Critical Ideology

I have realized that my approach to criticism is ideological. Here I thought I was just plain right all along, but to be perfectly honest, not so much.

My ideology is simple: what matters is the viewer's response to the work. I maintain that photography, at least the photography I am interested in, is a medium of communication, and I choose to evaluate it on those terms. I think I'm right, at least in the sense that this is a good idea. Loosen me up with a stiff drink and I might allow that other right answers exist.

There are, for instance, technique-forward ways to write criticism. You can talk about the formal properties, how big the print is, whether it's in focus or not, what the tonal range and color qualities are, and so on. You can talk about the texture of the paper. You can focus on sharpness and other purely technical properties; or you can talk about things like shadows and contrast leading to drama, and edge up against something like a discussion of viewer response that way. There's a pretty wide suite of tools here that you can mix and match, but ultimately you're thinking about individual measurable elements rather than a holistic/gestalt kind of thing, and you're tech-forward throughout.

This is the way Mike Johnston at ToP reviews things. Mike's view, whether he admits it or not, is that photography is primarily a technical pursuit. This attitude is widely shared. Indeed, I think it is far and away the most widely held position in photography, which is (partly) why blogs like mine have so few readers.

And, you know, photography is a technical discipline. Evaluating photographs in a tech-forward way does make a kind of sense. It's not an approach the ought to be dismissed out of hand (even though I have been known to do just that.)

Another position, widely taken by what I consider the second tier of photography writer, perhaps the bottom 1 percent, is that photography in particular and art in general should be evaluated mostly in terms of its relationship to other art. This seems to be the thrust of formal art schools. Art is made almost entirely to be so situated. The point of any given piece of art is that it was made by so-and-so who has a certain set of identity characteristics (politics, gender, etc), it was made at a particular time and place, and that the work was influenced by a specific cloud of other work.

This situation is the analyzed for meaning, and we get reams of turgid unreadable nonsense about Cindy Sherman's feminist ontologies and the epistemologies inherent in her methods.

Again, you can use this sort of thing as a jumping off point, or you can include formal details, and so on. The point, though, is that this criticism is situation-forward.

And, once again, photography (especially Art Photography) does indeed occupy a position in time, in relation to other work, and so on. There is indeed an author with an identity, generally. Sometimes there are several authors. This is not an approach to be dismissed out of hand (even though I have been known to do just that.)

My point of interest, which appears to be the least popular possible position in that I know of exactly one (1) critic who takes this position, is that the way a picture is understood by the viewer is by far the most important thing. I've been working for some years now fairly devotedly to making sense of the ways people read photographs, the ways people make sense of them.

Again, I can and do examine and think about the formal properties of the things, but always with an eye to how those will take the viewer. I do think about authorship and art-historical situation, but always again with an eye to how these might take a viewer. Our "read" on a photo can and often is influenced by what we imagine we know of the photographer. That is a real thing and we ought not to dismiss it.

What is puzzling to me is this: Photography is first and foremost a medium of communication. The number of photographers who will introduce themselves as storytellers is very very large. Nearly everyone who photographs, when pressed, will allow that they aim to communicate. Why, then, no serious critical apparatus that aims to evaluate photographs primarily in terms of their actual intended purpose?

I think we have, essentially, two populations of would-be critics.

The first are photographers. Photographers begin by struggling with technique. They spend a lot of time evaluating their own work and others in terms of technique in order to master technique. These people (e.g. me) have a hard time switching tracks, and attempt instead to re-task their technical understandings to communication. We get nonsense like "leading lines" and "it draws the eye" which are essentially technical or formal properties mated unwillingly to a fantasy of a mechanical generation of meaning.

The second group comes through Art school or anyways past it, and thinks largely in terms of situating work. They also tend to try to re-task their tools to meaning. The identify the author, or a painting the photograph resembles, or some political theory, and "explain" the meaning of the work terms of these associations: associations no "commoner" would make. They wander off into a thicket of ontologies and political theories, never to be seen again.

It is, I think, difficult to discard what you know and start from the beginning, to start from the basics of the visual apparatus and the cultures in which we live, and to work out how actual, ordinary, people will make meaning from a photograph, or from a book of photographs, or a white cube filled with photographs. While the non-viewer-forward ways to write criticism are not to be dismissed, they are also not particularly well-suited to understanding how viewers make meaning.

Art History is an excellent tool for Art History, but a poor one for making milkshakes, and and even worse one for making sense of what people think when they look at a picture.