an intermission after "War is Personal." I needed time to absorb it. And time to recover emotionally.
Legendary photographer and Look 3 workshop leader Larry Fink meets legendary jazz pianist and Charlottesville resident Hod O'Brien.
Hod O'Brien at work.
Martin Parr had the best line of the Festival: "We all know that photographs are lies. You should try to do it with intelligence." That came during a talk which covered various aspects of his career--photographer, historian of photography, and collector of Maggie Thatcher and Saddam Hussein memorabilia.... He managed to be, at one and the same time, droll, uproariously funny, modest, robustly self-confident, deadly serious, and hugely entertaining. Paradoxical, but aren’t we all, believing, as we do, that photos lie and believing just as hard that they tell a truth.
Martin Parr
Parr’s a purposeful contrarian--shooting in bad weather instead of good, moving to color--garish color--when black and white was still the thing, photographing the rich instead of the desperately poor. The purpose behind this puckishness has been to puncture photojournalistic cliches and to ask photographers and their audiences to examine things that have gone largely overlooked. His exhibition "Luxury," a skewering of the very rich in many corners of the world, was wonderful to see, in all of its garish glory.
Homage, or That Ol' Devil Influence
After showing us a series of photos from each of the 11 finalists, David Alan Harvey announced that Alejandro Chaskielberg had won the $10,000 Emerging Photographer Fund prize. He’s a deserving winner, and it’s pretty obvious why he won: his photos were by far the most original. (N.B., here I’m peering into the minds of the judges and guessing about their decision-making process.) They’re also very beautiful, but it was probably the novelty of his vision that persuaded the judges. Unlike most of the other photographs, his didn’t have you playing the influence game--this series looks like X, that series looks like Y, this one looks like the love child of Y and Z, and that one looks like an art school senior project. (For X, Y, and Z, fill in the name the fine art or documentary photographer du jour. Or cinematographer.)
This is not to knock responding to influences. Virtually anyone, from athletes to artists, who’s serious about developing a skill goes through a period of emulating the best in the field. This is a necessary part of the learning process. In grad school, I tried to write with the punch and power of E.P. Thompson and Eugene Genovese, after having failed miserably at writing with the grace of C. Van Woodward. But if we’re ever to say anything new, we have to speak with our own voices. Chaskielberg has found his.
I accepted his offer.
Yummy.
In a few days, I’ll consider James Nachtwey’s unsurprising work on the Extensively Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (XDRTB) crisis and contemplate where Look 3 goes from here.
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