Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art - Is there an MFA Truth and Reconciliation Committee?

Are graduate school years just wasted years? Is it possible to excise everything you believed as a graduate student from your brain and start from scratch? Or, perhaps I have a new book and it takes me a while to get over the swoon of a good read and integrate new material into my world-view.

I have only gotten through one chapter of The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton. But I am convinced that everything I thought I knew about photography is wrong. Well, not wrong, just out of step with the rest of the world’s values. To be fair, the book is clearly about how contemporary fine art uses photography, as opposed to being about contemporary photography – which is a subtle but important difference.

But it leaves out just about everyone I worshiped as a graduate student. Witkin. Heineken. The Starn Twins. Judith Golden. Barbara Degeneveieve. Francesca Woodman. And it elevates people I found drop-dead boring. William Eggleston; the ur-photographer for most of the work she examines. In 1997, I put Eggleston and Walker Evan into the same little box in my brain and left them on the curb with other irrelevant things I wanted out of my life. Ugh, boring.

I guess the images I loved got played out in too many 90’s music videos. The Cell, anyone? J-Lo meets the Brothers Quay?

Looks like while I was busy teaching, learning to use Linux and CSS out here in the pays-exteriour, photography (err, Photography) got interesting.

Ok, thanks Ms. Cotton for making me look. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And wrong in a jerk-ish, judgmental way. Oops.

Maybe, 10 years after graduate school, we should all be asked to write formal apologies for things we said and believed – an MFA truth and reconciliation committee – and given amnesty and allowed to go on making images for the rest of our lives. Allowed to apologize to our graduate school peers for not always believing in their work.

Cotton recently wrote a fantastic article that re-appraises black and white photography in the current digital age – google “color is the new black and white” – it’s all over the internets and much smarter people than me are talking about it.