how to get featured
05 May 2011How to get featured on Verve Photo’s Documentary Photography blog in 3 easy steps:
- Buy a plane ticket to a third-world country or an urban slum.
- Take a portrait of a destitute resident in their modest home lit by sunlight through the one window.
- Write some bullshit artists’ statement about socioeconomic disparity or religious tension or something that has nothing to do with your photo of some lady in her hovel, really, but plays well in the art community.
Exhibits:
| I could go on, but anyways. Don’t get me wrong: most of the stuff they feature is awesome, but they seem to have a hardon for this cliche that seems long since expired. They could all maybe work as part of one collection – you know, some crap about people in living spaces, or something (which has been done and done over again) – but as individual photos by all these different artists, it doesn’t work at all. What do these photos tell us about their inhabitants, really? Very little, except some sort of very puerile “garsh, there are *poor | indigent | foreign | different* folks?!” lesson of disparity. It’s getting to be as bad as homeless photography. It’s time to retire this formula. Thus I have spake. |
I don’t think you have to guess how much I like this post.
But Chris, be careful, you’re starting to sound like a hero in an Ayn Rand novel, beginning to glimpse some deeper truth that exposes unchallenged fallacies.
This is what happens when you don’t shop at Urban Outfitters. Every progressive, enlightened person knows that the aimless stare of a third-world hut dweller or a slackjawed homeless man holds a mystical virtue that we should behold and serve.
Of course, that’s something materialistic, greedy Westerners could never understand—wasting their lives in the empty pursuits of developing the airlines, vaccines, cameras, and computers that make those sacred pictures possible. ;)