From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/31/02-09:55:40 PM Z
On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Darryl Baird wrote:
>
> The reference is an essay entitled "On Redaction" in the collection
> _Depth of Field_. I picked up this copy for $3.00 at a Borders Outlet.
> Great price, great reading. Make sure you read the footnotes... there is
> where he often lays his golden eggs. As a teaser, here's a quote from
> the essay...
>
> (with regards to Woodman) "This is one of the few instances of I know of where
> the cradle and the grave have been robbed simultaneously."
>
> There is lots of controversy in this short essay. He takes swipes at
> Winogrand, Arbus, Woodman and (mostly) a lot of the critical/curatorial
> establishment.
In my reply to a letter to Post-Factory from AD Coleman (Issue # 5)
I quoted from that series of more or less gratuitous insults by him
appearing within just 7 pages of "Depth of Field."
When I say "gratuitous," I mean just that -- dropped in passing for the
fun (or sadism) of it, with little or no relevance to the point under
discussion. I'd been warned by some experienced folks, incidentally, not
to utter a word of contradiction, as he was known to be relentless --
going to boards of directors, chairs of departments, & otherwise pursuing
a critic, even a mild critic, which perhaps explains how he got/gets away
with that sort of thing for so long.
I figured I was my own board of directors, etc., but this got my curiosity
up and I read all his books in print, checked my folder of earlier essays
he'd handed out to his class at NYU years before -- and quoted some of the
more amazing passages.
Here are a few from just those seven pages of Depth of Field:
He called David Vestal one of photography's "ardent advocates of
perpetual amateurism", accused Julia Scully and colleagues on the
Disfarmer book of wishing "to own what ever work [they] can...to define
and aggrandize it with no contradiction from either the maker or the work
itself", called Garry Winogrand "both a commercial hack and a gallery
artist,", asking "How seriously are we to take the droppings of a
gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a
million negatives without bothering to look at any of them," and in a
passage savage even for him, indicted the "gaggle of ghoulish exegetes,
who, feeding off understandable parental grief over a suicided adolescent,
have taken a not untypical accumulation of student work and converted it
into an ideological cottage industry [in the] oeuvre of Francesca
Woodman."
There's lots more, some of which I will cite if I can ever get Pagemaker
working again after the upgrade (yes, woe is still me,) but I'll add here
that, although David Vestal and Garry Winogrand, et al, can probably take
care of themselves, Francesca Woodman died by suicide at about age 20.
Most photographers I know found her photographs remarkable, as I certainly
did. I found that comment, besides being absolutely untrue, ugly in the
extreme -- but, sadly, not out of character.
I'll add that when, in response to his letter-to-ed, I disagreed, quite
mildly *really,* with Coleman about what had happened at Asilomar 18 years
earlier (tho he later conceded I might indeed be right), he made a series
of e-mail comments on my mental state, ethics, and general character, of
which the kindest were "senility may be setting in," and I "should see a
gerontologist for evaluation."
Such name-calling seemed to be, as I noted, Coleman default mode for
difference of opinion.
Also, while on the topic of Coleman, I believe I fairly well established
that, while preaching "debt to history," and thumping his chest over
professional ethics, he pretty much made up out of whole cloth that stuff
about Ansel Adams & Beaumont Newhall forming a "conspiracy" against
William Mortensen, as he claimed in several essays and magazine articles.
(See Post-Factory #5, pages 20-24.)
Judy
>
> --Darryl
>
> "Christina Z. Anderson" wrote:
>
> > Darryl,
> > I would love to read the review by Coleman about Woodman--I show her
> > work to my beginning photo class. Where could I find it?
> > Chris
>
>
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