Criticizing Photographs

An Introduction to Understanding Images

Terry Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182361
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Emphasizing the understanding of images and their influences on how they affect our attitudes, beliefs, and actions, this fully updated sixth edition offers consequential ways of looking at images from the perspectives of photographers, critics, theoreticians, historians, curators, and editors.

It invites informed conversations about meanings and implications of images, providing multiple and sometimes conflicting answers to questions such as: What are photographs? Should they be called art? Are they ethical? What are their implications for self, society, and the world? From showing how critics verbalize what they see in images and how they persuade us to see similarly, to dealing with what different photographs might mean, the book posits that some interpretations are better than others and explains how to deliberate among competing interpretations. It looks at how the worth of photographs is judged aesthetically and socially, offering samples and practical considerations for both studio critiques for artists and professional criticism for public audiences.

This book is a clear and accessible guide for students of art history, photography and criticism, as well as anyone interested in carefully looking at and talking about photographs and their effects on the world in which we live.

1 About art criticism

This book is about actively engaging in photography criticism so that we can better appreciate and understand photographs and their effects. Unfortunately, we usually do not equate the term criticism with appreciation, and for good reasons: In ordinary usage criticism carries negative connotations. One rarely, if ever, hopes to be criticized. Nevertheless, this book is about criticism in a broader sense of intelligent, appreciative dialogue about art and its social consequences. The major premise of this book is that we can more carefully examine and more deeply appreciate photographs by learning and applying the various processes of professional critics.

Social media often positions criticism as judgmental and negative. In its aggregate of movie and television reviews, for example, “Rotten Tomatoes” derives its name from the custom of audiences throwing rotten fruits and vegetables onto stages as acts of disapproval with theater performances. In popular culture, critics are presented and seen as mere consumer advisors. Reviewers rate restaurants, television shows, movies with iconographic thumbs up or down or 1 to 5 stars, constantly reinforcing criticism as judgmental consumer advice. Of all the words critics write, those most often quoted are their judgments: “Pulls you in and doesn’t let you go” (Game of Thrones), “One of the great science fiction films of all time” (Blade Runner). These words are highlighted in bold type in ads because these words sell products, but they constitute only a few of the critic’s total output of words, and they are quoted out of context. These snippets have minimal value in helping us reach an understanding of a play or a movie and why, in the opinions of reviewers, they may merit accolades, if they do.

Social media also provides its users with quick and shallow voting with “likes” and hearts, thumbs up or down, likes, and various emojis meant to indicate approval or disapproval. Rather than considered discourse we get snap judgments devoid of reasons.

Critics are writers

Critics are writers who like art and choose to spend their lives thinking and writing about art. Christopher Knight, who has written art criticism for the Los Angeles Times since 1989, left a successful career as a museum curator to write criticism precisely because he wanted to be closer to art: “The reason I got interested in a career in art in the first place is to be around art and artists. I found that in museums you spend most of your time around trustees and paperwork.”¹

About writing, bell hooks, critical theorist who writes about art, says this about writing:

Seduced by the magic of words in childhood, I am still transported, carried away, by writing and reading. Writing longhand the first drafts of all my works, I read aloud to myself, performing the words to hear and feel them. I want to be certain I am grappling with language in such a way that my words live and breathe, that they surface from a passionate place inside me.²

Peter Schjeldahl, a poet who writes art criticism as a career, says about his poetry that he wants to be understood and enjoyed by all readers: “there are no rewards in being obscure or abstruse or overbearing.” About being an art critic, he says: “I get from art a regular chance to experience something—or perhaps everything, the whole world— as someone else, to replace my eyes and mind with the eyes and mind of another for a charged moment.”³

Some critics do not want to be called critics because of the negative connotations of the term. Art critic and poet Rene Ricard, writing in Artforum, says: “In point of fact I’m not an art critic. I am an enthusiast. I like to drum up interest in artists who have somehow inspired me to be able to say something about their work.”⁴ Michael Feingold, who writes theater criticism for the Village Voice, says: “criticism should celebrate the good in art, not revel in its anger at the bad.”⁵ Similarly, Lucy Lippard is usually supportive of the art she writes about, and she says she is sometimes accused of not being critical, of not being a critic at all. She responds, “That’s okay with me, since I never liked the term anyway. Its negative connotations place the writer in fundamental antagonism to the artists.”⁶ She and other critics do not want to be thought of as being opposed to artists.

Definitions of criticism

The term criticism used in art discourse is complex, with several different meanings. In the language of aestheticians who philosophize about art and art criticism, and in the language of art critics, criticism usually refers to a much broader range of activities than just the act of judging the merits of a work of art. Morris Weitz, a philosopher interested in art criticism, sought to discover more about criticism by studying what critics actually do when they criticize art.⁷ He took as his test case all the criticism ever written about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After reading the volumes of Hamlet criticism written over centuries, Weitz concluded that when critics criticize they do one or more of four things: They describe the work of art, they interpret it, they evaluate it, and they theorize about it. Some critics engage primarily in descriptive criticism; others describe, but primarily to further their interpretations; still others describe, interpret, evaluate, and theorize. These critical activities occur in different sequences of thoughts and do not necessarily proceed from description to interpretation to judgment to theory. Of the several conclusions Weitz drew about criticism, a most notable one is that any one of these four activities constitute criticism and that evaluation is not a logically necessary part of criticism. He found that several critics criticized Hamlet without ever judging it.

When critics criticize, they do much more than express their likes and dislikes—and much more than approve and disapprove of works of art. Critics do judge artworks, and sometimes negatively, but their judgments more often are positive than negative: As Ricard says, “Why give publicity to something you hate?” When Schjeldahl is confronted by a work he does not like, he asks himself several questions:

‘Why would I have done that if I did it?’ is one of my working questions about an artwork. (Not that I could. This is make-believe.) My formula of fairness to work that displeases me is to ask, ‘What would I like about this if I liked it?’ When I cannot deem myself an intended or even a possible member of a work’s audience, I ask myself what such an audience member must be like.⁸

Michael Feingold thinks it unfortunate that theater criticism in New York City often prevents theatergoing rather than encourages it, and he adds that “as every critic knows, a favorable review with some substance is much harder to write than a pan.”⁹ When Abigail Solomon-Godeau considers her writing about photography, she says there are instances when it is clear that something is nonsense and should be called nonsense, but she finds it more beneficial to ask questions about meaning than about aesthetic worth.¹⁰

“What do I do as a critic in a gallery?” Schjeldahl asks. He answers: “I learn. I walk up to, around, touch if I dare, the objects, meanwhile asking questions in my mind and casting about for answers—all until mind and senses are in some rough agreement, or until fatigue sets in.” Late in his life he wrote about his personal taste in art that he suspended as a critic:

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: ‘What would I like about this if I liked it?’ I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like?¹¹

Edmund Feldman, art historian and art educator, wrote much about art criticism and defined it as “informed talk about art.”¹² He also minimizes the act of evaluating, or judging, art, saying that it is the least important of the critical procedures.

A.D. Coleman, a pioneering critic of recent photography, defined what he does as “the intersecting of photographic images with words.”¹³ He adds: “I merely look closely at and into all sorts of photographic images and attempt to pinpoint in words what they provoke me to feel and think and understand.” Morris Weitz defined criticism as “a form of studied discourse about works of art. It is a use of language designed to facilitate and enrich the understanding of art.”¹⁴

Throughout this book the term criticism will not refer to the act of negative judgment; it will refer to a much wider range of activities and will adhere to this broad definition: “Criticism is informed discourse about art to increase understanding and appreciation of art and its effects.” This definition includes criticism of all art forms, including dance, music, poetry, painting, and photography. “Discourse” includes talking and writing. “Informed” is an important qualifier that distinguishes criticism from mere talk and uninformed opinion about art. Not all writing about art is criticism. Some art writing is journalism rather than criticism: It is news reporting on artists and artworld events rather than critical analysis.

A way of becoming informed about art is by critically thinking about it. Criticism is a means toward the end of understanding and appreciating photographs and their effects on viewers. In some cases, a carefully thought-out response to a photograph may result in negative appreciation or informed dislike. More often than not, however, especially when considering the work of prominent photographers and that of artists using photographs, careful critical attention to a photograph or group of photographs will result in fuller understanding and positive appreciation. Criticism should result in what Harry Broudy, a philosopher who furthered aesthetic education, called “enlightened cherishing.”¹⁵ Broudy’s “enlightened cherishing” is a compound concept that combines thought (by the term enlightened) with feeling (by the term cherishing). He reminds us that both thought and feeling are necessary components in responding to images. Criticism is not a coldly intellectual endeavor.

Sources of criticism

In this book we are mainly considering criticism that is published in books, art magazines, photography magazines, exhibition catalogues, academic journals, the popular press, and online. Studio critiques, forms of art criticism that take place in classrooms and artists’ studios, are discussed in Chapter 8.

On Photography¹⁶ is a book of critical essays that Susan Sontag first wrote between 1973 and 1977 in the New York Review of Books that were then published in a single volume that remains influential today. John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation¹⁷ is a book of his critical essays in which he investigates uses of photography much broader than photographs that are considered art.

Exhibition catalogues are a major source of critical writing about photographs. Catalogues list the exhibited works, often reproduce all of the works in the exhibition, usually have an introductory essay explaining why the curator selected this group of works for an exhibition, and often include essays on the work by different writers. Such essays offer insightful interpretive commentary on photographs and photographers. After the exhibitions, the catalogues are marketed as books and take on a life of their own. Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins,¹⁸ was a group exhibition and is now a book of photographs and essays about them by different authors. Martin Parr’s Think of Scotland¹⁹ is an example of a temporary exhibition of photographs by a single photographer that now remains intact as a self-sufficient book.

Much photography criticism is found in the art press in glossy magazines such as Artforum International, Art in America, and Art News. Criticism is increasingly available on the Web in online journals and blogs such as Artnet News and Hyperallergic. Photography criticism is also published in journals specifically devoted to photographic media, such as Aperture magazine and the British Journal of Photography. The Art Bulleti...