U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: alt exhibit

Re: alt exhibit



On Sep 6, 2007, at 7:57 AM, permadocument wrote:

On visiting the on-line alt exhibit I was impressed by the overall quality
of the retained works. A question arises: would it not be the moment to
define what we really mean when we speak of "alternative works".

I think "alternative works" could be defined any way a person or institution would care to define it, because "alternative works" doesn't mean anything to me particularly. Now that I understand that the call for work for this particular show defined "alternative" as such things as images from plastic cameras, pinhole images, photograms and the like, I'm not surprised to find such images, printed digitally, as part of the show.

For me, the confusion arose from their use of the phrase "alternative processes" as the title of the show. "Alternative processes" has come to mean, for me at least, and I suspect for some others as well, a specific set of handcoated processes. If they had named the show "alternative works" rather than "alternative processes," I wouldn't have had any expectation that the show would consist mostly if not wholly of works made by one or more of these handcoated "alternative processes," because as I said, "alternative works" could be anything at all as far as I'm concerned. Anthotypes, holga pictures, crossprocessed images, whatever, including the set of processes I know as "alternative processes."

And maybe "alternative processes" isn't a good name, because it does seem to denote "alternative to" x, and then you have to define what x is and accept everything outside x as "alternative." But I've never defined "alternative processes" as being whatever's left outside the boundaries of some x, to me it does have a positive definition as this particular group of processes, rather than a negative definition as "anything outside the mainstream." So maybe something else, like "handcoated processes" or "historical processes" would be a better name than "alternative processes."

I'm not yet ready to accept gelatin silver as an alternative process unless it's handcoated, and then I do think it belongs. But it's not surprising that we don't all agree precisely on where the boundaries lie that demark "alternative processes."
katharine


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