I think the only real sign of the internal stress I felt over the exhibit opening of Avantgarb{age} at ICANA was the fact that I was dropping crap all over the apartment. Various utensils, books and then ultimately a bottle of perfume. My bathroom still smells quite lovely, if not slightly overpowering. In all I’d do it again in a heartbeat (minus spilling my good perfume). I like the idea of reaching an audience through the gallery medium.

As a photojournalist I look to magazines and newspapers and yes, even the Internet, as a means of reaching a large audience. I am not a photographer for the sake of shooting photos. I enjoy that part of it beyond all else, but I am a photographer and journalist and documentarian and many other things, with the intention of communicating with others. I choose to communicate, story tell, preach, celebrate, eulogize and perhaps bitch now and again, through the photograph. Without an audience my job is incomplete. My objective fails.

I think this is how I’ve come to peace with the struggle I’ve felt between photography-as-communication and photography-as-business. When left my full-time job back in 2007 and moved myself to a foreign country I felt that photography-as-business was what I needed to be doing. I needed to perfect it. To own it. In the end that part of photography absolutely destroyed my desire for any other part of photography, to such an extent that I thought about throwing my cameras off the balcony. I didn’t. I may be a bit rash at times, but I’m not that stupid and I do recall how much a Nikon D700 costs. Instead I tacked a sign above my desk that said ‘Acceptance.’ My theory was I’d eventually figure out what and how, but that seeing the word was a good start. It is still there and hanging from it are various bibs from the running races I’ve entered. And that is – on a personal level – full of poetic irony.

Back to communicating via the photograph. After printing, framing and showing images at ICANA I realized I like it. Simple eh? I like the communication aspects available to photography in galleries and not just what we would term ‘modern’ art photography. A chair in a field might invoke all sorts of crap for you, but honestly, it is a chair in a field. I like people. I am enthralled by people and their places and their interactions. So when I recently popped into Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile I was excited to find a piece called  Transgresion by Andres Figueroa hanging on the walls. It is a series of portraits of young adults taken outside clubs and other locations. They are emos, pokemons, visuals, screams… labels and identities that mark a person as a member of one group and an outsider in another. It is a study of identity through the photograph and it was hanging in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile.

So, I am contemplating the gallery experience, the audience, what it says to be on a wall and not in a disposable newspaper. Outside of pop-culture, does a photograph and its message carry more weight? If we tack it to a wall in a nice frame do we change the message? the importance? the connection between viewer and subject? It is a herculean task to get readers/viewers to respond to photographs beyond the immediate visceral reaction in any medium. A photograph might ignite a temporary discussion or awe, but that fades as quickly as the newspaper in the sun, or one moment of indignation is replaced by something else in the rapid fire clicking between one set and another on the Internet. What opportunity do I have to communicate with others if I can’t get them to linger in a photograph? (and as a side note that is where that retarded piece of paper with the word ‘Acceptance’ written on it has taken me. I have accepted that my photography is about lingering in the image. For my communication, for my images, I need you to stop and spend some time. Amazingly hard thing to accept in an Internet age that asks photographers to produce photos with immediate ‘bang’). I am so used to the relationship between newspaper and reader/viewer, I’m not sure how to interpret the relationship between gallery and viewer. Does a photograph lose daily importance? Does it lose ‘authority’? Does it become an object only and therefore objectify the subject? Do we find it safer to look at tragedy, persons, life on the gallery walls as opposed to newsprint? (these last two are the most in my brain at the moment). Because in the end I want to communicate, but not objectify. I want you to realize the people in my photographs are people. They live, they love, they hurt, they die.

Ultimately, what I am showing at ICANA right now, Avantgarb{age}, is a good intro for me into this world. It is a ‘safer’ transition if you will because it is not nearly as affronting. What I was asking viewers of that exhibit to walk away with was two words, ‘what if.’ What if I thought differently about the things I throw away.

Many questions and much to think about. I should go back to reading some of my old anthropology texts or at least shake the cobwebs off a few brain cells.

Oh, by the way, this blog post was just so I could post some photos (see below) from the inauguration, but I started thinking and well, sorry… found a small soap box apparently.

Thanks to Beatrice Murch for taking photos. Click on a photograph to see it full frame and scroll through.