I wasn’t quite sure why A D Coleman was writing about the as yet unpublished ‘How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read’, by Pierre Bayard in his Nearby Café Photocritic International post How to Talk Through Your Hat (1) and making the connection between the author’s name and one of the pioneers of photography, Hippolyte Bayard seemed rather a weak link – especially as Coleman says “I’ve yet to determine whether he’s related“. But of course I knew and trusted that he would at some point get to the point.
And of course he does, if only in his later post, How to Talk Through Your Hat (2), where he talks about the development of his own critical practice, where he increasingly realised the need to make “careful description and formal analysis” central to his reviews, although as he says, “it’s hard to make description and formal analysis interesting to read, more so certainly than interpretation and evaluation.”
It’s an approach that I’ve also very much tried to take in the best of my attempts at critical writing about photography – and forced students to take in their critical studies of photographers when I was teaching, giving them a formal structure which started with these aspects, even though it was anathema to academic practice at the time. As I wrote long ago, most writers on photography would rather do anything than actually look at the pictures.
And this, rather more elegantly, is what Bayard and Coleman are saying. Coleman of course has pointed it out long before, as he says:
As I pointed out back in 1997, you can peruse the entire English-language “discourse” around Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” without encountering any substantive engagement with the particulars of any one image of hers.
He goes on to say that most theoretical writing about images tends not to discus its actual content, but “the literal subject matter, and their personal response thereto ― equivalent to assessing a Cézanne still life according to your preferences in fruit.”
But you need to read his posts, rather than mine, and I gather from the bottom of the second post that we can expect a third on this series.
I read rather a clear example of writing about photographs without any real attempt to look at the actual content the other day in a review of the current Winogrand retrospective at SFMOMA. Caille Millner‘s review in the San Francisco Chronicle was drawn to my attention in a post by Joerg Colberg on The Ethics of Street Photography (his link to it may work if mine hits the paywall) and seems to me a near perfect example of someone writing about images without actually seeing the actual content, producing a diatribe based on her reaction to his literal subject – or one of them – women.
Millner seems to have little idea of who Winogrand was or what he was doing – or with how it changed what other photographers do, and to be completely unprepared to engage with them. She could have looked at a Picasso show and come out with the same response (probably with more justification) about his attitudes to women.
I think Winogrands attitudes and images were considerably more complex than she imagines, and although when I wrote a lengthy essay on him some years ago I wasn’t entirely uncritical of his approach to women, I didn’t mistake this as the point of his work. But unlike her I knew his work, and looked at the pictures, including those in my copy of his ‘Women Are Beautiful‘ (I got it reduced to £4.50 and it now sells at $450 upwards) and didn’t have the same axe to grind.
Being currently immersed in Winogrand that SFC was so wrong it was unworthy of comment. Impossible to sum him up succinctly but relevant to that review if pressed I would say he was a transparently honest photographer.