Every boy with dreams of playing professional sports begins his journey when he sees another athlete do something that seemed superhuman. The career of every chanteuse begins when she is inexplicably moved by the voice of another human. Every great writer begins as a reader. We aspire to greatness because we are inspired by the greatness of others. It is only natural for us to want to return the gift.

In the beginning, our abilities always lag behind our connoisseurship; this is often frustrating, but it is a necessary component to the creative process. This is why we practice a guitar riff until our fingers bleed, or make print after print of an image until we have explored every nuance. This is what drives us to transform an idea into an object, or an experience that communicates with others in a way that is transcendent and beautiful.

While most young artists begin their careers with the intention of becoming practitioners, some begin to realize that connoisseurship is in itself an intrinsically creative act. They realize that while there are many people making art there are far fewer who are performing the equally important work of understanding art/images. They begin to see that they can make a greater contribution to the creative collective by collaborating with artists and the art community as gallerists, critics, and curators.

In my personal pantheon of heroes there are a great many photographers, but the preeminent figure, the man I learned the most from, was the late John Szarkowski. In his early career as a photographer Szarkowski was a solid journeyman, but it was later in life, in his role as the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, that he found his true voice. His singular gift was his ability to look at photography from a fresh new perspective of first principles. He had the courage to throw away the antiquated veil of critical thinking that photography had inherited from the history of painting.

Szarkowski’s formative experience as a practitioner gave him the necessary insights to invent a new critical discourse and create a new set of parameters that were specific to photography and its unique history. He wrote about the truth and power of the medium with a plainspoken, Midwestern eloquence that possessed both the momentum of an axe and the precision of a scalpel. Above all, he clearly loved and respected photographers for who we are. His writing educated a generation and elevated the medium to the status it now enjoys within the greater art world. Szarkowski’s career as a connoisseur and thinker may have outstripped his career as an image-maker, but it was certainly more important and, ultimately, creative.

Where would the Beatles have been without Brian Epstein? Where would Motown have been without Berry Gordy? Where would the music industry (or society at large) be without Rolling Stone magazine?

It is the connoisseurs who shape our tastes, report on trends, and distill the music from the white noise surrounding us. Connoisseurship, in its many forms, is a career option in itself.

Case Study

Brian Paul Clamp: Clampart Gallery

www.clampart.com

For photography students who decide that the rough and tumble lifestyle of freelance photography isn’t for them there are few careers more rewarding than working at, or owning, a photography gallery.

In the mid-eighties, there were only seven galleries in New York City that showed photography as fine art and perhaps another 20 scattered across the US. As a recent art school graduate I worked at two of the premier photo galleries in NYC. Personally, I loved it so much that I seriously considered a career as a gallerist. It was a chance to work with many of my heroes and get an intimate knowledge of their work and their creative process. It was incredibly exciting socially with a constant schedule of gallery openings, trade fairs, and photo festivals, and it was personally rewarding to know that my work as a promoter/salesperson was helping to foster the careers of artists that I believed in.

In New York there are currently over 250 galleries that regularly show photography and several thousand more worldwide. The medium is bigger than ever. There are many contemporary fine-art photographers who regularly sell prints for six figures and a few notable stars like Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Richard Prince have seen their work sell for millions at recent auctions.

Though the career is exciting and rewarding, it is not easy. Owning and running a gallery is a 24/7 job that is all-consuming. However, if you love photography, and aspire to running your own business, it’s a career that seldom feels like work.

ClampArt has always been one of my favorite galleries in New York. Its owner, Brian Paul Clamp, has a discerning and idiosyncratic eye. Like any gallery owner he has to make sure that the gallery is making enough money to keep its doors open but he also takes risks, often showing work by quirky young photographers that he believes in as well.

Brian Paul Clamp

Lori Nix is one of the artists currently represented by ClampArt who has risen to fame in the contemporary fine-art world. This post-apocalyptic scene is a miniature model created from scratch in her studio, one of several that Nix and her assistants will painstakingly create over the course of a year. Nix is a consummate technician; the miniatures are photographed with an 8 × 10 view camera and printed as large-scale prints.

Lori Nix, “Subway,” 2012, Archival pigment print, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Interview

MJ: So what made you even think about starting a gallery—what’s your background?

BPC: I took a photography class in high school and the teacher was a brand new teacher, very enthusiastic, very excited. It was a traditional darkroom class but she started every class with a slide lecture on the history of photography and I really enjoyed those.

I ended up to going to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I continued taking photo classes when I could, but I ended up doing a double major in art history and advertising.

MJ: Wow, it never occurred to me before but that was probably the perfect combination for a career as a dealer.

BPC: Well, that was the strategy. I was really more interested in art history, but advertising seemed like a good, practical, backup plan.

Three days after graduation I moved to New York and spent all my money on my first month’s rent. I started looking for work in advertising but it was in the middle of a recession so the prospects for finding an entry-level advertising job was miserable. I ended up signing on to a temp agency as a short-term way to keep afloat and because of my art history degree they found me a temp job doing clerical work at an art gallery called the Owen Gallery. It’s not around anymore but the gallery specialized in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American paintings.

The owner was surprised that I actually knew the painters they represented, we hit it off, and eventually I became a full-time employee and I worked there for eight years.

While I was working there I went back to Columbia and got a master’s degree in art history. Shortly after that I decided to start my own gallery specializing in contemporary photography.

In retrospect, it was probably a foolish business decision. I had only dealt in paintings by dead painters and dealing with contemporary artists is a very different proposition. But I believed in what I was doing. I just started small and worked my way up.

A current show at ClampArt featuring the work of Jen Davis

MJ: So tell me about what it’s like to run a gallery, because you’re right, it really was … [laughing] foolish to think you could do this! I mean, you hadn’t worked at a photo gallery, so it wasn’t like you opened the gallery with a contact list of photography collectors that knew you, and though you were a serious amateur photographer, you hadn’t been involved in photography professionally. But you opened a gallery, and you are successful—how on earth did you do it?

BPC: Well, you’re right, I was basically a photo-hobbyist. I had a darkroom in my loft and I was producing my personal work all the time, but that ended the day I opened the gallery. I just threw my whole life into developing this business, but the other reason I think I stopped doing my own photography was that I started showing really good work here at the gallery and that put my own work into perspective—the world didn’t need another Sunday photographer.

But what was good about my experience as an amateur photographer was that I did have a good working knowledge about how photographs are made. Over the last 15 years the art world has fully integrated photography into the contemporary art scene; every major gallery has a few photographers as part of their roster, and I have to cringe sometimes when I hear other gallery directors talking about photography, especially some of the technical aspects, because they really have no knowledge of the fundamentals of the medium.

So, while I think I acknowledged that I didn’t have the necessary passion to be an artist myself, I did have the passion for this. My passion was for promoting and showing photography, by artists I believed in, and helping other people to get excited about the work that excited me. Ultimately, doing this is more rewarding than my own pictures were.

MJ: And you are really a strategic partner in the careers of your artists; they can’t live without a dealer who works for them, and they have to produce work that is strong and fresh. Your successes and failures are intertwined. But I think it can also be difficult: I know that at one of the galleries I worked at when an artist produced a body of work that sold well the owner often pushed them to produce more work in the same vein.

BPC: I think it’s really dangerous for me, or any gallery director, to get involved in directing the work of their artists. I’m happy to listen to them, to have them bounce ideas off me, but I never want to be involved in suggesting what they should or should not be shooting. When I have seen that happen the result is almost always bad, schlocky work.

It’s tempting, when someone does something really successful, to try and encourage them to do more of the same, but it gets boring, and clients can sense that so it really doesn’t work.

MJ: That’s the catch-22 of the creative process: As an artist you experiment, and eventually refine an idea that becomes well received, so people want you to do more of it, but it was achieved through the process of experimentation. So success or critical acceptance can actually kill the creative process. We’ve all seen famous photographers who did something great ten years ago and they are just producing “more of the same” because that’s what people want.

BPC: And for the artists who are really creative and moving forward it can be frustrating because every magazine or museum wants to show the older work and every collector wants the famous print, so sometimes the artist can end up reprinting and producing the old work for years.

MJ: Like the musician who has an audience screaming for the hit they did 30 years ago.

But it has to be incredibly rewarding for you because you handpicked every artist in the gallery. Tell me more about that.

BPC: Well that’s a complicated process in deciding who you are going to show and who you aren’t going to show. It doesn’t always have to be work that I might personally collect, but it does have to be work that I like and respect.

And then there’s meeting the artist, they have to be able to speak about their work and have an understanding of their work in relationship to both the market and the history of the medium. I also want a sense of whether or not I want to deal with the artist on a day-to-day basis.

MJ: That’s something that I think a lot of younger photographers don’t understand. They are just happy that anyone likes their work. I know that when I was interviewing agents for my commercial career I found myself having lunch with someone who was courting me, telling me how much money we’d make together, and I’d think: “I don’t even want to have lunch with this person. Do I want to be joined at the hip with them? Do I want them to be the front person for my career?”

BPC: And from my point of view I’ll think, “How will I feel about this artist speaking to the press or to my clients?” Certainly, not all artists are good at that, nor do they have to be, but when they are it’s a real asset.

And you also need to get a sense of not only the current work, but also what they have produced in the past and what the future may hold. You are entering into a long-term relationship so I want to make sure they aren’t a one-hit wonder. It’s a huge amount of work to promote an artist so I want to be able to nurture that and have it grow. That might be a little old school. Lots of contemporary galleries will take on an artist, sell the heck out of particular body of work and then drop them, but that’s not what I’m interested in.

MJ: One thing that’s kind of interesting about running a gallery is that you are running a business, but it’s not like you are a hardware store, or Staples, selling the same thing all year long. There’s a monthly cycle of shows, you’re selling something different every month, and there’s a regular schedule of things that have to happen every month.

BPC: Well, my joke is that I’m really just a glorified salesgirl, which of course I’m not, but in the sense that my job is to sell, it’s true.

To be sure there are some tedious tasks: Press releases need to be written, announcements need to be printed, ads need to be placed, there’s a lot of day-to-day work that the average gallery visitor doesn’t see.

MJ: How far in advance is the gallery booked?

BPC: About a year in advance.

It’s funny; I got into the business because I like to talk about art. But especially in New York, a lot of the business has become about real estate.

MJ: Oh, I shudder to think about what kinds of rents the commercial galleries in Chelsea are paying.

I sometimes wonder how you guys do it. By the time you figure in employees, rent, insurance, printing, and advertising it means you have to sell a lot of art in order to make the monthly expenses and turn a profit.

I also have to wonder about your particular gallery. You show only contemporary artists and so many younger emerging artists. It has to be a tough sell.

BPC: Well, it is tough because you have to develop a market for the younger artists, but we do deal a lot in secondary market work (purchase and resale of work previously held in private collections). A lot of our behind-the-scenes sales are of older historical pieces or pieces by very big name contemporary artists that we don’t necessarily represent. I might be a little unusual in the respect, but that market is interesting to me because of my art-history background, and the additional income makes it a little easier to take some chances on some of the younger work we show.

MJ: How do you see new work?

BPC: We do have a formal review process which is outlined on our website, but almost no one follows it. Most things come in unsolicited, which is awful because you’ll get a 15-megabyte email and then see that it has been cc’d to every gallery director in New York. That kind of thing doesn’t make you feel very special, but I do look at them.

MJ: It’s one of my pet peeves as well. I get that kind of email from assistants all the time, and I think it’s really bad form to ask for a job or ask someone to look at your work with a form letter. It seems to me that it’s common courtesy to take the time to do a little research and handcraft a letter that is specific to the person you are contacting.

You also volunteer as a reviewer at quite a few mass portfolio reviews where there are 30–40 other reviewers who are looking at a whole group of 200–400 different photographers who have all paid an admission fee to have their work looked at by photo editors, gallery directors, and advertising art buyers. What’s that like?

BPC: It can be really stressful because the artists are all very pumped up and often a little nervous. The energy is really palpable. Hopefully, once someone sits down at my table I can get them to relax. They’re all hoping that they’ll get discovered and become the next big thing, but the fact is that if they are really good and worthwhile then the review is really just the beginning of a longer relationship. It is a very effective and efficient way for me to look at a lot of work in a very short amount of time. The usual review lasts about 20 minutes and that’s a very good amount of time for me to get a sense of who someone is, what drives their work and even gauge their technical skills.

Copyright Adam Ekberg, “A Disco Ball on the Mountain,” 2005, Archival pigment print, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Personally, I think that photographers are at a huge advantage because of these portfolio reviews compared to other artists. Photography is so portable compared to painting or sculpture. A sculptor can’t sit down across the table from a gallery director or curator with their work.

The better events for me are “vetted” events like Review Santa Fe, as opposed to some of the events where you’ll get a mix of photographers who have had several solo exhibitions mixed with little old ladies who are photographing their gardens.

But certainly, especially in the beginning when I didn’t have a big roster of artists, the review events were really helpful and many of the artists I represent now are people I met at portfolio reviews.

Summer shows are our way of testing the waters for new artists. Adam Ekberg is an example of a young artist I met at the Santa Fe review. We did a summer show called Into the Woods and I used one of Adam’s images for the show postcard.

MJ: So what would you suggest to a young photographer who was going to do a portfolio review event?

BPC: Of course you need to weigh the price of the review event (typically $300–500) against the possible benefits. But I think the first thing they should look at is makeup of the panel of reviewers and make sure that the panel is made up of people you are interested in and who will be possibly be interested in your work, and are in a position to help you if they like what you are doing. There are so many portfolio review events out there and the quality can really vary. And before you spend the money you have to ask yourself if you are really prepared? Do you have a body of work that is relatively complete? Is the presentation professional looking? Then there are the obvious things that you should have on hand, like multiple copies of your résumé, and a show card (aka a “leave behind”) with an example of your work.

MJ: On the flip side of that question, what advice would you offer a young person who wanted to become a dealer?

BPC: Well, there are two answers to that question, but the short answer is that almost all the people I hire have either a strong liberal arts/art-history background or they are artists. Artists have a lot to gain by working in a gallery; they really get to see the business from the other side and gain an understanding of how they and their dealer can work together once they do start showing. Typically we hire artists to help out with art handling, exhibition installations, and that sort of thing.

But if someone is really committed to a career as a dealer there is no substitute for a strong art-history background. As a dealer your best clients are going to be collectors who are passionate and very savvy about art; you need to be at least as knowledgeable as they are.

In terms of getting started as a dealer there’s no substitute for working at a gallery for a few years; it’s really like an old school apprenticeship program.

MJ: What do you think is the aspect of being a dealer that is the least understood? What’s the thing that people don’t consider?

BPC: Hmm, good question … One thing that comes to mind is that I think it’s fairly obvious that dealers have to deal with collectors, and they have to be good representatives for their artists, but another equally important part is dealing with the artists themselves. There are a lot of delicate issues that come with representing living artists that I didn’t encounter when I was selling nineteenth-century paintings. They all have very distinct personalities. I sometimes have to take on the role of father, therapist, disciplinarian, it can be challenging, but it can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.

MJ: That’s interesting because what I know from my own experience as a dealer is that collectors can also be pretty wacky.

BPC: Yes, eccentric and very strong willed, collectors tend to be people who have been very successful in their own careers and have made enough money to indulge in their passion. Artists don’t tend to use money as the barometer of their success but they need strong egos to produce good work. You really do have big personalities on both sides, so a big part of my job is to serve as an intermediary between those people.

Roadside Ghosts is a series of photographs by Dave Anderson. In the series the artist explores the twin themes of hope and loss using familiar and unusual objects from the American landscape. Ghosts linger on the margins while the images hint at stories partially told. This series began in 2003 and is taken from the artist’s travels through over twenty states

Copyright Dave Anderson, “Dark Road,” 2003/2008, Gelatin silver print, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Case Study

CHRIS MAHONEY: SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SOTHEBY’S, NEW YORK

www.sothebys.com/en/departments/photographs.html

Auctioneers who specialize in the resale of fine art are a special breed, distinct from private art dealers and gallerists who represent living artists and sell discreetly to private collectors. The sale of art at auction is a documented public event and the records of public sales are instrumental in establishing the benchmark value of an artist’s work to collectors within the secondary collector market.

Auction-house specialists don’t simply sell images; they also verify their provenance and authenticity. As a consequence auction-house specialists at the highest levels of the profession are required to be equal parts connoisseur, scholar, detective, and commodities trader.

The rewards of the career are many and varied; there’s the job security, and the excitement of the auctions, but the biggest perquisite of the job might be the daily exposure to some of the most amazing photographs ever made, many of them iconic images that represent the high-water marks in the history of the medium. Others that are so unique and rare that they are virtually unknown; photographs that have always been held in private collections and have been passed throughout their history from collector to collector. Images you’ll never see in books or museums.

As photography has gained a foothold in the traditional fine-art market place photographs are increasingly sought after by collectors who see them as investments they can hang on the wall. Photographs by modern master photographers like Irving Penn that may have sold for as little as $2000 in the late eighties and nineties are now trading in the range of $100,000–500,000 and mark a return on investment that far exceeds anything one could expect from a high yield bond.

Chris Mahoney might not have ever predicted his career as one of the world’s top auctioneers but in retrospect it seems that the job was tailor made for him. I caught up with him at Sotheby’s, New York just as they were prepping for their major fall auction.

Chris Mahoney

Interview

MJ: So tell me all about your life!

CM: Hah! Well …

MJ: Let’s start with graduating from school, because this … working as a curator/auctioneer at Sotheby’s was not in your plan.

CM: No, you’re right, this was not the plan at all. I went to school because I loved making pictures and I loved photography. It was that basic, and I didn’t have a plan.

After two years into my BFA education I knew I didn’t want to be a professional photographer.

MJ: But you stuck it out and got your BFA anyway. What made you realize it wasn’t for you?

CM: I didn’t have the skill set, or the technical expertise, but more importantly, even though many of my classmates were already working professionally, and while I knew that there were many photographers who made very good incomes, it was apparent that under the best of circumstances it was a job-to-job, hand-to-mouth existence.

I wanted more job security. I wanted a career with more of a trajectory. I just didn’t know what that was yet.

When I graduated I literally went door-to-door, stopping in at businesses; galleries, bookstores, anywhere I thought I could work.

Eventually I went to see Harvey Zucker at A Photographer’s Place, which was a little bookstore in Soho that specialized in all kinds of photographic ephemera: antique equipment, old copies of magazines, books, technical manuals, artist monographs, postcards, that kind of thing. It was the only place like it in New York at the time.

Harvey put me in charge of the mail order end of the business. He sent out a catalog every month, printed on newsprint; this was long before the internet. In retrospect, it was really a valuable source for information that was unavailable anywhere else.

Today, we are so used clicking onto Amazon and finding what we want in a few minutes and having it delivered within a few days, but back then A Photographer’s Place was a unique entity and as a consequence it was a hub for information and a meeting place for people who were interested in photography.

It was, in many ways, a pretty lousy job, sitting in the back of this dusty old bookstore, but it also deepened my knowledge of photography immensely. I saw work, Josef Sudek for example, a photographer that I hadn’t learned about in school, or [pausing to remember the name] Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

MJ: I knew that was who you were thinking of!

CM: Oh, an amazing photographer!

MJ: Yes! And one of those photographers who has been virtually forgotten in the current history of photography, but once you show his work to any young photographer their reaction is, “How do I not know this work?!”

I think it’s incredible how many people who were really famous back then and are virtually unknown now. Les Krims, for example; what ever happened to Les Krims? One of the most famous photographers of his time; he was on a par with Gregory Crewdson, to pick a contemporary example.

CM: Yes, and hugely influential to an entire generation of photographers.

Or Robert Heinecken for that matter. Another phenomenally important person in the history of photography who really changed our conception of what a photograph can be. Both of them represent an interesting point in the history of photography where the work becomes conceptual, yet it’s also still very much about the final photograph as an object. That work still has an energy that persists to this day, and isn’t felt as strongly in some of the people they influenced.

MJ: One of my heroes is the physicist Richard Feynman, and in his biography of Feynman, James Gleick makes the distinction between “ordinary geniuses” and “magical geniuses.” The idea is that magical geniuses—Einstein, Picasso, and Feynman—make leaps that are unprecedented. While ordinary geniuses are people who do amazing work, but you can see their lineage: So as an example when you look at Sebastio Salgado, it’s great work, he’s a genius, but you can see the influence of Eugene Smith, or with Sally Mann, you can see Emmet Gowin …

CM: … and with Emmet Gowin you can see Harry Callahan.

MJ: Exactly, but Robert Heinecken is a magical genius, he has no precedent, he becomes the precedent for a new genre.

Okay, sorry, I went too far afield. What was the next step after A Photographer’s Place?

CM: I got a call from one of my old professors, Tom Drysdale, who asked me if I’d like to make $100 a day working for Richard Avedon.

A hundred dollars a day was a lot of money to me back then, so I went and interviewed with Avedon’s studio manager, and got the job. It was not a particularly great job. I was printing contact sheets from all his old negative files from the 1940s through the 1980s in preparation for his retrospective at the Whitney Museum and all those Avedon books that came out in the early nineties.

Basically I spent nine hours a day in an 8 foot by 8 foot darkroom making contact sheets. They didn’t have to be great, they just had to be serviceable, which was fine with me because I was never fully on top of my technical skills.

But for me it was great, because I got to look through the negatives files of one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. I saw the good images and the bad images. I got to see the ratio of good to bad images. You could see the process of him working up to the great image. It was an incredibly valuable experience.

MJ: It is incredible to have such an intimate experience with the archives of a master. It gives you such deep insights into their process; you get to know the work differently because it’s not being presented as a finished masterpiece, but as the result of a consciousness working through a problem.

CM: Working at Avedon’s was a fantastic education, and it was a lively place to be; you’d see Frank Sinatra walk by on his way to his shoot, that kind of thing. It was a whole new thing for me, and very exciting.

We had a communal lunch every day. Avedon would often join us and he was great, he was very warm and it was great to see the myth demystified.

MJ: So how did you get out of Avedon’s basement?

CM: As much as that was a valuable experience for me, there wasn’t a future there so I applied to the MFA program at the University of Buffalo and it was a terrible shock and disappointment when I didn’t get in!

MJ: Really?! I’m shocked and disappointed as well!

CM: In retrospect the MFA program probably wasn’t a good fit for me. Instead I went into a program called Master’s of Arts and Humanities which was part of the English department. It allowed the student to pick their own course of study so I got to take courses in both humanities and in the art department.

After grad school I moved back to New York, again with no real plan of what I was going to do, no job prospects, nothing.

I interviewed at a number of different places and eventually went back to A Photographer’s Place just to visit with Harvey Zucker. He mentioned that Swann Galleries was looking for someone to help with their photo auctions, he made a call, and the next thing I knew I was working at Swann Galleries.

MJ: Did you know anything about the auction business?

CM: Not at all, I didn’t even know what auctions were, but almost from the moment I started there I realized that the environment was a good match for my skill set. I knew the history of photography, and my knowledge was deepened very quickly as I got hands-on experience with the material. I understood and could differentiate different techniques and processes. I could tell the difference between an albumen print and a gelatin-silver chloride printing-out-paper print. I could tell the difference between a tintype, an ambrotype, and a daguerreotype. That knowledge came to me very quickly. I had a real feel for that because of my undergraduate education.

MJ: I don’t know that I could tell the difference between an ambrotype and a tintype.

CM: If I showed you one of each you’d know. They are basically the same process, it’s the medium that is different. A tintype is on flattened iron, and an ambrotype is on glass.

The job also required a lot of research, which I loved doing, and a lot of writing, which I was very good at. Essentially it was a perfect match for a skill set I didn’t know I had. It wasn’t easy, lots of long hours, but I liked it. And what I really liked about it was the material, and spending time with the material.

MJ: Back when I was working at a gallery I loved going to the auctions. It is very exciting.

CM: The auction business is a very unique little world within the art universe. It is very exciting.

In my first sale at Swann, in 1992, we sold a daguerreotype of Cincinnati. It was taken from an elevated vantage point, by an African American photographer named J. P. Ball in the 1850s.

MJ: Wow, that’s interesting.

CM: Yes, that’s interesting right there; an African American photographer in the 1850s, but more than that was the incredible technical quality of this particular daguerreotype. It was one of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen, even to this day, just magical.

It just reaffirmed the magic of photography to me. It was a quotidian street scene with nothing fancy going on, but there was something so amazing about the detail, just seeing the detail that a daguerreotype was capable of was remarkable.

MJ: That kind of thing still blows me away, I am still so in love with the descriptive power of photography. What something looks like when it is photographed, and how something like a vintage daguerreotype can take you back in time.

So tell me, what did that daguerreotype sell for?

CM: It sold for $63,800, and broke a record for a daguerreotype at the time

MJ: And that is part of what makes the business so exciting, although I have to say that when I came in to shoot the photos of you auctioneering last week there were not as many people in attendance as I remembered from back in the eighties and nineties.

CM: Well the business has changed because of telephone and internet bidding. We might not have as many actual people in the room but there’s a much bigger pool of bidders that you don’t see.

MJ: After I took the picture of you with the Edward Weston Pepper behind you I thought “Well my work here is done,” but I wanted to see some real action and I noticed in the catalog that an iconic Lewis Hine photo of a steamfitter was coming up for auction so I hung around. It was valued at $70,000–100,000 in the catalog, which struck me as way too low. I suspected it would go for much, much more.

It was very exciting to watch the bidding on that photo, I think it went for 180,000?

CM: Actually, it sold for $269,000 and broke the record for the most expensive Lewis Hine photograph to sell at auction. It was one of the photographs in the sale that we had hoped there’d be a lot of action on. We based our estimate on a number of factors, including sale prices at past auctions. Our estimate was realistic based on previous sales, but there haven’t been very many sales of that image, and a really good example hadn’t been up for sale auction in quite a while. I knew there was the distinct possibility that the estimate was low in the current market place.

“Steamfitter” by Lewis Hine

That particular Hine had everything you would want from an early Lewis Hine photograph: the paper it was on, his studio stamp, and his handwriting on the back. It was the “genuine article,” an ideal print of the image, made shortly after he made the negative. It represents one of the first incarnations of that image. In our market, that “directness” to the photographer’s intention is one of the things we prize, and that will affect the monetary value of the image.

MJ: It’s also one of the most iconic Lewis Hine images. One where the graphic qualities, the composition, completely supports his life-long thesis on the nobility of work.

CM: Exactly, he’s transformed this worker into a hero, a mythic figure.

That was a photograph we certainly had hopes for, and we do get a sense during the presale exhibition of which photographs are getting interest from collectors. When you get repeat requests from buyers for a closer look, how many times the photo comes down from the wall for instance, it gives you an indication that it might exceed your expectations.

MJ: Hearing you say that, it occurs to me that I had never really thought of salesmanship as part of your job, but in talking to you I realize now that selling must be a huge part of it.

CM: That’s one of the most intense aspects of the job: is simply talking to people about the work. I might be talking to a potential buyer who has never purchased a photograph before, and in that case part of the salesmanship is a little bit of education. Or I might be talking to an established collector who knows what’s in front of us far better than I do.

For each of those people I have to be as upfront and honest about the object as I can be, and share with them what I know about it, what can be said definitively about it, or what we can speculate. I need to be able to talk about what the various aspects of its “object quality” mean.

Chris overseas the bidding on an image by Edward Weston, printed by Cole Weston

For example: Take Ansel Adams, or Man Ray, their credit stamps are on the back of the prints. Those credit stamps help you to date the print because both of those artists moved a number of times, and the information and design of the stamps changed over the years.

Man Ray had a couple of addresses in Paris, then briefly in London, then in Hollywood, and then back in Paris after the war. Understanding what those indicators mean can give you a very accurate window of time for the provenance of the print and understanding the significance of its “object” quality.

MJ: How did you learn all this?

CM: From talking to other people who have done research on this and looking at a lot of material.

In the case of Adams in particular, we’re lucky, because the Boston Museum of Fine Arts did a wonderful book of their Ansel Adams collection which includes an appendix illustrating all of his various stamps and studio labels.

Then there’s a Man Ray scholar named Steven Manford who has been working for years on a catalogue raisonée of Man Ray’s studio stamps—not his images, mind you, just the stamps.

And he is actually working on a catalogue raisonée of the Rayographs, but in the course of his research he started photographing the studio stamps and was able to piece together a chronology of where Man Ray was living and even a few that were posthumous stamps. There are even a few that have been identified as, possibly, spurious.

MJ: Forgeries?

CM: Stamps that may have been inappropriately applied posthumously …

So with Ansel Adams and Man Ray we are lucky because there are published resources that exist, but that isn’t the case with many photographers.

MJ: Why would anyone do that? It strikes me as a completely thankless job. Is there any financial reward for this?

CM: Absolutely not, it’s just pure scholarship. That’s why there are so few catalogue raisonées of photographers. Amy Conger, back in the eighties, did a catalog of every Edward Weston print in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona. It’s not a complete record of Weston’s work, but it’s extensive.

MJ: So the print of the Pepper that I photographed you with. That was not a vintage print? That was a posthumous print made by Cole Weston right?

CM: Right.

MJ: I recall seeing that print sell at the auction for about $5000–7000, somewhere in that range; now had it been a vintage print made by Edward Weston is would have sold for … what ?

CM: Well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars…

MJ: And he was interesting because he had his sons who could continue to print his work.

CM: Yes, later in his life, when he was stricken with Parkinson’s disease, he would work with his son Brett in the darkroom. Brett Weston printed all the photographs that are in the Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio under Edward Weston’s direct supervision.

MJ: So those are more valuable than the Cole Weston prints?

CM: Exactly. Then, when Edward Weston died, Cole Weston was granted the exclusive right to print his father’s work.

MJ: Really, even though Brett was still alive?

CM: Yes, but you have to remember that by that time Brett was a well-known photographer in his own right, he was on his own career trajectory. Cole was also a photographer, but not as dedicated as Brett; he had other interests besides photography as well. But he was an excellent printer, and his prints of his father’s negatives are excellent prints.

That said, they don’t have the magic resonance of a vintage print by his father. Looking at an original print of an Edward Weston shell from 1927 for instance—printed by the man himself, mounted perfectly, with everything just as it should be—when you are confronted with the genuine article, it blows everything else away.

We’ve sold original shell prints on two occasions for well over a million dollars. So if you want a print of a shell, and you aren’t a billionaire, then a Cole Weston print is probably going to be what you are able to get.

MJ: I guess what I wonder … given new technologies, I wonder if the new print might not be better. I have a hard time imagining why a print from the thirties would be better than a comparable gelatin silver print from the eighties.

CM: Well, think about it; number one, we’re talking about Edward Weston, who wasn’t just a great photographer behind the camera. He was also a phenomenal printer and craftsman in the darkroom. When you are looking at a print from 1927 you are getting his original interpretation of the negative, the purest state of the image.

And there are also technical considerations: the silver content of the paper in 1927 vastly surpassed anything you could get in the seventies or eighties, and earlier in the twentieth century there were many more choices of papers and developers. [MJ notes: I had also forgotten that Weston’s developer of choice was Amidol, a legendary paper developer that hasn’t been commercially available for as long as I can remember.]

MJ: I think that connoisseurship of the print is one of the things the current generation of photographers is losing because of the internet. They see so much online that they are always thinking of the “image” instead of the “object.”

Coincidentally, I recently saw five different prints of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother within a period of a few months; four of them were just ordinary prints of the famous “image” that we all know. Those prints were probably printed for newspapers, but the fifth print was just magic. It was one of those prints where the light seems to be emanating from the print itself. I guess that’s what we’re talking about.

CM: Exactly.

MJ: On a completely different topic: You are one of the few people I’ve interviewed for this book that works within a large corporate structure. Tell me about that. What’s it like? It must give you a tremendous sense of stability, health benefits, pensions, etc., but I imagine it also gives you a pretty clear career ladder in terms of promotions, pay raises, and that kind of thing.

What was your entry-level position when you came to Sotheby’s?

CM: Because I’d already had my experience at Swann Galleries, I came to Sotheby’s with the title Senior Cataloger, but the department was only three people back then; me, my boss, and an administrator.

The reality is that in a department that small everyone does everything, from fielding phone calls, cataloging the work, everything. So we just worked long hours and built the department.

We even drew up our own contracts for consignment, something that would be impossible now. In fact I don’t even have the ability to execute a contract, they are very complex documents and there are administrators within Sotheby’s who only handle consignment contracts.

So now we are a six-person department, and we are still working all the time because the market for photography has grown immensely.

One interesting factor in the growth of the photography market is the number of collectors in other fields who will now consider collecting photography. It used to be that someone, a painting collector for instance, with a focus on a specific painter or school, only collected painting from that period or genre. But to take Surrealism as an example: Someone who collects Surrealist paintings will now also buy a Man Ray photograph because there’s a greater understanding of photography’s place in the history of Surrealism. Photography has always been a very serious component in the worlds of art since 1839, but today’s collectors have a greater appreciation of its importance to other disciplines.

In fact, you can’t have any serious conversation about the history of twentieth-century art without brushing up against Stieglitz and his contributions. Both as a promoter of art and as the creator of some of the most extraordinary photographs ever made. Another example might be László Moholy-Nagy.

MJ: I was just thinking the same thing, but we’ve strayed off-topic again. We both love the history too much.

Let’s get back to working at Sotheby’s and the corporate world.

CM: I started here in 1995 right when photography was really beginning to boom.

It was a little bit of a culture shock coming from Swann Galleries, which was very sophisticated, but essentially a family business, to Sotheby’s which is a big corporation.

Sotheby’s was my first suit-and-tie job, and it did force me to step up my game. Sotheby’s was already big back when I started, but it has grown a lot since then.

I started as the Senior Cataloger, then I was promoted to Assistant Vice President after a few years, then I became a Vice President, and I’m currently a Senior Vice President and Head of the Photographs Department.

In some ways that corporate structure might have suited my style because my promotions came in recognition of my work. I’ve never been terribly competitive in the common sense of the word; I’m not a claw-your-way to-the-top kind of guy.

That’s not to say that I’m not ambitious, but I don’t need to be center stage; I can step to the foreground when I need to, but I’m also happy to be Keith Richards to someone else’s Mick Jagger.

MJ: I know exactly what you mean, but let’s not forget that Keith Richards is pretty awesome …

CM: No argument there, but I guess what I’m saying is that, while I am happy to have received the promotions I have, I also have to acknowledge that I had a very supportive boss in Denise Bethel, who recognized my value and contributions. She’s always wanted me to be successful within the corporation. I’m not sure that’s always the case in many corporate environments.

MJ: Can you paint a picture of your daily life here?

CM: I wish I could, but no two days are alike. There’s a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I think the modern American version of that is, “May you have an interesting job.” An interesting job is never an easy one.

Unquestionably, this is a fascinating job, both in terms of the material I get to work with and the people I encounter. But what it also means is that there is no coasting, no routine …

MJ: But you do have seasons …

CM: Yes, we do have seasons, there’s a cyclical nature to what we do. I’m responsible for two photographic sales a year, one in the fall and one in the spring.

However, the contents of the spring sale is going to be completely different from the contents of the fall sale and that will be a function of what we’re offered and what’s out there and available to be sold.

MJ: Now that’s another interesting question. How do you get art for sale, and is there competition for work among the different auction houses?

CM: Much of that comes because of our reputation. Sotheby’s is probably the pre-eminent name in the auction business, and the photography department in particular has had some well-publicized sales of photographs at very high prices so people often call us:

It might be an Irving Penn photograph that they purchased at Marlborough Gallery in 1982 for $2000, and now they want to sell it because now it’s worth $80,000–120,000.

But then there are also people who find things in their attic, and I have seen some pretty amazing things that people have found in their attics. I’ve also spoken to many more people who have found things of absolutely no commercial value in their attic. The ratio is steep.

MJ: Do you actively pursue work? What’s the hunt like?

CM: I wouldn’t characterize it as a hunt, it’s more of a cultivation. Many of the people who are selling through us are the same people who have been buying from us for years. There are people who bought things from us, or maybe Light Gallery back in the eighties, for instance, and those photographs are worth much more than their original sale price. We want to be the agents for the resale of that material. We try to stay close to our customers who buy from us because we hope that eventually they will also sell with us.

There are always big collectors out there, some that we know well, and others that we do our best to get to know.

MJ: The competition for material, collections must be fierce. Christie’s [another large auction house] also deals extensively in photography.

CM: Yes, it’s phenomenally competitive because Christie’s photography department is just as robust as ours, and they operate on the same sales schedule as ours, their fall and spring auctions are the same week as ours.

And we’re not just competing with Christie’s, we are also competing with Phillips auctions, and they are a very serious force in the photography world. They have made photography a priority, and they also have their auctions the same week as ours.

MJ: Have you thought about breaking that cycle so you aren’t competing for the same bodies in the room at the auction? Do you hurt each other by holding all the auctions at the same time?

CM: There’s an argument to be made for that, but a lot of collectors come in from out of town so it makes more sense to consolidate the dates and make it more convenient for the customer.

In fact we have gotten complaints when the schedules aren’t concurrent.

MJ: I guess that does make sense because the secret to any successful auction is to have as much money “in the room” [or on the telephone, or internet] as possible so you get competitive bidding.

CM: We do break the pattern occasionally: we have a single-owner sale coming up in December, which is going to be major. This collector, his name is Howard Stein, over the years he has built an absolutely fabulous collection, and he collected everything, from very early photography to very contemporary photography. In fact he was a patron to many photographers, people that he bought a lot of work from just to help keep their careers going.

So we’re doing a grand sale from his collection called “175 Masterworks Celebrate 175 Years of Photography,” and that sale is so full of amazing material that we are actually using the term “Masterworks” in a sale title for the first time. That kind of hyperbole is not something we use often, but in this case it fits because the work from his collection is just so incredibly good. There’s a great William Henry Fox Talbot print, a Plumb daguerreotype, and the collection ranges all the way to Philip-Lorca diCorcia, William Eggleston, and Vera Lutter. It’s an amazing collection of material and we felt it was worthy of a stand-alone event.

[M.J. notes: Subsequent to this interview the “175 Masterworks” auction set a new world record for a single auction of photography, grossing $21,325,063.]

MJ: This is strange question, but do you feel any heat from eBay and other new technologies or business models?

CM: In fact Sotheby’s has recently formed an alliance with eBay. eBay users will soon be able to access our site from eBay and they can participate in our sales through eBay. Eventually, the plan is that Sotheby’s will hold auctions of certain select pieces online through eBay.

MJ: Last question, I promise: How did your education prepare you for this career? Or maybe the question is: If someone wanted to have a career like yours what do you think they should know? How should they prepare?

CM: You know, so many of my counterparts in other departments here at Sotheby’s are so brilliant, and I absolutely respect their scholarship and their deep knowledge of art history. What is different about me is that I don’t come from an art-history background. My real qualification—the value that I bring to the table—is the practical training that I got from my BFA education.

What I mean by that is that it was my hands-on experience as a photography student that I think is so invaluable to me now. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t draw on my undergraduate experience as an aspiring photographer.

MJ: It’s interesting, when I interviewed Brian Clamp he said something very similar. He has a graduate degree in art history, but he felt that it was his experience as an amateur photographer that gives him the best insight into the work he represents.

CM: Exactly. Yesterday I spent a lot of time with a Moholy-Nagy photogram trying to figure out exactly how he made it, exactly how he achieved the effects he was getting. I was able to look at it forensically and determine that he had made a couple of different exposures and he had moved objects in a certain sequence during the exposures.

Having made photograms, and understanding the principles of light and how things work in the darkroom, I think I have a unique insight into the work and I think I can talk about it from a different perspective. Those are the things that put me way ahead of many of my colleagues in the fine-art photography trade who have strict art-history backgrounds.

Case Study

SARAH COLEMAN: EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY—OR DOES IT?

http://theliteratelens.com/

To state the obvious, photography is a visual art, and much of the continuing dialogue about its status as an art form has been historically rooted in the same critical constructs as the other visual arts; most notably painting, and more currently as a component of conceptual art.

But, in many ways photography has always had a closer kinship to literature. Many of the iconic images in the history of photography are either complex stories told in a succinct visual form, or photographs that utilize the inherent ambiguity of the medium to frame a story in a manner more compelling than words can say. When we photograph something as a mystery, we force the viewer to examine their interpretation of the image as a function of their personal perspective and prejudices.

The intersection of word and image, in advertising, journalism, and fine art, has been pervasive since the inception of the medium, and might begin to explain why so many great photographers, from Walker Evans to Robert Adams, have also been such terrific writers.

Writing helps make ideas concrete. As a consequence, photographic education over the past 30 years has increasingly made writing (and reading) an integral component in the training of photographers. Most current undergraduate photography programs require an extensive critical studies component, and even those of us who teach practical/studio courses are likely to require a few essays every semester.

With the increase in written assignments as part of a photographic curriculum there has also been an increase among photo students who see writing/critical studies as their ultimate career objective.

Sarah Coleman is a unique figure in the landscape of photography writers, and a particularly interesting subject for this book because she has covered photography from so many different points of view: journalist, critic, and novelist. She has made writing about photographers and photography her life’s work.

Sarah Coleman

©Evi Abeler

Interview

MJ: I wanted to talk to you about your career as a writer, but one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you specifically is because, while I know a lot of people who write about photography, most of them also do something else as their main career either as curators or teachers. You are a writer first and foremost, and you have chosen photography, almost exclusively, as the subject you write about. Your career is also interesting because you write about it from so many perspectives: fiction, art reviews, and actual reportage on the industry.

Of all things, how did you end up writing about photography?

SC: I grew up in England, where there’s no such thing as a liberal arts degree, and I was always equally interested in writing and visual art. So it was kind of a big conundrum for me because when you go to college you have to choose one thing to study, and I found it very difficult to decide. So what I did was go back and forth between the two for a while.

I did a one-year pre-degree art course, and then I was an English major at Cambridge for three years, and then I went to the Slade School of Art in London for a degree in fine art printmaking.

But you know, two degrees weren’t enough! So I came over here [to NYC] and did creative writing at Columbia. I was looking for a way to put it all together and I happened to be taking a class in black and white photography at ICP with Harvey Stein. I told him that I was about to get married and move to San Francisco, and I wanted to write, and I wanted to do photography, but I really didn’t know how to go about this.

He told me to go see his friend Jo Leggett who owned a photography magazine there. She had bought this magazine called Photo Metro that started off as a free community thing. It was very beloved among San Francisco photographers.

I ended up interning with her, writing about photography there and it just kind of grew from that. I got a gig reviewing art with the San Francisco Bay Guardian and soon I was writing for almost all the local papers in the bay area. Then I moved to New York and initially I got a little job with a little non-profit magazine called World Press Review, and I was doing that for a few years. Part of my position there involved doing some photo editing. After that, I got a contract position with Photo District News producing one of their corporate sponsored publications, VisionAge [sponsored by Olympus]. I did that for five years, in addition to writing for the main magazine. When VisionAge ended, I started writing a historical novel based on the life story of an actual photographer.

I also started blogging, and the blogging has been a really great thing because it’s led to some other opportunities. I now contribute to ARTnews magazine, and that came through the blog. Blogging is something I think would be a good subject to talk about.

MJ: You know for years I had a sideline writing reviews on motorcycles and doing first-person adventure stories for magazines like Men’s Journal. It was a very enviable job and so much fun. My students always want to know how I got those assignments, and the answer is that in order to get writing assignments you need a portfolio of published “clips” that are samples of your work. Once you have some clips it’s much easier to get more and more writing assignments.

I think blogging is one of the contemporary ways to establish yourself as a writer, and create those writing samples, but in some ways it’s better because you can always write from your own voice. You’re not constrained by the editorial identity of the magazine. It’s a great way to build a following as a writer, or photographer for that matter.

But, what is it specifically about photography, out of all the things one could write about that was so interesting? Obviously it’s a great subject, but it’s also a pretty limited market.

SC: I think it came from the fact that I had been taking these classes in photography at ICP and I was probably one of the last generation to have that amazing experience of learning black and white darkroom printing as the primary way of making a photographic image. I just loved black and white printing; it was something I could really understand and get my head around as a craft, whereas digital photography has been harder for me because I’m not very technically minded. I fell in love with the darkroom, and with black and white photography.

In a broader sense, though, to answer the question “Why photography?” I would say that the medium is just so of the moment—I think now more than ever, photography is infiltrating every area of our lives.

MJ: Exactly. Meanwhile people talk about photography as if it’s dead. I think it’s actually become so pervasive that we just don’t even notice anymore.

I always think of the quote from Moholy-Nagy, “The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of pen and camera alike.” I think we hit that tipping point a few years back. It’s imperative in modern society that everyone has some form of visual literacy.

SC: That’s why I feel that it is important now to have smart writing about photography. It is just everywhere, and we need to be able to look at it, analyze it, and figure out some of the nuances.

MJ: Like what? Can you be more specific?

SC: It’s difficult to generalize about nuances without referring to specific photographs, but take for example Thomas Hoepker’s famous photograph of the people relaxing in Brooklyn on the waterfront while the Twin Towers are burning in the background.

That’s a photograph that you can look at and at first read it as: “Oh these blasé New Yorkers know the world is collapsing and they’re just sitting there goofing off and having fun.” But then it came to light that there was a much more complex story behind it, and those people were having a serious discussion about what was going on. The subjects of the photograph have gone public about that. There are images like that that can be deceptive.

The site Bag News Notes (www.bagnewsnotes.com/) is very smart about analyzing photographs and writing about the complexities behind them. In contemporary society, we’re all about the sound bite. It’s very easy to look at these images and say, “Oh you know, that’s what happened.” But Michael Shaw, the publisher of Bag News Notes, talks about the story behind an image, and why it was taken. There was an article he did about the first photograph of Hillary and Bill Clinton holding their grandchild, Chelsea Clinton’s baby, and he talked about the PR value of the photograph and the fact that they probably staged it to show how Bill was being the adoring husband. You know the Clintons are very savvy about the image they want to put forward.

So I think we just have to be smart about things like that and aware of them because images are very seductive, and it’s very easy to just be sold a story or version of events.

MJ: I remember seeing a film when I was in college that was of a pile of hair and gold from victims of the Holocaust and of course like all the other students in the class I’m thinking how horrible it is, but then I realized that it was shot by a Nazi cinematographer. The film was actually shot as positive propaganda, “Look how productive the concentration camps are. See how much gold we are harvesting from the Jews.”

SC: Propaganda photographs are especially interesting: Of course we’ve known for a long time that the camera lies, but propaganda makes that explicit. A great thing about writing my blog is that I’ve made friends through it, including a British man who publishes a blog called Propaganda Photos (https://propagandaphotos.wordpress.com) that’s exclusively about that subject. As well as giving people a platform for their writing, blogging is a wonderful way of discovering community.

MJ: Do you still photograph, do you still shoot?

SC: Not really; just like everyone else I shoot pictures of my kids and I try and make them as artistic as possible. Also I’ve been taking some pictures of my elderly neighbors, on how dementia is affecting their relationship, and I did post a few of those images on SocialDocumentary. net.

MJ: But was it really the decline of film?

SC: Yeah, I mean that sounds like a bit of a pathetic thing to say and I feel stupid saying it, because I’m not a total technical imbecile, but the buttons and controls and the screens turn me off a bit. The other reason is that you can’t do everything, and in order to commit more to writing (and raising kids) I’ve had to cut some things out.

MJ: The reason I ask is because I feel there’s a new trend that is attributable to the rise of digital photography. Analog required us to be stronger editors, not just because of the monetary expense, but because there was also a huge time investment involved in printing. Printing an image well usually takes a few hours so you have to be far more selective about what you print. What I see on the websites of many younger photographers is more like a flow of images. In a way I feel like they are anticipating the viewer self-editing because the viewer sees the stream of images and they only stop at the few that draw their attention. I’m not sure if I think it’s a bad thing, I think it’s a new aesthetic, and something I am seeing more and more. I think that’s also why I keep returning to medium- and large-format cameras for my own work. It cuts down on the visual clutter.

SC: I attended a seminar on cell-phone photography at this year’s PhotoPlus Expo, and the photographer Benjamin Lowy said something similar. He said, “We’re living in the McDonald’s age of photography, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to sit down to a gourmet meal once in a while.” Maybe, in a way, we’re all becoming stronger editors because we’re flooded with images and we have to decide which ones are worth looking at.

MJ: You’re writing a novel about photography. Is your protagonist a photographer? Can you tell me a little bit about your novel, what exactly is that?

SC: [Laughing] One of my three degrees was in creative writing, I have always wanted to write novels, and I’ve had some false starts. Then I went into journalism and got distracted for 15 years. When the recession hit in 2008 and my freelance work started disappearing, I thought it was time to sit down and write this novel. I’ve been a bit cagey about giving away the specifics, but I’m hopeful that by the time your book goes to press I’ll have a contract with a publisher, so I’ll tell you that it’s a historical novel based on the photographer Berenice Abbott, a fictional version of her life. She had an amazing life, she was around for the birth of documentary photography and had very strong opinions about what photography should and shouldn’t be. It’s funny to look back on that now because I think we have such a big umbrella, we have room for everything in photography, but in the early twentieth century there was a fierce debate about what photography could and couldn’t be, and she was part of that.

MJ: Oh she’s a great subject, she had a big life as a photographer and she was also witness to a lot of the history. She was Man Ray’s assistant, and she discovered Eugène Atget …

SC: Exactly, nobody would know who Eugène Atget was had it not been for Berenice Abbott. There is a rich tradition of photographers rescuing other photographers, like the Vivian Maier story.

MJ: You’re right … Now that I think of it there is a history of photographers rescuing the work of other artists; Lee Friedlander rescued E. J. Bellocq, and Henry Darger’s work was also discovered by a photographer, Nathan Lerner.

SC: And there’s the work of Mike Disfarmer that was rescued as well. I think that if you’re a creative person and you find someone’s work that you think is amazing and it’s not getting any recognition … Well, there are some people who would just walk away, but others who feel compelled to rescue the work.

So yes, Berenice Abbott rescued Eugène Atget, and to a lesser extent Lewis Hine as well. I think she just felt it was unfair; she saw a lot of photographers whose work she thought was pretentious, like Steiglitz—she had a real animosity towards Steiglitz. And meanwhile she was encountering these other photographers who she thought were amazing and weren’t getting any recognition at all.

MJ: But I’m not sure we ever answered the question: Why photography?

The reason I’m pressing the point is because I hate a lot of what is written about photography. As an example, I personally feel that Barthes is incredibly overrated and I always wonder why so many teachers require Camera Lucida as one of the standard texts. I feel that he has no deep insight into why we make pictures, aside from memory, which is a really simplistic way of looking at the medium. I also hate the jargon he introduced.

But I shouldn’t imply that I hate writers; I love John Szarkowski, John Berger, and most recently Errol Morris.

But there is a growing interest among my students in writing about photography professionally, so much so that we have created critical studies as a separate academic track within our department.

The thing I’ve liked about your writing, and the reason I asked to interview you is that you seem to actually like photographers and understand our motivations.

SC: Well I’m glad that comes across! Perhaps having practiced photography a bit helps me appreciate photographers more, I don’t know. I think writing for PDN has probably shaped that appreciation as well because the magazine exists to serve photographers and the industry. I tend to gravitate more towards documentary photography and photojournalism because there are all the ethical issues around that work that are very interesting to consider. I am fascinated by people who choose to do that work, and engage with those issues.

I think of myself as a humanitarian and I think that a lot of photojournalists get into it for that reason as well. They are idealistic, humanitarian people who go and expose terrible problems all over the world, trying to get people engaged and create some change.

The problem is that once they get into the actual work it turns out to be more complicated most of the time. I’ve interviewed a lot of photojournalists over the years and there is the obvious problem of how and when do you choose to put down the camera and help in a given situation. John Moore, who was one of the first people on the ground in Liberia shooting the ebola story, has taken these wrenching photographs, and in some ways they are very beautiful, the lighting, the setups … very beautiful. But these are wrenching pictures of people in pain and dying. James Nachtwey as well, with his pictures of the Ethiopian famine. I interviewed him a little while back and I asked him, “When do you put down the camera and actually help someone?” and he has done that a few times. He”s pulled people away from getting shot by a sniper, and he once put down his camera and helped someone get to a rehydration station.

You can rationalize it all you want, and I mean it is a big question, “Do I help this person to survive or do I get this picture in the New York Times?” It’s not such a simple question, because the photo might motivate people to donate money and change things on a bigger scale. I think it’s a really difficult dilemma a lot of the time and that’s one thing that weighs heavily on those guys. An extreme example would be Kevin Carter, the guy who committed suicide.

MJ: Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with him, what was the story?

SC: He was one of the members of the ‘Bang-Bang Club’ of photojournalists in South Africa. He won the World Press Photo of the Year award for his photo of a starving child in Africa with a vulture sitting near by. A couple years later he committed suicide because he felt like everyone had been celebrating the photo but it hadn’t caused any significant change.

I started saying this conversation by saying it’s good to have writers who are writing smartly about photography, but I think it’s also true that certain photographs might need to be left alone. There was a quote about comedy, about over-analyzing a joke: “It’s like dissecting a frog; the more you do it, the surer it’s just going to die.” And that could be the case with some photographs as well.

MJ: So you have been writing for ARTnews most recently; what kind of things are you doing and how is that different from writing for PDN or your blog?

SC: ARTnews is a good match for me compared to some of the other art magazines. There’s a kind of writing about art that is very high flown and intellectual, exactly what you were saying about Barthes, and I think it can be very obfuscating and verbose. I like plain speak. What I like about ARTnews is that they value that as well. My editor and I see eye to eye.

MJ: What do you actually cover for ARTnews?

SC: I review shows for them that are in Chelsea galleries, downtown, Brooklyn. Usually there is a photographic component, but it is fine-art photography. I think that gets back to the question of why photography for me, because however abstract and conceptual a fine-art photograph becomes, it still has to be rooted in realism in some way. For example, the last review I did for ARTnews, which is in this month’s magazine, is of a show by an artist called Shai Kremer, he got access to the Freedom Tower when it was being built and has made these photographs that have multiple layers and are very textural but you still see these little details in them, for example workers on a steel beam eating lunch, which refers back to photos Lewis Hine took in the 1930s at the Empire State Building. I think that appeals to me as someone who likes realism: there’s a reference. It’s never gonna spin out into this realm of pure abstraction.

Photography is so ubiquitous, and there has been this blurring of the lines between amateur and professional photographers. Sometimes I feel like fine-art photographers feel compelled to do something just to help them stand out from the rest of the crowd, something different.

I did an essay a while ago about the deadpan expression in fine-art photography because it’s something that has always bothered me slightly.

I feel a lot of fine-art photographers have risen to great prominence by doing this portraiture where people have a glassy, dead-eyed look, and I think the reason for that is to distinguish between more popular photography where it’s always “say cheese” and people are grinning. I think some fine-art photographers have taken that to an extreme, thinking they have to do something different just to stand out.

I sometimes get annoyed as well by very theoretical work, because there can be a tendency among fine-art photographers to make work that speaks to five people in a city that’s populated by eight million. But I also think it’s interesting to look at work like that and examine it in a different way and to ask why is this annoying me so much, and what’s the history behind it.

MJ: Is there a question that I haven’t asked that would give people a greater insight into what you do?

SC: I guess one thing that I might say is there can be a misperception about people who write critically about the arts. I think some people assume that the person would be doing that thing if they were good enough, and just because they’re not good enough they are writing about it. But it’s actually pretty hard to be a critic: it takes discipline, curiosity, and a lot of thinking and revising. I like practicing art, and I have done so in a number of ways in my life, but I think at my core I am a writer. The blog that I launched, I do that purely for pleasure. No one is asking me to do it, no one is paying me (unfortunately) but it has led to other things.

If I had to say one more thing it would be about money. I think people reading your book will probably know they are entering a profession where they are not likely to become rich very quickly, or ever. So you have to love what you do, enough to compensate for the paltry income. It’s difficult to make a living writing about photography; it helps if you can get a staff position or a regular column. In the last six years I’ve made a big gamble by writing a novel that I hope will get published and make some money. Fingers crossed! But obviously, I didn’t go into this field to rake in the big bucks.

A screenshot of Sarah’s blog “The Literate Lens”