“The idea of the work of art as an imaginative achievement to which the audience freely responds is now too often replaced by the assumption that a work of art should promote a particular idea or ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.”
“I want us to release art from the stranglehold of relevance—from the insistence that works of art, whether classic or contemporary, are validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns.”
From the book Authority and Freedom by Jed Perl—pages 16 and 19.
I believe that today’s photography is being choked to death in this “stranglehold of relevance.” So many of the photographic images I see today are centered on “race, gender and sexual orientation.” Museums, galleries and the media are so focused on these current trends that they are tripping over each other to obtain appropriate work. As a result, many of the photographers today choose their subject matter to appeal to these controllers of the image gateways in the hope they will be recognized. Pity the poor stand-a-lone photograph, even if it is far superior than the trendy image, and the photographer who created it. Too bad if you and your photographs don’t fit into the theme du jour.
Perhaps it is time that the image gatekeepers swing the pendulum back to a more balanced state of photography where all photography does not have to be relevant and the best images have a chance to be recognized.
I wonder how many of the master photographers of the past, who have been highly recognized by the photography world, would have fared in the current photography environment.
For example, the photographer Jerry Uelsmann died on April 4, 2022. His images were independent dreamscapes that are difficult to classify. They verged on the surreal and were created by combining multiple negatives in the darkroom. In 1967, he had his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and that same year he was featured in Aperture Magazine (issue 13:3, 1967). Today, I doubt that the world would even hear of Jerry Uelsmann and, with its current subject emphasis, Aperture would not have featured him (much to the chagrin of Minor White who founded and was the editor of Aperture.)
Let us free photography from the current constraints and give it room to breathe.
Sleeping Mind Photography 