The first part of Jörg’s post that needs immediate attention is the following: his response to the broad claims made between the journal questions and the survey responses indicates a lack of serious criticism. I might address that I felt several publisher responses, from my end, were quite diplomatic in their answers. There was not an overwhelming feeling that the critics were doing good work, yet, as Jörg points out, very little was espoused as to why the level of current criticism was not up to snuff. Only one publisher went into some detail about the problems associated with criticism, which I appreciated. More on that later. In the meantime, Jörg answers the broad claims made in the surveys that suggest no honest valid criticism of the photobook field. Criticism, we should assume, is tendered differently from academic treatises and more extended rumination of the photobook, and I believe it can be most easily summed up as review-oriented. Jörg had this to say…
…people simply want more and better criticism. Let’s ignore the fact that there actually exists quite a lot on these sites already. I think we need to move up one layer and look at things from a different vantage, people. Here’s the actual question: do we need criticism? Please note that I’m not trying to be facetious at all. I am completely serious. As someone who has written about photography for quite some time, I regularly ask myself questions around what I do. In particular, I wonder which approach to criticism might produce the best outcomes, given what I think is needed. You might spot the big problem with that approach immediately: “given what I think is needed”. Maybe my ideas are simply wrong or out of touch? It’s possible. Do people really care about criticism? I think if we’re really honest with ourselves in terms of what’s going on in photoland, the answer might not be very rosy.
The conundrum of criticism regarding the photobook and its criticism has been levied at the critics (though unspecified) previously without any sense of the real answer to the problem by David Solo (a collector of books, though claims of researcher have been made amongst others) in Aperture’s Photobook Review Issue 20 in a piece entitled “Why Is This a PhotoBook? A Call for a Richer PhotoBook Criticism.” I do not mind saying that I found Solo’s approach to the question of criticality in the field limited, myopic, and full of underhanded, if comparatively soft, invective against the number of people working very hard to enrich the field. This pithy call to arms by a privileged voice in the field upset me much more than the Materialities of the Photobook responses. Of course, I do have a bias in this as one of those people that Mr. Solo has condemned to not be rich, in his estimation of critique, which redundantly cites a significant number of the same people that Jörg points out rightly as redundant critics and reference points, such as Sontag, Benjamin, and Barthes (and I do hold all dearly, but). Mr. Solo and the people of Aperture, notably Leslie Martin, function as Gatekeepers to that particular outlet for writing. Wherein their efforts might be great at times, they use the same authors/critics for every issue and only work with the anointed or those who fill a particular dimension of their visions of visibility. I think it is also fair to point out that, in my estimation, neither Leslie (even with her copious publishing experience) nor David has made soup to nuts, a photobook from their own work. Again, as per my recent Kim Thue review, I am very wary of people autocratically telling others how to pursue subjective responses to critique, mainly when those criticisms are levied from inexperience and, in Solo’s case, the simple expenditure of economy…