From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 09/02/02-06:15:24 PM Z
On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Darryl Baird wrote:
> A.D. Coleman admits his job as a critic is to destroy, but only that
> which doesn't advance the medium or pretends to achieve the status of
> sacred....
Actually, it seemed to me that Coleman *boasts* that his job as critic is
"destruction." I admit I don't recall the qualifications you cite above
(even if I did agree with his assessments, which I tend not to). I recall
only that he appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. ("The
Destruction Business," Introduction to Depth of Field).
But I don't in fact think good criticism does destroy. The critics I rate
most highly -- including Szarkowsky incidentally -- usually *build*
something. I wrote, "Why it is nobler to destroy than to build is not
explained." That was simply Coleman's proclivity, or so I concluded from
his work.
I might add that among his attacks that seemed most unseemly was one on
Minor White -- whom he called "proto-totalitarian," and Octave of Prayer
"an insidious insult to all photographers... of a visual banality so
adolescently puerile as to be offensive" ... etc. etc.
True, Octave of Prayer was yucky, everyone knew that, but that "review"
was so disproportionately savage, while belaboring the obvious, that even
the Village Voice wouldn't print part 2 (which ultimately appeared in
Camera 35, Nov. '73). There Coleman said, "The time has come for White to
be put away before he gets a chance to hurt himself or anybody else."
At the time Coleman was maybe 23 years old. White at the time was editor
of Aperture (if the reference I came across on his tenure there is
correct), and in any event, like Winogrand, et al, could take care of
himself. But it seems hardly necessary *or* appropriate for Coleman the
middle-aged man to launch full bore attack on a troubled teen age girl (at
time of the work), whether or not she committed suicide.
Granted the work was thus accorded an aura it would not have had if she
had lived... Did you ever hear someone eulogize their evil mother-in-law
at her funeral? Or think of the threnody for the WTC, at the very least
subject of controversy during its "life." If some folks did expect a
sublimity in the work they didn't find, I myself found more than expected.
But the issue I raise isn't in fact Woodman's work, it's Coleman's
nastiness in the "framing."
J.
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