The Portland Metro Photographic News

When is anything fine art? If we propose that all paintings are fine art because they are paintings, we immediately see the fallacy of that kind of reasoning. The individual medium does not imbue the creations made under its banner with any kind of imprimatur as art, fine or otherwise. We have all experienced bad paintings, bad poems, bad music, bad sculpture, bad dance and bad photographs. We have also hopefully experienced examples from all of these media that we qualify as better than ordinary.

The fact is, we all have a baseline that we use to evaluate the things we encounter. Work that does not call attention to itself because of an obvious shortcoming of craft, but does not separate itself from other examples of its type, might be deemed pedestrian. It is not shockingly bad, but neither is it good enough to matter. It just is.

The question as to the quality of any piece of work has less to do with its existence within a genre than our experience of it emotionally, intellectually, spiritually or physically. Most simply put, great work (fine art?) moves us in one or many of the aforementioned ways. It, and we, do not just sit there. Something happens. We become new by our exposure to, or our experience of, the work.

It should be noted that I have not linked this experience with any sort of aesthetic rubric. I am speaking without regard to subject matter, materials or scale. I am also speaking of an experience independent of pedantry or an overabundance of explanation and/or rationalization. Work either has it or doesn't have it.

I have always felt that if a work needs more time to explain than to experience, perhaps the choice of medium should be questioned.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but should it take that many words to explain one?

Recently I attended a senior exhibit by a young man who is arguably one of the best young photographers I have worked with during my many years of teaching. I wanted to meet his Mom and Dad to tell them how highly I respected their son and his work. His Mom thanked me for my comments and then said: "I just wish he would put words with his photographs. I think it would make them stronger."  Without a tremendous amount of cynicism, I observed that I had never heard anyone say that a poem could use a photograph to make it stronger, clearer, more interesting or anything. It is what it is.

Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. Jacob Riis wrote about the social ills of his time, and picked up a camera "when words were not enough".

The camera is superior to the hand in describing detail. That strength freed painters from the task of replication and opened the door for them to go places they never imagined possible. The work of physical description fell to the camera. The great Rudolf Arnheim once noted that: "photography's greatest strength was its ability to deal with three dimensional reality, and its greatest liability was its need to deal with three dimensional reality".   Many painters of Western folklore rarely visited the West but did their work in New York studios. The photographer had to be there.

So, the fact was bound to the camera and the camera bound to the fact. As the medium continued to produce images, some practitioners began to look beyond facts to the notion of feeling. It is worth noting here that photography, and the subsequent camera arts that grew from it, are the only art forms that were purely secular in nature. All others had their origins, and many of their greatest achievements, in religious art. Photography was invented and marketed as an enterprise, a business. Photography's first attempts to enter the arena of "high art" in the nineteenth century were mawkish endeavors to make photographs seem more painterly, both with regard to subject matter and highly stylized methods of printing, in order to increase apparent difficulty and insert the idea that the brush was as present as the lens.

Alfred Stieglitz closed the door on this era with the final double issue of Camera Work, which featured the work of the young Paul Strand. Unvarnished, unsentimental, and entirely photographic, Strand's work did not apologize for being made with a camera, it gloried in it. The romanticized pigment prints of people costumed to mimic genre painting of earlier generations were replaced with a visual dynamic that addressed both the fact of what was being photographed and the feeling that issued from that event.

Perhaps it is fitting that, in the age since Freud, we have created work from within our own reality. We are not illustrating themes from the Bible but themes from our own story. What is closer and more specific than the photograph that could not have been made by anyone else at any other time? The spirituality we were looking for lay not in religious allegory, but in us and our reaction to the world.

My first photography teacher, Emmet Gowin, once said: "All photographs are documents, but only some of them enter your imagination."

For me, that is the moment the photograph becomes special, out of the ordinary or, if you wish, fine art. If it is a photograph I made, it is a gift given. If it is one I am viewing, it is a gift received. There is a communion, usually unknown, between maker, image and viewer that transcends material, process and facts.

It is not a science or a formula that we can stir up at a moment's notice. It is a process we must invest in. It is a process we must trust. It is a process we must often endure. When it decides to bestow us with grace, however, it is a wonderful process to be a part of.

© Craig Stevens, Camden, Maine, 2009

More about Craig Stevens and his thoughts on teaching --------

I became a teacher of photography on my way to meet Big Bird. Just removed from college, I got my first adult job teaching second grade in a town in the woods of Maine. Teaching all subjects save music, I became amazed at the importance the process of learning holds in our life experience both individually and collectively. Another fact that resounded for me was that the process was always new and exciting for the learner (or at least it should be). My experience coincided closely with the creation of the Children's Television Workshop, the people who would create, among other programs, Sesame Street. This would be education carried out on the huge stage of television. I wanted to work with Big Bird. I may have actually wanted to be Big Bird and so I set myself on the path of Visual Communications by working toward a Master's Degree at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Early in that program I took my first formal class in photography, and the course of my life was set. I fell in love with the medium of photography and have done nothing else but practice photography and teach the craft to others for the past 38 years.

I followed my degree in Communications with an MFA in Photography from Ohio University in 1975, only to find that most of the full-time teaching jobs in the medium were filled mostly by people a few years older than myself.They wouldn't be going anywhere for a while. I took a summer position at the Maine Photographic Workshops in my old home state of Maine. The Workshop was in its second year and very much a seat of the pants operation. My  God was it fun! Exciting people would come to the Maine Coast to spend one or two weeks immersing themselves in photography. I taught doctors, teachers, scientists, fishermen this wonderful craft that opened them up to what they never knew they really were. In the Fall of 1975, 12 students enrolled for a 3 month residence program. I was asked to teach it. With my colleague, Richard Procopio, we created a curriculum that exists to this day and which produced an amazing number of well-known photographers and educators including a few Guggenheim grants and Pulitzer Prizes.

I remained in this alternative world of photographic education for more than 12 years. Summers would be filled with Master Classes in Craft and Personal Vision. Fall through Spring, the Residence Program would occupy my time. We also established a degree program in association with the University of Maine during this period. Ultimately I resigned from the year-round teaching position and pursued other experiences, such as leading workshops in Japan and Europe as well as teaching at other workshops including the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado, and the Santa Fe Workshops. I also spent a good bit of time writing articles on vision and craft for a variety of publications.

In 1987, I was asked to join the faculty of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. I have just finished my twenty-first year as Professor of Photography there. I was the third member of the department hired. We now have 18 faculty. The college was 900 students and now tops 8,000. Add to this startling growth the digital remaking of the medium and it can take your breath away.

Along the way, I figured out that I had taught more photography workshops than anyone else alive. With my college teaching added to that, the number of students I have had over my career would seem numbing. What is wonderful, however, is that the rush of engaging a new group of students and watching them grow and evolve has never lost its power for me.

My philosophy of teaching is very simple. Find out what the student is interested in. Give them the craft to express themselves and the historic perspective to see themselves in context, and do this with an enthusiasm they can't ignore.  That's why Big Bird worked... he was honest, funny and kind - and you could not ignore him.