Jacob Holdt, Worst slum in America
Like most photographers living in New York, I definitely made a point of checking out what the New York Photo Festival had to offer this year. I attended the exhibits and sat through a couple of artist talks and a panel discussion. The festival this year was larger and seemed to have a lot more going on, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Although there were highlights and events certainly worth talking about, I have to say that in the end I was kind of disappointed.
My biggest complaint would be that given the fact that the festival is trying to bill itself as the go to photography event of the year, I think they are doing quite a disservice to many of the photographers on display by printing, mounting and framing a lot of the work specifically for the festival.
I assume that they do this to save enormous cost on the shipping of work back and forth which I totally understand but in the end many of the photographs were badly printed and inconsiderately framed.
I won’t even get into the strange hanging some work received, the standout being Simon Roberts in Jon Levy’s Home For Good exhibition. Robert’s work was hung in a corner and over the sofas. This will sound harsh but in my mind treating photographic work like this for an exhibition is almost pointless. I would almost rather look at the pictures online or on some poorly projected screen.
My other big complaint relates specifically to Jacob Holdt’s slide installation and artist talk which was probably the biggest highlight and draw of the festival. Just before his artist talk, I was blown away by Holdt’s slide installation being presented around the block. Holdt himself though seemed frustrated by and seemingly went on to disavow the entire presentation of his work as not really being his version of it. He seemed to say the same about the artist talk itself.
I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes of setting up a festival of this proportion and while I’m sure it isn’t easy, I would have preferred it if Holdt had been allowed to set up his own slide presentation and/or give a complete artist talk about his work. It’s possible that maybe the festival asked but Holdt refused or didn’t have enough time in his schedule to give a full-on presentation. But limiting someone like Holdt to 50 minutes of speaking time seemed pretty ridiculous and a disservice to the life long commitment that his work ultimately represents.
I won’t get into my take on the main exhibitions but needless to say I wasn’t terribly impressed. Generally I thought there was too much work selected and not enough focus. For the next festival I think I would rather see smaller exhibitions, finely tuned to their themes as well as beautifully presented.
Grant Worth, The Sounds in Our Core, 2008
Strangely, I only recorded two exhibition highlights in my little notebook.
One was Grant Worth’s Guess Who’s Coming After Dinner which was exhibited in I don’t really know what kind of girl I am curated by Jody Quon. Worth’s project is more a performance captured on polaroid film than straight up photography but I couldn’t help but like it.
Phillip Schaerer, Bildbau No 7, 2007
I also enjoyed Philipp Schaerer’s Bildbauten, a funny yet strange collection of constructed and fictitious architecture.
Another highlight of the festival over all was the photography blogging panel which really only got knee deep into the beginning of a discussion. That panel too should have been longer and more in depth.
I would have liked to have seen more of the panel discussions but the remnants of a cold kept me from attending The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography as well as Photography After Frank.
As a final conclusion I would say that I value and appreciate what the New York Photo Festival is trying to do but I think the festival would be better served by scaling down their offerings next year and not scaling up any further. I have to wonder if we really need another photography award competition or more portfolio review sessions?
Update:
Daniel Power (one of the organizers of the festival) responded (in a comment below) to some of my criticisms of the festival and he makes some good points worth reading.
The Holdt slide show was precisely what Holdt wanted; he left the selection and sequencing to his two curators, Paul Cottin and Jerome Sother; they all were extremely happy with it. His slide show talks average about 5 hours; he and we knew this made no sense, so he asked for an hour and we have him an hour and a half, if you were checking. He also stated he does not consider himself a photographer; that was his first sentence. The photograph is not as important to him as the people he makes friends with and the lives he changes. As to Jon Levy’s pavilion, this is precisely what he wanted to do with the work. I thought it was a provocative installation. Each of his artist was on hand to create the installation, so what you criticizing is what Jon and his artists wanted. I think you are saying you would like the organizers to take a stronger hand in controlling the presentations; we don’t do that, we would like to give as free reign as possible. And yes, we printed as much as we could for the festival, but even if we had the financial sponsors we had last year, a good deal of the work did not exist framed to begin with. The artists created what they wanted for the festival. Finally, reviews and awards may be tedious, but they do provide invaluable support for producing and mounting what you see, especially in this tough economic reality.
I appreciate your comments in response to my criticism and like I said in the post, I wasn’t exactly sure what the story was with Holdt, his work or his presentation. Yes he did stretch it out to an hour and a half but he seemed to express in frustration during his presentation that the slide show (which I loved) wasn’t exactly what he normally does, the same way his book printed by Steidl wasn’t exactly his book either.
Why wouldn’t a special event 5 hour slide show talk by Jacob Holdt live at the New York Photo Festival make sense?
Essentially what I was trying to get across through my post is that the Festival need not be some gigantic over reaching event that covers all areas of photographic practice. What might be more valuable is a smaller more focused festival with in depth explorations diving into specific photographic practices chosen each year. That could be another way to deal with this tough economic reality.
my sense is that a festival of this size should grow organically–maybe it cannot be forced.
[...] a good, comprehensive critique of the Festival (and a response from the founder) go here or The Exposure [...]
For the record, Simon Roberts was not present and had no participation in the installing of his photographs. As an artist, he was not at all happy with the manner in which his work was presented, nor was I as his gallerist. This was communicated to the curator, but given the unique situation, he was not able to make the changes that even he said he would have made, given the opportunity and with the benefit of hindsight.