Sitting around after dinner with friends the other day we got into a discussion that hit home for me. This concerned career development, connections made and lost and how many times I've been screwed by the dreaded "curator changeover".

I don't have any knowledge of business practice but it has to be true in that world too. 

In a career that is based on showing museum curators my work towards purchase for their permanent collection and/or exhibition there have been many times where my work has been mishandled, poorly represented and misunderstood.

Let me give you a few examples. I studied at the RI School of Design in Providence, RI and it seemed logical to keep up contact with the RISD Museum of Art in the years after finishing. The Museum is the art museum for Rhode Island, not just for the school. So I did. Eventually, I was showing portfolios of new work every year or two to Diana Johnson, the museum's director. For whatever reason, Diana "got me" and had a strong sympathy for the work I was making and the direction my career was taking. Without my specifically asking she committed to showing my work in a one person show two years down the line. I was ecstatic. Much thinking and planning went into what I would show, how I would juxtapose one body of work against another, even the artist statement I would write, the size of the prints and so on. About a year before we were going to schedule the show, Diana abruptly left the museum, to return to her original career, which was wealth management! All this history with her was now gone, all the trips to Providence to show her work, all the long conversations we had about intent and result, all now irrelevent. My show was quickly assigned to a new curator, just out of graduate school, another Johnson, this one named Deborah. Deborah and I had no history so I started over. The first time we met, I showed her some work and she excitedly told me she'd found a date and location in the museum for my show. I knew at this point in my career I wasn't thought of as an A list artist, or someone to be headlined.  But to be given space to show my work on a lower floor in a room that was just outside the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Department felt like being given a table next to the kitchen in a restaurant.  Furthermore, the show was now going to open in early August the next summer. For most museums, August is the graveyard shift, when attendance is low and foot traffic almost non existent. We did the show, I was very pleased and proud of the installation, the work looked great but practically no one saw it. End of story number one.

Story number Two. A few years  after getting my MFA in the early 70's and moving to Boston I had begun to show work to the logical museums and venues for exhibition in the area: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Decordova Museum, Vision Gallery and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA, among others. Perhaps my strongest connection was with Don Snyder who was the head curator at the Addison. Again, Don understood my pictures, my intentions and the level at which I worked. This was fairly early in my career so my ability to be verbally coherent about my work was hampered by shyness and a lack of eloquence (still true today) but the pictures spoke to Don and so he committed to exhibiting my photographs after two or three years of showing him work. In his heart, Don wanted to be teaching not curating so when Ryerson Institute in Toronto offered him a full time job he jumped at it. Me?  I inherited a young new curator at the Addison, tasked to curate my show, who had some progressive ideas about exhibiting my work, including "informalizing" it. The show was schedueled at a better time than in Story Number 1 and was a moderate success but I didn't like the presentation very much. Unmounted prints covered with glass and pinned directly the wall, butted quite close to each other?  Fine for a hallway gallery, or maybe a cafe' but not a prestigious museum. The lesson here? Watch out for the curator who wants to bend your work to his or her goals and aspirations. End of second story.

Having your work curated can be very good, of course, a melding of two minds on  what work will be shown, how it will look and what it means. To be fair, I have had that, both with museums (a show at the Danforth Museum curated by Jessica Roscio comes to mind) and with galleries (Susan Nalband at 555 Gallery, which represents my work). But relinquishing control of your work to someone else is never easy. This is very much like working with an editor, of course, or a music director or a conductor. For me the characteristic of working with someone over years only to find they've moved on and left you to work with a stranger seems to pervade my career. I am sure it does many others as well. I call it curator changeover and it sucks, big time.

Last story, this one with a decidedly unhappy ending. For probably fifteen years I showed work to a curator at a nearby museum. While my career was ascending, so was hers. We did a few small things together over the years, a print or two of mine in a group show, a couple of things purchased for the collection. In what turned out to be her last year there I made the museum an offer they couldn't refuse and they bought a whole portfolio of work, a series of mine. Now we were getting somewhere. Then, suddenly, she was gone. I never knew details but the museum had a big shakeup when a new director came on board. Not only did I lose all those years of showing the curator work, when I met with her replacement, there was no chance of anything happening. It was clear to me my work was not the new person's idea of what the museum should be showing or collecting.  

I am hoping you will keep these three stories in mind as you work to gain increased exposure for your work. 

Just saying.

Ted Forbes, on the site called "The Art of Photography," states that "Nobody Cares About Your Photography". No one likes to hear this but this is a realization that leads him to say that "photography that matters" is what counts.

The essay is called

Brutal Truth: Nobody Cares About Your Photography

and can be found here.

This can serve as a wake-up call, putting us on notice that the world moves on and no one knows or notices your hard work.

Photography that matters can mean all sorts of things, of course; news, reportage, events, prominent people, disasters, and global changes. But art can matter too, a seminal Cartier Bresson, the kid with the hand grenade in Central Park by Diane Arbus, even Ansel Adam's Moonrise as it has become so iconic, a picture from Robert Frank's The Americans, all those matter.

Go on that photo trip. Shoot a lot. Get home. Print a lot. Make the work into a portfolio or perhaps a book. What've you got? Work that no one cares about. As viewers we are callous and while it is wonderful you had such a great time and made pictures so unusual of such exceptional things, we really don't care that much.

Let's look back to shooting film and/or slides. Same thing. Someone went on a trip, shot a lot of slides, got home, made a slide show, invited friends over, looked at the slides. I don't know about you but I was subjected to this kind of abuse when I was a kid by my dad and those were some deadly boring evenings.

In that sense Mr. Forbes is correct: nobody cares about your photography. In the world of still imagery these days no one is going to slow down and consider your work, judge its redeeming value, place it on a pedestal of praise and awe, make the necessary connections to link it with other works of yours, to place it in your oeuvre.

First of all they don't know you exist, secondly, they aren't going to spend enough time with your work to get it, third, they're not going to pay attention unless they've been told by some authority they read or know about who tells them how wonderful your work is. Even then, no guarantees.

So where does that leave you? Well, one way to differentiate your work from the masses posting on Instagram is to make your work into prints and display them somewhere. Just that separates you from most. A print is a real thing, something you can stand in front of and look at for a while. But also build a website, make it very good and direct people to go and see it, perhaps use the site to promote your shows. Make your prints extraordinary, learn your craft, and excel at it. And own your pictures so that they are not derivative.  That seems hard I know, but listen to your own inner artist, follow your own instinct in your work. Pay little or no attention to "influencers," or "mimickers" that are so prevalent online. And don't travel to "great locations" for photography or get trapped into believing you need the great picture of any given place. It blows me away to see a row of workshop attendees standing in a line with cameras making the same picture. Is this what you want? Make work that stems from real projects, not just an hour out with a camera. Scratch deeper and learn to use the medium to say something, be it actual as in a story or a narrative or more figurative or emotional, a dream, a setting, or to, as Ted Forbes says, make pictures of things that matter.

And, oh yes, good luck. You'll need it. Photography is now so very tough, no longer a small thing, but a ubiquitous thing, with so very many vying for attention that almost no one gets any. Facing the realization that no one cares about your work is that splash in the face with ice water we need as a wake up to the situation we are all in now. Face reality. If you want to be a player, figure out a way to differentiate, stand apart, make a distinction. These days, good work is nowhere near enough. Try to figure out a way to make work that matters. 

With thanks to Ted Forbes.

This post will be just one person's perspective: mine. I don't know if there are other characteristics in other people's lives as artists, I suspect there must be, but I can only reference mine. I am going to try to write about my life as an artist.

Note: I'm just going to share some of my past work that I believe embodies some of the things I am writing about.

Some ground rules. One is that the base of my creative life has been as a photographer. If you can't cope with that then no need to read further. I would cite that there are more similarities to the conventional arts like painting, sculpture and drawing for the photographer than differences. Second, is that we're not all crazy and emotional wrecks, although I certainly have been those things at times in my past. Finally, that we all drink from the common well of needing to express ourselves visually. That making our work comes from where are are at our core, a need, a requirement and that, in effect, our work is our life.

The essential element of what I hope to convey is that we are, for the most part, private people working in a public sphere. Photography tends to be a little unique here in that we need the exterior to make our work, at least most of us do. I live in the real world and am thankful that my discipline makes me be out in it, for if it didn't I would be more reclusive than I am now, not a good thing. There is an element of loneliness to what we do, or at least aloneness, for artists need to be comfortable in that private place, where their thoughts are theirs and only theirs.

Private people working in a public sphere. Noble, honorable, consistent, satisfying, heroic? Not so much, usually. More like coming out of a need to create comes a sharing of common human experience. Can I convey this in a picture I make standing in a field pointing my camera at a line of trees?

Can a picture like this resonate with you? I can't know this nor should I try to predispose its outcome. I simply need to make photographs that connect for me in the hope that my experience (or hopefully, my expertise) will also allow them to connect with you.

As a private person, words mostly fail me at times like these.  I wish that it weren't true. I can remember trying to convey to a large class, students asked to sit in a circle, after I came back from Prescott, Arizona listening to Fred Sommer for three days tell me everything, sharing with me his core philosophy that was informed by people like Einstein, Nietzsche, Blake and Stravinsky, and of course, his own desert explorations, how it all worked, to answer the primary questions about why you would embark upon a life as an artist. This was a total failure, me dissembling into incoherent ramblings and stories. I always thanked the higher powers that my students were incredibly forgiving of this teacher's incomprehensibilities.

I think that many people do get it, that artists are reaching down into something deep within them that is then shared. My own out is that my primary vehicle isn't words at all, it is photographs and I apologize for outright ineptitude in trying to write about this in this forum.  I hope for at least an A for effort.

Since a couple of key posts this past spring my readership has gone from very small to quite large (20k) so I am aware I am speaking to a great many. This loads what I write certainly, but also is immensely rewarding in that so many are now viewing my work, admittedly in a poor fashion due to small screens and not looking at my actual prints, but far better than knowing nothing of it at all. I am very grateful to you for  coming along for the ride.

The private part is mostly around what my thinking process is like. How I can work off a reaction to a place, a piece of music, something I've read or even some art I've seen to find the beginnings of an idea or a project. To initiate that spark of curiosity that questions things as in "I wonder what it would like if I...?" That's a fundamental thing but also a trained thing, a response to surroundings that is lubricated by experience, devotion, and yes, at least for me, single mindedness. Can I, or you, springboard from that beginning curiosity into a force to be reckoned with, a picture making machine that uses all it has to make a powerhouse body of work? That's probably why we have to practice, to be fluid in our knowledge of what we have to use, for to be in front of the best thing ever with a camera and to be inept, rusty and not fully conversant is tragic and we only have ourselves to blame.

This is the back of a postcard Harry Callahan wrote to me after I failed yet again on a Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1983. I'd asked him to write on my behalf and believe he did his best, several times as it would turn out. I was devastated but didn't stop photographing.

I have written about success and failure in this blog, things that can move us up or down on our own register, but really they should mean very little. These are external things, outside influencers and pressures that mostly take us away from our inner guide, which is our work. I used to tell students who were up against the artist's version of "writer's block" that "pictures make pictures". At times I have to remind myself of my own words as I am as capable of wrong turns, dead ends, laziness and an inability to see the forest for the trees as anyone else. 

I don't know that I have a firm conclusion for this post I've written.  Perhaps I can end with the thought that I have found artists to be consistently misundertood, under respected, maligned and biased against my whole adult life. Recently I am dealing with the concept that no cares about my work.  In fact that no one cares about most work.  Facing that is sobering, humbling, frustrating and mostly true. 

Enough.

I am off for a short road trip west from Boston for a couple of days in a sports car.  Me, a couple of cameras, my eyes, my keen mind (I hope), my perceptions, my past experiences all packed up and ready to find things to photograph. Who would have thought that this would still be an adventure after all these years. But it surely is.

Thank you for reading my blog.

By 1983 I'd been teaching at Northeastern in Boston for a couple of years. I was teaching at Harvard two days a week as well. Plus I had a new kid, a new house, a German shepherd, a beat up Porsche 914 that was rusting everywhere and my marriage was in a shambles. Fast and not altogether heavenly times. 

I was struggling to be an artist during those years, squeezing a few hours in here and there to make pictures that now look scattered and disorganized. I had built a darkroom on the third floor of the house we were in in North Cambridge and would sneak up there after everyone was asleep to develop some film or make a print or two. I remember being exhausted all the time. 

I was building a new photo program at Northeastern with a tiny budget, no staff and a very poor facility that leaked when it rained from the ceiling above in a cruel irony right into the darkroom sink. I sat in meetings, stating the need as clearly and forcefully as I could to department chairs and deans, competing for bucks, space and faculty lines in a hugely competitive bureaucracy where art, and photography underneath that, didn't get much credit, exposure or attention. 

The MBTA started to build a new subway line right through the campus at Northeastern, right outside the building I taught in that was then called Ruggles Hall. I wanted to shoot this construction, but was stymied by having no permission to be on the site. The one time I tried I was promptly kicked out. A friend who had more experience than I did suggested I go on the site wearing a hard hat. I got one like the crew was wearing, put the camera on a tripod and walked on the site like I owned it. Bingo! Problem gone. For the next 1 1/2 years I roamed all over the new T line called the Orange Line and made pictures.

No assignment, no client, no show coming up, no reason to make these pictures whatsoever. This was one of the first construction projects I shot, mostly in 2 1/4  but also some in 4 x 5 (I didn't work in 8 x 10 yet). Did I have some sense that I was photographing a historically significant project? That the pictures might be worth something someday? Not particularly.  Little did I know.

So why write about this work now, in July of 2016? Because today (7/6) I donated all of this work to Northeastern University, where I taught for thirty years. It's taken months of inventorying, appraising, reading over tentative contracts and signing a final one but yes NU now owns the originals of the 19 prints, free and clear.

Let me tell how weird that feels, to let go of the only set of actual prints of this work. It feels very odd, partly good but partly I feel a loss, letting go of work that seemingly had no value but is now appraised at a very high amount. I retain all rights to use the imagery any way I wish. I can make new prints from the negatives, scan them and disseminate them any way I choose. NU also can sell the originals, store them, exhibit them, reproduce them any way they see fit with the only stipulation being to give me photo credit.

But what better use for the photographs I made than for Northeastern to have them? The Orange Line cut right through the campus, bisecting it and also providing a T stop right near the school's central quad. And there are my pictures showing the line being built in 1983 and 1984.

Are you new to photography, making work that might be significant in 40 years? Take good care of it. If you're older, did you make pictures long ago of something important, relevant, significant and timely? Still have them? Let them go where they might be of use. Let them go so that others can see them and appreciate them. Isn't that better than your work sitting on a shelf in your studio seldom seem?

Footnote. The 19 photographs that comprise the Orange Line pictures are now added to 53 I gave earlier over my career at Northeastern. The Development office decided that it would make sense to inventory and appraise all the other works I made over the years on the campus and informally gave to the school. I would frequently photograph buildings under construction then give the work to the school for display inside those same buildings. The new contract formalizes and legalizes those gifts as being owned by NU. The gift of those and the new gift of the Orange Line work makes this one of the largest donations to Northeatern in fiscal year 2015/2016. I am proud of that.

Addendum:

I received this letter from Joseph Aoun, the President of the University, the other day:

As I said earlier, if there is any possible use for older work, if there is any historical significance to it, give it away.

Photographic series or bodies of work are being explicated, explained, contextualized, rationalized and elevated with text or verbal rationals. You're thinking: so what? That's no big deal. Let me start with a short history and then let's take a look at current practice.  20 or 30 years ago, going to a photo show at MOMA or the Met, SF Modern, ID in Chicago or even the Whitney often meant you were confronted with a row of framed and matted photographs along with perhaps a brief statement from the show's curator that gave some biographical data on the photographer or maybe explained in what context the works were being shown. The titles of the work were usually the place and the year the images were made. That was it. The expectation was that the photographs stood on their own, were to be viewed and understood on their own terms, usually as single images sitting next to other single images.Think Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer, Lew Baltz, even Ansel Adams, and Cartier Bresson. Few words were necessary. There were exceptions, of course. For instance, Robert Adams, who had whole reams of text used to flush out his work and build a rational.

Now, go to a show by a recent MFA grad or sit across the table from someone showing you their work at a portfolio review and things are very different. For most work, there is absolutely no understanding possible without a written or verbal account of what the photographer is up to. I always have the sense that I am joining the telling of a story in the middle, trying to play catchup. Again, for most works, separate the photographs from the words and you have no ability to comprehend what is going on. This isn't always awful, as perhaps it is part of the evolution of the medium into a specialized category that leads to increased specificity and a clearer intent. But, and this is my main point, the photographs often aren't very good. It's as though photography has been sublimated to a necessary part of the total, that the words are the priority and the photographs somehow are ancillary or secondary and therefore not needing much attention. This resides perilously close to using the photographs as illustrations, really another field entirely.

What is this? My theory: most new art photography these days come from MFA grads who have studied the medium, not only its practice (although often not enough) but its theory, its criticism, its analysis. As the medium's craft has become easier, more fluid and automatic, mastery of the technical and visual has become less important. Students flowing out of MFA programs now that were started in the 60's and 70's are graduating with degrees and thesis works that are equivalent to PHD dissertations (there is no PHD in applied photography) as the MFA is the terminal degree in the discipline. These grads and recent grads are learned, academic, studied, vocal, theoretical and informed in the medium's history. They are also "conceptual" in that the thought is formed, the work is made to fit the thesis and then executed as a package with the written text to go along with it. This can resolve itself in performative works, video and/or photographs with a primary written component and a secondary tier of importance to the photography. As photography at this level has grown, the treatment of it as an academic pursuit has as well. Very often the craft of the medium is subsumed, indicating the artist has little interest in the inherent qualities of the discipline itself,  using it simply as a vehicle for visual communication. In fact he or she may have graduated from just that: a department of visual communication. This constitutes a "literalization" of the medium or in effect a deconstruction of its inherently visual qualities resulting in an analytical and intellectual final result.

Go to a graduate thesis show and take a look. The students are concerned with issues of identity, gender, developmental and emotional positioning, posturing, physical and emotional abuse, cultural and societal pressure and assumption, human rights, sexual identity, and on and on. Each of these ideas and many others take on a personal relevance and importance square in the photographer's aim, as though there is a catharsis that when shared it is assumed to have relevance to others who are there looking at the work. Of course, much of this is narcissism, self-absorption, even making work with blinders on.

Before you label me an old guy with a lack of sympathy for the young and an inability to see the value in younger's peoples' ideas read on. Joni Mitchell once sang that "the old hate the young" but I have always really liked the young, forty years of teaching at the university level that I really enjoyed as a case in point. Youth is vibrancy, endless energy, huge flexibly and sense of discovery that is wonderful to be around. But making the assumption that I or any viewer wants to hear the personal story as a prominent component of the art just really gets me going. I do not. I want to be able to look at the art and judge it on its own merits. Presently, I find a good deal of it lacking.

Look, the practice of making pictures used to be hugely craft based. You needed to study photography and the making of pictures hard to be good at it. It used to be difficult to do well. As a professor I seldom saw any student any good at it until they were a couple of years in. Now, the level is higher and proficiency comes without much work. I doubt most students two years into their degree can accurately tell you what ISO is, aperture and shutter speed settings, 18%  gray, reciprocity failure, D-Max and so on. You can build the case, of course, that they don't need to know those things. Put the camera on "P" and fire away.

My point? As photography becomes ubiquitous, as we are all photographers and even the most simple of cameras made today provides stunning results compared to a few years ago, photography is free to explore areas never approached before. That's all good. But please give me fewer words and better pictures! I find the story, the text mostly boring and condescending, telling me how to look at the photographs rather than letting the photographs do the talking.

It's ironic that as photographs have become easier to make and there are more photographers than ever before making more photographs the pictures are worse. 

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five when referring to the allies massive bombing campaign of the city of Dresden towards the end of WW II that killed people in the hundreds of thousands: 

So it goes.