the last word

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]

Five reviews today. Two completely positive, and three with suggestions for improvement. I don’t think it would be very entertaining to walk through all of them; you’ve gotten an idea of how they go from the earlier posts. The different shapes of the pictures in Nighthawks came up again. It seems to bother curators. I… [Read More]

Five official reviews today. The first one, with the curator for a Mid-Western museum, went incredibly well.  He called Nighthawks “a fresh approach,” and “some of the best of this kind of work he’s seen.” He also wanted to see work from This Green Growing Land, which I’d left at the hotel. I dropped by… [Read More]