Friday, June 22, 2007

Happy Snaps

Chris Rywalt over at the NYC Art blog is not a great fan of photography. His gripe is “And ultimately that's what keeps it [photography] from being art, in my opinion: It's not a communication from deep inside a human being, it's a document of a moment in the physical world. Staged or not. And, at bottom, I'm interested in people, not in images of people.”

As I tripped around the net over the past week I kept tripping over the pre-publicity for a new american portrait at the jan beckman gallery. This lady sure knows how to push an idea, in fact it would seem the criteria for inclusion in this group exhibition is how well you can help with the promotion. On the gallery web site you can see the 18 pieces selected for the exhibition and they support the Rywalt proposition with a capital ‘S’.

The exhibition is co-curatored by Joerg Colberg of the Conscientious blog fame which is a temple for the banal. Between them these two sure have made it hard to argue that photography is an art form.

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