Rhubarb-Rhubarb: In July 2007 I was a reviewer at the photography portfolio review festival Rhubarb-Rhubarb in Birmingham, then one of top four or five such events around the world.
The event, based on the first this type of event, FotoFest in Houston, Texas which had been founded in 1986, had begun in Birmingham as a portfolio day as a part of a ‘Seeing the Light‘ festival for photographers in 1997, named after photographer and educator Rhonda Wilson‘s 1993 book ‘Seeing The Light: The Photographers’ Guide to Enterprise‘.
Following the success of this review, Wilson went on in 1998 to organise the annual 3-day Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival in Birmingham which drew photographers from around the world to have their portfolios reviewed by a mixture of well-known photographers, educators, magazine editors, photography critics and others. And in 2007, me. And although I wasn’t going there to take photographs I did wear my Leica M8 with a 35mm f1.4 lens and couldn’t resist taking a few snaps.
The 2007 event attracted many mainly young photographers, including some who have gone on to be very successful in the photography world. I was invited to take part as a reviewer as for around seven years I had built up one of the largest and most followed photography sites on the web as ‘Photography Guide’ on one of the many micro-sites of About.com. On it I had tried hard to write about many well-known photographers and to write about photography in countries around the world.
Unfortunately although my work on About.com received many positive responses from photographers and collectors around the world – and some of my words were widely pirated on gallery sites and helped earn many students their degrees, the whole of About.com had recently been taken over by the New York Times, which saw it simply as a way to make a quick buck to finance their other activities. My micro-site had been a part of the fifth largest site on the web but a few years later the whole site had essentially disappeared.
Until then I had worked with great and supportive editors. My new editors didn’t like what I was doing. They didn’t want any serious writing about photography and had no interest in anything that was happening outside the USA. They wanted short easy pieces which would appeal to a wide American audience – taking pictures of your family, babies, Thanksgiving, July 4th etc – and more importantly to US advertisers. Readers in Australia, Bangladesh, Chile, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Honduras, India, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Norway etc – and I had them in many other countries too – were of zero interest to them.
I fought with them for around seven months, making some small concessions but continuing to try to write – as I had been engaged to do in 1999 – for serious photographers, collectors and people with a real interest in the medium, while also providing some of the things the editors demanded. But by the time I arrived at Rhubarb-Rhubarb I was just out of a job.
I’d started Re>PHOTO a few months earlier, anticipating my sacking, largely as a site on which I could publish my thoughts on photography when I was no longer writing for money, though over the years it has slowly changed into being a site almost entirely about my own past work.
Almost immediately I returned from Rhubarb-Rhubarb I posted a short piece on it, ‘Rhubarb Rhubarb: Three Canons‘, the title and structure referring to a short text with 3 pictures by Minor White. My ‘Three Canons for Reviewees’ based on my experience as a reviewer are perhaps worth repeating:
Three Canons for Reviewees
Be still, let your work speak and your reviewer think. Say only what is necessary.
When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.
Erase the word memory from your memory, your statements, your discourse. Let your work be memory, if so, then no one will need to be reminded.
Rhubarb-Rhubarb in 2007 was held in the former Curzon Street station in Birmingham, a fine building which was Birmingham’s first railway station in 1838, but closed in 1966. It may open again around 2038 as the terminus of the ridiculously over-budget and emasculated to pointlessness HS2 line from Old Oak Common.
At the end of my 2007 >Re:PHOTO post I promised to write about some of the photographers whose work I reviewed – and I did. You can find more about them and Rhubarb-Rhubarb 2007 in August 2007 posts on >Re:PHOTO.
The last Rhubarb-Rhubarb was in 2009 and was the largest and most successful of them all, but the recession and the withdrawal of Arts Council funding put an end to them. Sadly Rhonda Wilson died in 2014 having been ill for several years.
You can read more about the 2007 event with many more of my pictures at Rhubarb-Rhubarb.
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