What would happen if publishers–especially the major houses–banded together and “just said no” to amazon and its unreasonable demands? If the majority did, amazon would have to back down if it wanted to continue selling books on its site. As this article points out, if publishers accede to amazon’s demands, their profit from sales on amazon would be pretty much “wipe out” their profit anyway, so why not use this as an opportunity to change the equation, shift the balance of power to publishers, and reinvigorate the indies? Books are becoming less and less of a profit center for amazon, which is clear by this policy. If amazon ends up selling virtually no books, people will find their way either to bn.com and/or to the indie in their towns. I often wonder what would have happened in the ’80s if publishers had not kowtowed to the demands of the chains, which now seem like child’s play compared to the hardball that amazon is playing.

by Kate Ware and Joanna Hurley

CENTER’s Portfolio Bootcamp, 9-24-11

Before you can write a cogent artist statement, you have to have a really well-thought-out body of work.  So first we are going to discuss the really essential question, which you have to answer before you can even think about writing an artist statement.  That question is,

Do you have a coherent, cohesive, fully-realized body of work yet?

If you can say yes to that question, then you should be able to write an artist statement in about twenty minutes; if you cannot, then you need to go back and rethink your project and where you are with it.

CONCEPTING YOUR PROJECT: How do you Create and Refine Your Artistic Vision?

• A bunch of pictures of a similar topic or place does not a fully-realized project make.
• Start with your PASSION
• Anyone with technical skill can make a good photograph these days, what makes an image and a body of work great is the heart and soul in it, whether it is a documentary project, portraiture, photo-journalism or conceptually-based, it’s that individual spark that sets a project apart.
• It’s also the intelligence and discernment and individual eye of the photographer that is evident in the choices that have been made, from subject matter, to rendering to sequencing.
• This is particularly vital if you have chosen a topic or place that has been done by many people previously—eg Cuba, Mexico, a war zone eg., discuss Alex and Rebecca Norris Web’s book on Cuba, Alex Harris’s book on Cuba, Wright Ledbetter’s book on Cuba

Now we will frame how we talk and think about the artist statement using the tried-and-true journalistic approach to writing a story, that is, answering this set of questions: WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHERE, HOW, and WHY?

THE ARTIST STATEMENT

1. WHAT is the artist statement?

The artist statement is an essential communication tool that cogently expresses the primary meaning of your work and how you arrived there.

Remember, your viewers haven’t spent the last three years working on your series – you have! They are coming to it cold, and may have a limited amount of time in which to look at it. A good artist statement is the basis for presenting a cohesive, creative body of work.  It is a vital tool for defining and promoting your work.

As such it should provide

• A clear introduction to the work for anyone – a publisher, your mom, a bored teenager, a gallery director, etc. If you do it right, you will assist the casual viewer and encourage those who want to know more.

• Access and clarity
• Basic information on you, the work, your process, your influences and your intention
• Insight into your passion + how it guided you to make this work
• Leaves room for interpretation; guides rather than controls the viewing experience

2. WHO are you writing the statement for?

Who uses artist statements and how?

• Museum curators
• Gallery owners and dealers
• Book publishers
• Collectors

All of these people review work at one time or another, and all of them use the artist statement to

• determine if the work is suitable for their needs
• figure out what the artist is up to
• help the viewer engage with the work—particularly if it is in-progress
• maximize YOUR opportunity to have a constructive conversation about the work with a professional in a position to help you realize its potential and get it out there
• choose work for an exhibition
• assist those writing about your work, often without your being involved, eg. text for a label or education guide
• form the basis of proposing an acquisition
• determine if they want to represent your work in their gallery
• determine if the work is publishable by them or someone else

Joanna writes in her article that seeing a statement on work by emerging photographers is particularly useful in any setting, whether it is a portfolio review or if she is looking at a project for possible book acquisition.  Ideally the work should speak for itself, and the statement should provide any necessary amplification of the artist’s intention and process.

In a review or jurying setting, Kate usually looks at the work first but checks in with the artist statement to make sure she isn’t missing something. It is not unusual for an artist’s ambitions or ideas to be greater than what is clear to a viewer at first glance. You want to draw us in, help us see where you are trying to go, and engage us in helping you get there.

3. WHY is the artist statement necessary?

SEE ABOVE!!!

Many photographers are baffled or resentful about having to write about their work. “I’m a visual artist,” they say, “I speak in pictures.” That’s fine but you also need words to maximize the impact of your work, and to properly share it with the outside world.

If you can’t talk cogently about your work, you haven’t thought it through;

 if you talk too much about it, it’s not ready for prime-time.

4. WHEN?

At what point in the project should an artist write a statement for a body of work?

Certainly this is an individual thing, but the guideline is

• when you have a group of pictures that are starting to cohere, it is time to start thinking about defining the body of work. This can be a very organic process, in which your definition of it or your proposed titled is consistently tested against the pictures themselves.  The statement itself may change as the project changes.
• When the work is really done and ready to be shown to the world.

An excellent example is Dan Milnor’s blog on his work-in-progress on New Mexico:

http://thenewmexicoproject.tumblr.com/

5. HOW to write an artist statement?

Make a Draft

Writing can be difficult for almost anyone, especially when it is something so important and personal. Each person must find his own strategy for getting started, whether it is giving yourself permission to sit down and write whatever comes into your head or speaking out loud and having a friend write down what you say. Start with the objective of writing a paragraph, in language that anyone can understand, that you could use to give a quick sense of what you do. Your initial goal will be to address the following basic questions:

• What is it
• Why you made it: why do you have PASSION for this subject? (and if you don’t have passion then forget the whole thing and start over—more on this below)
• What does it mean
• How do you make it

Edit Your Draft

Once you have something basic on paper, it may help to amplify some of those basic questions, to give yourself room to elaborate a bit:

• What is your idea for the work?
• Is there a working title?
• What do you want it to mean or express?
• How do the materials, presentation, and process you are using contribute to and support your message?
• Keep checking back and forth between pictures and text to make sure what you are saying rings true.
• Test your statement of purpose or title on other people

If you took writing composition in grade school, you may remember tools such as the topic sentence and the outline format, which can be helpful in structuring your statement. Once you get the basic information in place, you can think about how to organize it. Your next goal is to turn the basic information into a statement that:

• Reads easily
• Is informative
• Adds understanding (behind-the-scenes view)
• Is too short rather than too long (1-3 paragraphs max)

You can try putting separate ideas on file cards, if that is useful, or simply use the computer to try a variety of sequences for each idea or sentence.
More tips and things to keep in mind:

• Make sure it has a strong and compelling topic (beginning) sentence to draw us in (Don’t begin with your childhood! TMI disease!)
• Is the most important information at the top of the statement?

• Use your authentic voice: Avoid jargon and “art-speak”

• Be specific not vague
• Tell the truth (the Truth is often a simpler statement)
• Read aloud for clarity and flow
• Write in the first person—but DON’T make it all about you
• Don’t overreach: don’t make your work about everything, then it will surely be about nothing
• Rather, tell us what is distinctive about your work.  This is vital especially if you are working on a project in an area or on a subject that has already been widely photographed

Test it!

Communication gaps – remember the old Gary Larson cartoon about “what we say to cats” and “what they hear,” where the bubble around what we say contains “blah blah blah” and the bubble for what they hear contains absolutely nothing?

What you wrote is not what I heard

Test it out against people who will be honest with you

Be prepared to rework and refine the statement

Photo by Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe

Essays by Rebecca Senf and Stephen Pyne

Reconstructing the View, a four-year photographic project exploring the Grand Canyon, dramatically expands on Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe’s previous collaborations, resulting in a diverse body of work distinguished by its diversity, sense of humor, and power. Calling on a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs by William Bell and William Henry Holmes to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams to ephemera and souvenir postcards, Klett and Wolfe used digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own photography. Reconstructing the View interrogates a broad range of issues, including the passage of time and how it is manifest in photography; changing cultural assumptions and perspectives; how images are circulated; and understanding the role photographers—both anonymous and great—have played in picturing American places.

Reconstructing the View is also a collaborative publishing project, initiated by the Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and produced by HurleyMedia for the University of California Press under the direction of Kari Dahlgren, the art history editor.

Rebecca Senf, PhD, is Acting Senior Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Norton Family Curator at Phoenix Art Museum.

Stephen J. Pyne, PhD, is Professor, Human Dimensions Faculty, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.

While I believe strongly that the work must speak for itself, and that no amount of verbal deconstruction will make up for a poorly-conceived or executed idea, a good artist’s statement is essential if the photographer has any desire for recognition or progress, as well as to gain as much as possible from the review process. I have found over the years that the photographers who can speak or write clearly about their work also produce the most affecting and powerful images.

One could argue that that there is an inherent paradox in asking photographers to speak or write about their work; presumably if they could do it in words they would be writers not visual artists.  However, just as the best works of fiction or non-fiction engage the reader on a number of different levels, so do the best works of art and photography.  To read something really clear about the artist’s vision and process enhances the viewer’s experience of the work and, in the review setting––where often a photographer is presenting the germ of an idea as opposed to a fully-realized project––can make the difference between the reviewer not having a clue what the artist is up to and therefore giving a less favorable comment, and being able to provide constructive feedback. This is why I always read the artist statement.

The essential qualities of a good artist’s statement are clarity, brevity, humility and a keen awareness of the work that has come before you and inspired you. But first you have to have some idea of why you want to make the work and what you want to express with it––in other words, a concept, even a simple one.

Here’s a great example. I had the opportunity to hear Julie Blackmon describe how she came to make the kinds of photographs she does. She said that she had studied photography in college, and had been a stay-at-home Mom for several years.  She wanted some artwork for her house, and she thought she could create something herself that would please her as much as anything she could afford to buy.  She admired the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, and she was at home, so her children were her natural subjects.

We are all familiar with the results, which are a fresh, contemporary and very original take on a familiar subject.  The images speak to a sense of history, and are ironic and funny without being self-conscious or pretentious.  Indeed, they have become almost as iconic as their inspirations.  And her statement was short and direct, amplifying the vision behind the work while allowing it to speak for itself––which is, in the end, the whole point.

—–

I first wrote this article after the 2009 photolucida, for their de-brief.  It was then reprinted in Center’s online newsletter.  It actually became the inspiration behind Center’s upcoming “Portfolio Bootcamp”, September 23-24, where one of the main topics of discussion will be–you guessed it:  how to write a cogent artist’s statement. For more information on that very worthwhile seminar, please go to Center’s website, www.visitcenter.org.

This is a book about dreams and their fulfillment––and the adventures of a lifetime.  Norman Brown was for many years the CEO of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. As such, he traveled all over the world, but saw much of it only from the windows of skyscrapers or planes. He resolved when he retired to see it from the ground, to plunge into the natural, physical world, and to experience firsthand the huge variety of landscapes, peoples, and cultures that comprise the earth.

Here he shares his adventures on every continent and subcontinent on the planet, from crossing the Sahara, circumnavigating Nepal’s Mount Manaslu, the eighth highest mountain in the world, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Fuji, trekking to the bases of both Mount Everest and K2, to traveling into the wilds of Amazonia, and standing in the spray of Angel Falls in Venezuela. He has explored ancient Roman and Greek ruins, retraced the routes of Marco Polo and Genghis Khan through Central Asia and, closer to home, gazed at the sunrise at Arches National Park in Utah, along with dozens of other encounters in Australia, New Guinea, Africa, and beyond.

Forthcoming George F. Thompson Publishing, Fall 2012

This unique collaboration between Gerry Adams, the renowned leader of Sinn Fein, and Elizabeth Billups, a Santa Fe-based photographer and activist, reveals the Ireland not always seen in guidebooks, as well as a side of Adams not usually captured in the news.

He shares personal anecdotes and family stories along with relevant historical details, legends, and myths, complemented by Billups’ photographs and her impressions of the country culled over many years and many visits. Although Adams does not focus on politics, his discussion of his participation in the historic Good Friday Peace Agreement adds a timely dimension to his text.

Gerry Adams has been president of Sinn Fein, the fastest growing party in Ireland, north and south, since 1983.  He has served as a member of Parliament for West Belfast from 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to the present.  He is he author of several books, including A Farther Shore: Ireland’s Long Road to Peace, which was published to wide acclaim by Random House in 2003.   He lives in Belfast.

Elizabeth Billups is a Santa Fe-based photographer and political activist who has worked with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council, among others. Her photography has been exhibited in the U.S. and Ireland.

Foreword by tk

AVAILABLE

Basketball is the only major league and Olympic ballgame that was invented by North Americans.  Its popularity in the U. S. is near mythic, matched only by baseball and football, and its players are icons and role models for American youth.  Its appeal is universal, dissolving ethnic, demographic and regional barriers.

Bill Bamberger has traveled all across America taking pictures of hoops, from the deserts of Arizona to the inner city of New York.  There are lonely hoops out on the prairie, hoops tacked to urban steel walls, hoops sandwiched in between the garage and the back yard. These stunning color photographs of hoops and courts all across America will appeal to anyone who loves basketball––and even those who don’t––but who is fascinated by American culture and our ongoing love affair with the sport.  These images of hoops connect us to the place of basketball in our lives––where we play it, how we feel about it, and what it means to us culturally.

Bill Bamberger is a photographer based in North Carolina whose work explores large social issues of our time. His Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory was published to wide acclaim by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University with W. W. Norton. Richard B. Woodward is a critic and journalist based in New York who has written extensively about art and photography.

Forthcoming Fall 2012 George F. Thompson Publishing

WILD INDIA is inspired by Joan Myers’s encounters with jungles and animals in remote areas of India, and by Kipling’s Just So Stories, which she read, as many of us did, as a child. WILD INDIA is her homage both to that book and to the wild parts of India  that few travelers ever see, much less know about, and which are rapidly vanishing in the face of increasing development and industrialization.

Joan Myers has been taking photographs for more than thirty years, exploring the relationships between people and the land. Her highly acclaimed work has been the focus of three Smithsonian exhibitions, numerous solo and group shows, and six books.

They include Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (with text by Sandra Blakeslee), which was published by Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, and awarded Honorable Mention in the American Association of Museums’ 2006 Publication Competition. Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-down California (with text by William deBuys), won the 1999 Western States Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and the 1999 William P. Clements Prize for the best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America; it was published by the University of New Mexico Press.  Her current work centers on volcanic and geothermal sites around the world.

Forthcoming Fall 2012 George F. Thompson Publishing

A poignant memorial to the victims of Colombia’s ongoing, armed conflict, the images in DRIFTING AWAY are at once beautiful and deeply moving. Amplified by images of the photographs being shown in memorials in areas where the victims were “disappeared,” as well as by essays exploring the social and political implications of the work, this book will be a significant resource in contemporary Latin American studies, as well as for social anthropologists, human rights workers, and those wanting to understand at a very basic level the human cost of terrorism. The exhibition of the work in DRIFTING AWAY was the most viewed show in the history of the Nacional Museo de Colombia.  The work has also been shown in the U.S. at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and other venues.

Erika Diettes is a Colombian photographer and social anthropologist whose work is subtle, yet gut-wrenching, and focuses on the deeply personal yet universal effects of political violence and injustice.  Her first book, Silencios, was on survivors of the Holocaust now living in Colombia. It was published by Consuelo Mendoza Ediciones in 2005, and is available in the U.S. through photo-eye and the Jewish Museum.

Published by Hudson Hills Press, October 2011

Jack Parsons has been investigating the light, landscapes and cultures of the American Southwest for over thirty-five years. He has produced fifteen books, many of which have become bestsellers and classics in their fields, from the groundbreaking Santa Fe Style (Rizzoli), which spawned the hugely successful, international genre of publications based on regional design; to Lone Star Living: The Texas Home and Ranch Book (Bulfinch), and Low ‘n Slow (Museum of New Mexico Press).

DARK BEAUTY features one hundred of his rarely seen or published photographs of New Mexico. From images of small towns and lonely plains, mountains, rivers, fiestas, and murals, to old adobe houses, crumbling walls and dirt roads in Santa Fe, Taos, and elsewhere, it presents a very personal, elegaic vision of the state where he has made his home since the 1970s. These photographs reveal a deep understanding and reverence for a place whose complex, rich history, unique multiculturalism, and unparalleled beauty continue to captivate residents and tourists alike.

A Guggenheim fellow, Frederick Turner has written ten books and edited three,including Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness; Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours, and the latest, 
The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years.