the last word

I’ll write later about PhotoLucida’s effect on me personally, but in this post I’d like to attempt a summary for anyone considering attending PhotoLucida or a similar portfolio review convention. The program’s target audience is mid-career photographers. If you already have gallery representation, your work is in museum collections, and you have had many individual… [Read More]

I’m not done with PhotoLucida, but my time is getting swallowed up by things unrelated to my personal photography (but related to photography; maybe more on that later). There’s one thing I was going to save until the end, but, since the end is receding into the mists of future time, I thought I say… [Read More]

Well, there’s really no question. The reviewers have it; the photographers don’t. The clues are everywhere. The reviewers get a free ride; the photographers pay. The reviewers go into the reviewing room at their leisure; the photographers queue up, flatten themselves against the wall, and wait for the signal from the staff person chosen to… [Read More]

I drove back from Portland yesterday. On the way down I had time to think about how to get the most out of critical comments. In my reports on the reviewing process, I made the point several times that there was little consistency in the reviewers’ comments. At the time, I saw that as a… [Read More]

Consistency. My first reviewer looked at a picture of a barber shop in the Washington Heights district in Manhattan. It’s a multi-layered image, with a lot going on. She pointed at a bright blue video game in the middle of the frame, and said: “It could be a good image, but that blue box right… [Read More]