I don’t even know why I didn’t realize this earlier, but most blogs (at least those similar to Conscientious) are being organized in a temporal way - new posts are sorted by when they were published - but, in fact, their contents usually is not temporal at all! I do post one photographer per day, but the reason why I post one is so that people have enough time to look, so that the photographer’s work is done justice. This might make it look like yesterday’s photographer is “old news”, but that’s just because the blogging software makes it look that way. I mean I could post thirty photographer at the beginning of every month and then remain quiet for the rest of the month - but that would obviously reduce the experience of seeing the work. I guess what this really comes down to is a need for a better way to organizes the “archives”… (thinking out loud) But it’s good for people to realize this: The fact that you here see one photographer after the other, day after day, has reasons that have little to do with showing something new every day.
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Those who were unable to come to the panel on blogging at this year’s New York Photography Festival can find a video of almost the whole discussion here (only the introductions in the beginning are missing), taken by my friend Michel (merci!). Also, Laurel has posted a full audio recording.
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In a new post, Alec brings up the “if seeing too much contemporary work is problematic.” Which I want to call the photo blog scene’s strange attractor: “Does it do more harm than good to read all these blogs?”
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There appears to be fairly wide-spread consensus in the blogging community that there’s a dearth of critical discussions of photography online. You wouldn’t really know this from reading blogs, because nobody posts about it. However, the many email exchanges and conversations I’ve had with people tell me that there are lots of people who would actually like to see photography being discussed in a more critical manner. (updated below)
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One of the many nice side effects of attending the New York Photo Festival was to run into some people whose blogs I was very familiar with. Bloggers are often accused of being too self-referential (which might strike some as a somewhat curious accusation, given the context of the art world), but it is now a pretty simple fact that the network of bloggers has created an extremely lively (see Andrew and Michael above!), diverse, and, yes, democratic community - and I still hope that the spark will finally ignite the same kind of fire (read: passion) in those parts of the world that hasn’t quite learned what is to be gained from blogs.
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