ROSS EVERTSON, PHOTO (BLOG, INFO)

Benny and Arch, ‘06 © Shelby Lee Adams

I’m going to try and kick these off with photographers I have already mentioned on this blog. So, first off, we have Shelby Lee Adams. As much as I would like to critique this and all future statements I post, I will try to refrain out of respect and fear. Don’t let that stop you, though.

Every summer, traveling through the mountains photographing, I am somehow able to renew and relive my childhood. I regain my southern, mountain accent and approach my people with openness, facination, and respect; and they treat me with respect. My psychic antennae become sharpened and acute. I love these people, perhaps that is it, plain and simple. I respond to the sensual beauty of a hardened face with many scars, the deeply etched lines and flickers of sweat containing bright spots of sunlight. The eyes of my subjects reveal a kindness and curiosity, and their acceptance of me is gratifying. For me, this is rejuvenation of the spirit of time past, and I am better for the experience each time it happens. These portraits are, in a way, self-portraits that represent a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion and salvation. My greatest fear as a photographer is to look into the eyes of my subject and not see my own reflection.

My work has been an artist search for a deeper understanding of my heritage and myself, using photography as a medium and the Appalachian people as collaborators with their own desires to communicate. I hope, too, that viewers, will see in these photographs something of the abiding strength and resourcefulness and dignity of the mountain people.

Shelby Lee Adams

Shelby has a blog that is as seemingly as new and as oft-updated as my own.

The dry spot on my porch created by the New York Times - Echo Park, Calif. 2006

Being accountable totally blows. The fact that some people think you should be responsible for the things you say and do is one of the more frustrating things about not being five years old. So it’s a shame that more artists aren’t five. Instead they are often hormonally realized adult human beings. They have fully developed frontal lobes that hold them accountable for their actions, artistic or otherwise.

Some artists resist accountability, at least on paper or in interviews. Or in any public venue. Or at home. Some people might think that it is noble, or at least respectable, to claim that your work either doesn’t need or would be ill-served by being bound to a statement. I suppose that’s fair, but is operating on the assumption that people probably don’t care for any supplemental insight into the work. Which is probably also fair.

It is so easy to write a bad statement, even for a great body of work, that it is something that most people have come to expect and resent. Nobody likes to be told what to do–especially hormonally realized adult art patrons–and too often an artist’s statement will tell you how you are experiencing the work. “This blog post forces you to consider your position as a spectator in relation to an art-language-loop.” Right?

I write about my work constantly, via email with other photographers, in “actual” statements, or in notebooks when I am in the middle of a project. It literally is a different language with which to approach and consider what I am doing and I find it a very necessary component to understanding and advancing my work. I also appreciate insightful, informative and helpful statements from other artists. Even more so, I appreciate the schadenfreude experience that comes with reading a truly bad, self-important statement that is neither enlightening or useful in any way.

Starting either later today or tomorrow I am going to start posting statements as I find them. Out of respect and fear I will not comment on them. I will not point out which one made me pee my pants, or the one that originally inspired me to continually write about my work. I originally wanted to be funny about the whole thing, with a grading system that was named with a hilarious acronym. Introspection and counsel reminded me that to be respectful isn’t a bad thing.

So here’s to the glory of lobes and accountability.

When it comes to “strife photography” I am a detached, immovable object. It’s not that I lack empathy, I am not a sociopath. It is the photography of said plight that isn’t engaging.I coined the term strife photography while I was at Art Center. I was looking for a more all encompassing term than simply “war photography”. It encompasses any documentary work that might not fetishize, but aesthetizes the unpleasant nature of a given situation, whether it be the war in Iraq or a holler in Appalachia. From war to the poor.

©Susan Meiselas

At the terrible photography “conference” Photo LA (basically a photo gallery bazaar) three years ago my experience was saved by a lecture from photographer Susan Meiselas. She showed work from Carnival Strippers (I believe she was there promoting a new edition), as well as Nicaragua and more recent projects. Her work is the kind of war photography that I ‘like’ to see. Straight, dead pan images with little to no romance and as objective as photographically possible (I know, I know). Strife is no place for style, war even less so.

Who else spoke at this conference? None other than the captain of colorful strife, Steve McCurry, famous for the “Afghan Girl” photograph that graced the cover of National Geographic. A girl with a dusty face and amazing eyes now defined Afghanistan for an entire country. Only years later, when McCurry set out to relocate and reshoot the girl, with the two image shown together did that photograph serve any real illustrative purpose to the strife of those living in Afghanistan.

©Steve McCurry

Prior to that it amounted to pretty travel photography. From the lecture it is actually hard to imagine him in a different light, something other than a really pretty travel photographer. In one breath there is a dramatic story of a treacherous border crossing with film sewn into clothes, and in the next a revealing statement about ethnocentric lack of engagement–after a number of trips he never bothered to learn any of the native language.

©Shelby Lee Adams

In contrast, Shelby Lee Adams is very involved with his subjects. He is connected to them geographically and is well liked by a fair amount of them, if we are to believe the documentary about his work in Appalachia, The True Meaning of Pictures. The difficult thing about Adams though, is that even though he calls himself a documentary photographer, he is (to go by this body of work) more of a portraitist. Everything is set up to a degree (some more than others) and everything is lit. There is a fair amount of editorializing going on in the images as well, which pushes it even further out of the documentary realm.

The lines for all of this are very vague, especially since I have done a poor job of defining what I believe “strife photography” really is. What started as basically a snide remark as turned into a partial framework for how I view all documentary photography. The big question being is it actually effective, or is it just attractive?

Oh and borderline strife photographer James Natchtwey won a TED award.

My friend and former New Orleanian Samia Saleem has just released a book of post-Katrina postcards created by displaced NOLA designers. I interviewed her about the project for the next issue of MakingRoom, which will be online soon. You can read more about the project or buy the book now (with a custom slip cover+posters+buttons) at http://www.degreesnola.com/