all photos ~ (embiggenable)
ON MY LAST ENTRY, BERNIE WROTE:
“I wonder how and when it came to be a necessary accompaniment to any work on public display.”
One simple answer to that question was expressed by John Szarkowski:
“[writers on photography] …. we tend to be interested only in intention, because it makes the enterprise feel more important.”
Or, if one wants to engage in a more scholarly / deep dive into the subject, read Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation.
However, here is a very simple reality, re: artist statements; when applying for a grant or exhibition opportunities––which I am in the process of doing––to ignore including an artist statement + bio is pretty much a guarantee of failure to be successful in achieving either objective. With that reality in mind, I try my best to keep it simple. Consider my artist statement for my Adirondack Survey work:
These photographs are intended not to be a comprehensive nor a definitive appraisal of life in the Park but instead as visual analogues of a private view of subject matter as experienced in the commonplace realities of the Park. Created as an engagement of personal vision rather than as a topographic documentary, the work illustrates an intent to animate, elucidate, and reveal a sense of beautiful strangeness: not predictability (the opposite of cliche), but rather, a kind of shock recognition hidden in plain sight within the qoutidian Adirondack landscape.
So, in conclusion, the moral of the story is rather simple; if ya wanna be in the game, ya gotta play by the rules. However, that written, when I do have to write an artist statement, I always keep in mind the words––as best as I remember them––Bill Jay wrote after reading an art statement that was not grossly verbose and artspeaky:
“It has been a long time since I read an artist statement wherein the photographer was not speaking out of his own asshole.”